As a Roblox developer, it is currently not worth it apply to LiveOps.
I have applied my game to LiveOps once, it was featured early summer 2019, the ratings during LiveOps were atrocious compared to the long run ratings due to what I think is the general hatred players had for the program at the time.
The live ops probably do not have much impact on game plays (opinion statement, however it is factual when compared to plays while being showcased on a game sort, example: Featured), and thus the program may have failed its goals. Real estate on the front page is incredibly valuable as that is where players go to find games to play, not some far off page with a bunch of text saying stuff about events.
This is an example of how valuable games being shown on front page are. Stats while featured for one week. starting Sep 24.
If games in the LiveOps program were showcased on a front page sort rather than being hidden away behind an obscure button, more players would find these games, developers would be incentivised to apply, and competition to have your event chosen would skyrocket, upping submission quality. Better for players, better for developers! Switch LiveOps to an added game sort on the games page.
I second this. The LiveOps page is only really accessible to PC players as it is. Xbox players never see it. Mobile players on the app need to dig through a bunch of buttons to find it. And best of all, you only gain at most 50 more concurrent players.
The fact is that developers have a need to natively communicate game update/event information to their players and judging by how successful the “[UPDATE]” game titles and icons are, players have a need to natively receive these communications. This is why I created my feature request for a native game updates feature nearly two years ago:
We got screwed. The update notifications implementation we got was dead on arrival due to the almost comically stubborn limitations imposed (60 characters only, no accompanying graphics, no push notifications, can only send an update once a week, no presence on the home page, and the generally poor exposure of the notifications tab to the user)
LiveOps is an attempt by Roblox to bandaid fix these problems and to enable developers to share information about their game through the Roblox site. Unfortunately, the long lock-in times, lack of traffic to the live ops page and lack of any user targeting specificity prevents LiveOps from efficiently fulfilling this dynamic need for information that everyone on the platform has.
As a passionate lifelong creator on this platform, the lack of creativity and the unwillingness to take any meaningful risks in the web space really frustrates me. I don’t think expanding the LiveOps program to be it’s own sort will be any more effective than the old featuring program was. When a game updates or has a big event, that information should go to the players most interested, not just broadcasted to everyone.
I think this really hit the nail on the head. The whole Live Ops idea in general is a useless way to showcase game updates. We absolutely need better tools than this cheap program to keep players informed and coming back to our games.
Roblox should build upon the methods that are already working for us instead of pushing an obscure program. I think a stronger notification system would be far superior to more visibility for live ops.
I think it’s also important to address the fact that many Roblox games are maintained by individuals or small development teams that commonly don’t have a set update schedule, with many people pushing changes either straight to the production version of the game when made, or pushing individual features at a time rather than one lump update. It’s difficult to group together a load of bug fixes and small features together into one short title explaining what that entire update is, and at least from what I’ve seen live ops is just not worth the hassle - I’d rather spend that time working on improving my game than being both a full time marketing manager and developer for each of my games.
I think larger games with proper update schedules and big changes each update are unlikely to see a noticeable increase in players from liveops because players referred through live ops are dwarfed by their existing player base. If this was somehow automated, and there was a way to enter our updates and changelogs directly into a box on the site, which Roblox then pulled from to display the biggest updates on liveops, I think it could be so much more valuable.
Since the release of LiveOps I don’t think I have visited the page more than 5 times and I have never visited the page to find a game. This is due to that fact that the button is hidden away and there is no incentive to click the button. Then on mobile and tablet the button is so hidden away I don’t suspect a great deal of people actively click on it. Why should I click the LiveOps button and see a few games when I can click a games button and see hundreds of games?
For these reasons I think @TheAmazeman’s idea of moving the LiveOps games to the main games page will give more incentive to players to play those games and for developers to actually use the program. It will also draw a lot more attention to the program because it will be in a higher traffic area of the site. The featured sort gives Developers a huge player boost so if the LiveOps games have there own category they should get a similar boost in players.
I agree with @SteadyOn and @berezaa on that we need a way to show our games updates on site. At the moment developers are having to use offsite applications like discord to show a simple changelog for their game. This is a huge problem because only people that are over 13 can use these applications meaning that a lots less people will see them. As developers we shouldn’t have to use offsite apps to show are changelogs, it should all be onsite. If you look at the app store every game on their has a way to show players their changelogs.
Having a way to create changelogs for our games will have some many amazing use cases: Developers won’t have to edit their games descriptions to show their updates. Lots of the players that play the game will be able to see these updates. There wont be any need to use offsite apps to show our changelogs.
I completely forgot! I actually ran into that issue when I applied for Live Ops. They wanted to know down to the hour when I was going to push my update. It’s borderline impossible for me to guarantee my game would be updated at a specific time on a specific day months in advance. Life happens.
The feature certainly could use improvements if we’re keeping it around.
