To streamline the Groups experience on Roblox, we are sunsetting Premium Only groups.
Premium Only Groups allowed you to require a Roblox Premium membership in order to join your group. The feature used to be named Builders Club Only Groups before Premium launched.
When Premium memberships launched in fall 2019, we transformed all Builders Club Only groups into Premium Only groups. However, once you turned off Premium Only, you could never turn it back on.
Removing this feature will allow us to simplify Groups and refocus our efforts on building new features.
How does this affect my existing Premium Only group?
Starting next week on October 7th, the Premium Only toggle will disappear from the Configure Group page. Groups that previously required Premium to join will no longer have that restriction.
What if I want to choose who can join my group?
The manual approval toggle will still be available for group owners who prefer approving requests on a case-by-case basis.
This is a great change; restricting groups only to Premium users never seemed fair. I never found any reason for groups to be Premium only anyways; whatâs the difference? Having the ability to sell clothes? All it has done is foster elitism. Iâm glad the divide is getting thinner.
Speaking of which, when are you going to allow Non-Premium users sell clothes? Really, thatâs about the only incentive of a Premium-only group, other than elitist reasons.
Premium should really be something for players rather than developers. Iâm okay if players receive benefits, but if you canât even sell t-shirts, or make other clothing to begin with, whatâs the point? A Premium barrier is just that, a barrier.
Does anybody even use BC (now premium) only groups anymore? I feel theyâre a relic of the older days of Roblox, when Roblox wanted to make users buy BC, so that they could access âexclusive groups and gamesâ.
Being someone who used to be part of the RoAviation and Transport communities, many RoAvia groups used BC groups to try and exploit the now removed âBC only gamesâ sort. Manual Approval is such a better way to go here.
Good to hear that theyâre finally being removed.
ps removal of premium to create (not sell) shirts wen
So thatâs how I didnât even know it was still a thing. Oh well, I guess this change is for the better? I donât really see the point, but it shouldnât be too hard to make a bot that auto-accepts only Premium users anyways.
Will groups with this setting turned on have manual approval turned on by default? While this is not an issue of my own I feel it could cause complications with groups which have this setting actively enabled.
I really donât see the purpose of this change. It makes absolutely zero sense to remove it. Nothing is gained by removing it. Seems to me like time spent removing this feature would have definitely been better spent elsewhere.
For a platform thatâs so obsessed with backwards compatibility, this doesnât seem right.
Why would you do this? I know many people are going to be like âThis isnât fairâ but do keep in mind:
Even as the world of gaming grows, some people still prefer paid-access games. You might say that you could still just use paid access in your game, but by having it where you have both the premium only setting of you group on and only people who are in your group can play your games in your group, you can make a subscription-based game without presenting a premium paywall to everyone, and instead saying that you automatically get access if you have premium and you join the group. This could be used as a subscription-based-acess monetization form, which is no longer possible using this method.
This is a great way to stop bots and find good customers. Usually users with premium are going to be real people who actually have an interest in roblox, meaning serious gamers who are willing to pay to play, so you got a good chance with these people.
I just said that paid access isnât subscription based. It is just that having this feature in and actually encouraging it more could make roblox a lot of money and turn premium into something bigger. I am personally a premium user, and honestly the benefits are not that big, if roblox were to encourage it with this feature it could become bigger. Manual approval and bots work fine I guess, but people shouldnât be forced to do that.
And like I said, anyone who joins your group would be almost guaranteed not a bot and almost guaranteed someone who is a serious player.
Some of those features are not uses by everyone; Clothing is botted so it is hard to do clothing, trading can be useless if you are not a trader, and a lot of devs donât implement benefits, most people canât dev ex, and dev implemented benefits are pretty rare or useless at the moment.
To be completely honest, Premium has become more or less just a paywall for creators at this point because 95% of the features have become available for everyone and they removed the name that everyone loved too, No one asked roblox to change it but they did anyways.
I feel like this is a good step to making the platform not seem like another greedy corporate entity.
Curious as to how many people this affects. I think itâs good considering the fact that groups are supposed to be like social hubs on Roblox and this was kind of a feature that went against that ideology.
