Hello! I’ve been attacked on twitter from old guard game developers who have no patience to actually research into individual Roblox developers, and what they stand for, and they group us all in as an evil bundle exploiting children shilling for Roblox Corp.
I’m publishing this document so that anyone can take a look at what I’m about. Read in as much as you want, the more you read, the more you’ll see what I’m about, and have always been about. This is not a comprehensive guide of every single one of my dev forum posts, but the main ones, as to not overwhelm the reader.
I’m not saying I am the only dev who makes suggestions or helps people, nor am I saying I’m the best at it. Take a look at the many others within the Admired Developers category.
Economic Guides: to spread knowledge I spent a lot of money to attain in University, for free
Hello fellow developers, in this tutorial I will be unraveling what I’ve come to see, through experience and economic insight, as the most concrete guide to profitable game advertising on Roblox. A bit about my background, I have a BA in Economics from the University of Arizona, and have maintained a Roblox game that has earned at least the floor DevEx cashout since October 2013 when DevEx began.
First question, I’m a developer too, why would I want to show all this work to make others more pro…
References:
Hello fellow developers, in this tutorial I will be unraveling what I’ve come to see, through experience and economic insight, as the most concrete guide to group game payouts for Roblox. A bit about my background, I have a BA in Economics from the University of Arizona, and have maintained a Roblox game that has earned DevEx cashouts since the program began.
Part 1: Recognize percentage group payouts done by Roblox are not reliable.
There are many threads about this .
The first thing we must …
Hello fellow developers, in this tutorial I will be unraveling what I’ve come to see, through experience and economic insight, as the most concrete guide to maximizing profit by setting a gamepass price in Roblox.
A bit about my background, I have a BA in Economics from the University of Arizona, and have maintained Roblox games since I joined in 2008.
First question, I’m a developer too, why would I want to show all this work to make others more profitable?
If more developers do this, it wi…
Game Discovery Advocacy: to improve the exponential curve of earnings (pareto distribution) to more developers, giving more opportunity.
As a Roblox developer, I see more potential with regard to developers introducing a new game to players, and growing that game with those interested in the niche. Developers should, with a good game for their niche, however big or small that niche already is, be able to reach a wider audience that is potentially interested. Currently, there is a plethora of sorts on the front page, the front page has never had so many games on it than it has today.
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But what is the click through rate? …
Developers the past few months have seen an enormous sponsored game upgrade.
However, this upgrade came at a time when sponsored games only show up for users while browsing FOUR out of NINETEEN, I repeat: 4/19 of the game sorts. Sponsoring is currently extremely worthless - #58 by TheAmazeman
That is to say, developers are paying Robux to have their games appear in only 21% of the visible game sorts.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to take full advantage of this new system b…
Repro: Go to top rated
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Why isn’t this entire sort filled with games with a 94% or rating or over? There’s enough games with that good of ratings - and yet there’s some games with under 70% on this sort. Is this some kind of a sick joke? -As many developers have games with over 70% and are not included on Top Rated. This is not an attack on any games on the sort, this is about the dignity of the platform and how serious we’re supposed to take Roblox’s algorithms and naming convention…
Putting this out there because ratings per platform would influence player expectations
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to view the platform specific ratings of my game.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, developers will be able to accurately gauge which platform needs improvement attention. It will also help players as some games will naturally be more fun on computer or vice versa for mobile, and players will see ratings that matter to the experience they are about to get, not the game as a whole.
Concurrent players are already differentiated by platfor…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to showcase our game’s most recent ratings to the games page, instead, the all time rating is shown.
I believe ratings are an incredibly important tool to gauge how well a game, or even how a gamepass is performing.
I believe a certain segment of potential high value players might not checkout a game if the displayed rating is under their arbitrary threshold.
As a game receives more ratings, it takes more and more ratings to change the m…
Posted this because getting your game out there to new audiences improves discoverability
As a Roblox Developer, it is currently too hard to partner with musicians and artists to which the developer has a limited time licensee right to some of the works of the artist.
With the lack of a submission form for showcasing our licensee rights to a work we are uploading, the current experience of uploading audio is disrespectful to developers.
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This pre-emptive copyright strike that Roblox puts on my account is blatantly disrespectful to the contract that the two parties actually…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to foster a community of youtubers for our games. Developers want to promote youtubers who play our games, we are left to only be able to promote one with a game trailer. Otherwise, we have to move to other measures such as tweeting, instagram, or having a youtube promotions channel in our discord communities. These methods only allow a tiny fraction of our game’s audience to find the youtubers who care about the game and its future. Meanwhile, …
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to showcase our group’s development Instagram in front of our audience on the social links portion of our game’s page.
Currently, these are the only Socials listed available to put directly in front of Roblox players.
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Facebook, the largest social network, is one of the options, which may be good for those taking that opportunity. Instagram is owned by Facebook, though a separate audience mainly leaning younger, more in-tune with the f…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to view the exact amount of clicks and impressions on a sponsored game ad once the number goes to 10,000 and above.
This leads to vague numbers such as 1M+ total impressions (which doesn’t change until 2,000,000). 10k+ clicks, bid 10k+ (when you really did exactly 10,000 for example)
This is mostly annoying for currently running sponsored game ads where the developer may want to get a feel for how quickly the impressions and clicks are coming …
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to get the best use out of the “Game Updates” feature due to low visibility to the player.
You can see these updates for a mid-tier game only get 400 to 700 clicks to them. As a game in the 500s/800s for regular weekday/weekend concurrents, and these updates being out for weeks, it is clear that players are not re-joining the game through this feature.
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This feature request is to have better visibility to games using this update feature…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently infuriating for a game with a certain percentage rating to make it to the top of the recommended sort, when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other higher rated games that do not get the time of day solely because the Roblox algorithm does not know those games exist.
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This particular example is worse to me personally as it is a copied version of Virtual Valley Game’s Roblox Titanic. The copied one is being recommended to everyone, meanwhil…
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/stolen-work-being-popularized-by-robloxs-algorithm/285293
Edit: No longer the case:
{
Recently the games page has changed and developers have noticed lowered impressions per robuck when running sponsored game ads, causing some to give up sponsored ads entirely.
https://devforum.roblox.com/search?q=sponsored%20topic%3A260961
}
The game sort “Popular Near You” does not currently have tile space for sponosred game ads to appear.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, this would improve the likelihood of a user seeing a sponsored ad while browsing …
The front page as it stands today, has the following sorts
Popular
Top Rated
Featured
Rthro
Popular Near You
Recommended
Because You Liked ___
Top Earning
This feature request is to add a new sort in either the 4th or 5th row, leaving everything else the same.
The new sort could be named “Have You Tried” and the purpose is to showcase the many hundreds of games outside of the top ~50 most popular to keep the games page fresh for players hungry for more content.
How it could work is ev…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to set a genre to my team’s game in such a way that it connects players looking for that genre to the game.
As a Roblox player, it is currently impossible to search for / seek out Roblox games by genre.
The previous genre system that existed on Roblox for many years was extremely limiting to the creativity and imagination of the developers and game designers, this is not a post that is advocating for the return of the pre-curated genres.
Inste…
Upon running a new sponsored ad for the first time, you will see the effects of it over the course of 24 hours almost perfectly fine , but after the ad has concluded, the stats disappear. You will notice that everything about the new sponsored ad is 0, the impressions, clicks, CTR, bid.
Repro:
Create a new sponsored ad
Run the ad and wait 24 hours
Try to note the stats the sponsored ad received, expected results is the stats are there for you, but the reality is they disappear (but they’re n…
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/more-than-one-way-to-calculate-ad-profit-for-your-game-item-roblox-econ/31133
Players should be able to receive feed updates from their favorite games when they are updated.
Here is an example:
Why?
The new games thumbnail update coming out soon(tm?) points to an extreme anti-putting game updates in our title.
Well, ROBLOX, the reason we have to do this is to communicate to our players. We have no way of telling players who favorited our game that it was updated, unless we make a thumbnail specifically for the update, or put it in the title.
This just screams that …
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/the-game-pages-genres-are-outdated-lets-fix-them-together/7660
Feature Requests to improve Roblox Develop for everyone:
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Roblox Youtube Stars are given a special code that their viewers can use to support their favorite Roblox youtuber in Roblox’s star program.
Roblox has a Star program with developers, though they are not given the same feature. This is confusing as the naming would suggest that these Star developers be treated with the same Roblox Website features as Youtube Stars.
Roblox should add this feature for developers within their Star program, allowing players to use the same code referral…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to manage a nice community on the Roblox website due to loopholes malicious people have when coming in and spamming / being asshats on group walls.
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As a developer, we have the option to exile and delete all posts by said person, this is very handy, as evidenced below:
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This suggestion is to add a blacklist banning userIds (edited out banning IP), so that they can not just immediately come back in the group and spam more. If th…
Roblox stats are counting obvious botted visits, creating inaccurate data
Roblox stats are the ways developers gather legitimate data about their games. This becomes a problem when even the official stats being provided are obviously the result of botting.
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This for example, carries over to the monthly stats which are now FAKE data
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There is nothing developers can do about these fake botted visits, and it’s hurting the integrity of Roblox stats.
As a Roblox developer, it is too hard to update my game’s description - one of the most basic necessities to fostering a good community. I don’t like to play a guessing game every time I update my game’s description as to what is the “inappropriate” text.
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It also doesn’t help that the box to view your description is small and can’t be extended, like other text boxes around the website.
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If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience becau…
Thank you so much! Premium Payouts have helped tremendously. However hear me out there is something that can improve it for devs like me that do custom accounting.
I have developed my own accounting system, (other devs can adopt, I share it here)
With this system, long before premium payouts I have paid my developers dividends from all our games total profit, so even devs only working on 1 game in our group benefit from the group’s other games lifting up. We also had to wait to the 3rd of t…
As a Roblox developer running a studio with multiple users earning Robux payouts each month, the freedom to change usernames would interfere with the systematic approach that custom accounting entails. With the ability to search a user by Id, this would improve my development as I would be able to store their UserId in a custom payout spreadsheet and easily paste it in every payout time!
This is the current prompt
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As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to moderate group walls when people are spamming links to their games, groups, items, etc.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to stop regular members from being able to post spam links.
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/daily-reminder-to-copy-the-description-of-anything-you-change-on-the-roblox-website-before-you-press-save/740359
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/twitter-vs-instagram-is-there-a-new-generation-of-roblox-players-growing-up-on-different-social-media-platforms-study-and-correlation-statistic/707384
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to grant ownership of a gamepass that is owned by the same group by a Server Command / API call.
I have 2 use-cases:
Giving away website/legitimate gamepasses ownership to developers / team members, so they do not have to purchase the gamepass. This can be done currently by calling a boolean value to true within the Player’s data structure. Hook up the boolean to then give the gamepass perks. Legitimate ownership would be better.
Settin…
FTWDK: A sales mix is the proportion of products your business sells, can be in terms of volume and revenue.
Super simple Eg) Item1 accounts for 40% of our sales volume and 30% of our revenue. Item2 is 60% of our volume, 70% of our revenue.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too tedious to create a spreadsheet and gather my game’s sale mix.
Knowing your sales mix is important in my opinion, so you understand what your players like to buy in your game. You can decide if this is important…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard / tedious to develop a recursive loop that checks throughout an entire game looking for one specific asset ID (of any kind).
edit: it was easy
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve development time spent optimization specific assets, and ensure a through search throughout all hierarchies of the game.
I imagine this would be very similar to the current “Find In All Scripts” feature, but for AssetIDs
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This would be helpful for trying to find correlations between revenue, avg visit time, and platform the game is being played on, just as one example I would personally use it for.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to run stats on game performance by platform by one’s own metric set up, and currently impossible to use the data table provided by developer stats to seek differences between platforms.
Developers with a knowledge in statistics would benefit greatly and improve design decisions with greater access to this data.
Blurred is what we currently get under the ‘Daily Stats’ tab.
When making this feature, make the differentiated by platform a separate …
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to find out how many nominal players are crashing, and how that number compares to the overall mobile/tablet players.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it may improve design decisions in determining which lower-end devices are worth potentially sacrificing vital game-build quality for.
For example, if a certain device crashes 25% of the time and became filtered, but was only .7% of total tablet players at the time, that could be seen as …
They solved this by having tier-less cashouts after 100k Robux
As a Roblox developer, money strain is currently too hard on developers or studios just starting out or making “American Middle Class” incomes. More developers earning a “stable” middle class income means more potential for high quality hit games coming out and increased competition.
Depending on the month, studio or individual incomes could often shift from 50% to 200% of a ‘long term average’. It could be argued this is to be expected in the nature of the games industry, but the DevEx tiers …
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard for our game’s great gamepasses to standout to players who do not check each individual gamepass on the website store page.
Roblox should supply gamepass ratings to players clicking the prompt purchase button, which could influence player choice, rewarding great gamepasses.
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If Roblox is able to address this issue, it could improve click through rates for players thinking about buying, and players actually buying gamepasses.
I do not hav…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to see age developer stats data after the age of 18.
Ideally, there would be further stats that extend into the 20s and maybe have a 30+
Alternatively, these could go all out for all ages, but I assume there is data that says there is a huge drop off point somewhere, where it wouldn’t be worth it to clutter dev stats.
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If Roblox is able to address this issue, I think it could diversify the games on the platform by having people well in…
This will be a post about the current use of group games, and potential improvements I think would help incentivize more developers to use them for their new projects. Eventually I see group games as the dominant method for publishing a game on Roblox.
Given Roblox’s current features, here’s what I like about group games currently compared to individual profile published.
A group wall, this essentially replaces the comment section of a game, there is fewer spam, more feedback generated, more…
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find out where players are purchasing my gamepasses, either in-game or from the store tab on the game’s detail page.
There was a bug reported a few months ago that actually unintentionally allowed for this to happen.
I commented
Scripton was correct in assuming that it produced a different result when bought in-game, and I took full advantage of it at the time. However, now every sale is “at place (place name)” so there is no way to differ…
First, some definitions as I see them:
(edit: added pictures)
Game’s page: The page where users click play, view desc, and leaderboards to a specific game
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Games page: The liquid page to find all games on!
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As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to calculate ratings ratios (for example before/after an update) because the exact ratings of my game are only found on the games page (for example finding it in the sort of top earning, popular, recommended, etc)
As a Robl…
The graph is cut off toward the beginning 4 hours of the current hourly time period
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You can see the ‘2409’ matches for the first time the graph is above 0 and the Data Table.
This bug happens 100% of the time.
I included the visits by age in the 1st picture to show that it happens for another graph for the hourly tab. It indeed happens to all graphs within the hourly tab. Repro by having a place with stats, and check the hourly.
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/streaming-enabled-part-property-allowpartstreaming/20912
With the recent player points update, it is now a pointless sort. That is all.
