Wait they OWN Guilded? I knew they use it for basically all community based things like this but I thought they just liked it a lot or something.
6 Likes
Yeah, if you google “who owns Guilded” then it says that it is owned by Roblox
7 Likes
In other words, you want free advertising in order to isolate more recruits for potential employment. Unless there’s some sort of incentive, echo’d in most legitimate feedback already posted, there’s no point. And there’s no real reason or application to bridge school work to Roblox. So, it would be incredibly hard to find students that want to do this and to tell them there’s value when, let’s be real here, there isn’t.
People spend money to go to college to find value. Having Roblox listed on your resume or even extracurriculars does absolutely nothing unless the hiring company is on Roblox or knows what Roblox is outside of a “children’s game”.
–
My thought process as a College Student (aka Target Audience of Program)
I am technically considered part of this program’s target audience. I can tell you for certain that no college / university student will be willing to do this. There’s just not enough value. This program aims to do something decent and that’s by showing students development. That’s not intrinsically bad. This program basically does a few things that are not very value worthy to a future ambassador:
- Creates brand awareness for free
- Creates new possible revenue sources from adults for free
- Creates new users towards Guilded (owned by Roblox) for free
- Creates a new pipeline for candidates that Roblox can hire for free
Every single impression that we make on a college campus can go three ways:
- Start developing / playing Roblox (Helps Roblox more than it helps an ambassador who did all the work)
- Start looking at Roblox for a job and applies (Helps Roblox more than it helps an ambassador)|
- Thinks this is stupid and walks away (No one wins)
For someone in college / university, we have a ton of classes that has a higher chance for landing a job. Unfortunately, no fault to anyone, this doesn’t. This is purely volunteer work. This is a lot for a volunteer to do, essentially free brand ambassadors, for no benefit. No one in their right mind would do that. Not a college / university student who’s full time and / or paying for college. We have loans to pay for. We don’t have time to advertise a multi-billion dollar corporation for free.
High-level what it would take to operate something like this in the exact way listed here:
- Time commitment (4-5+ hours a week given that University Ambassadors would lead it)
- You’d have to register this club to operate on campus (takes a ton of time)
- You’d have to organize events (takes a ton of time)
- You’d have to figure out how to advertise to college students who think Roblox is a children’s game (y’all clearly haven’t figured that out so, expecting college students to do it for free is unrealistic)
- You’d have to find time to attend check-ins (which takes time out of studying for classes)
- You’d have to give up a sizeable portion of the time you’re not studying and panicking about classes
- You’d have to figure out how to make a team out of this because, doing this on your own is overly time consuming and the fear of failing out of college has been instilled in you since you were little
- All the above with the notion that having Roblox club on your resume does absolutely nothing for you in terms of getting a job or degree
That’s not even the tip of the iceberg or all the problems (drama, etc) that would possibly come out of this. Sure, you say support is provided. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t mean much. This is way too big for volunteer work.
No sane professor, let alone a department head, is going to think that minecraft-lego people in a virtual reality platform aimed to target kid’s spending habits as a viable way to essentially waste part of a college tuition.
People don’t go to college to make games on Roblox. They go to college to make games on Unity or EU4/5. Or they have the goals of going into Rockstar, EA, etc. Or making an actual income. There’s very little distinction that you can make outside of being a “game platform”. It’s great that Roblox handles stuff for you but, it’s also takes away a lot of the learning opportunities that you’d learn in school. Unfortunately, those learning opportunities translate to the real world whereas Roblox doesn’t. For example, you can’t create your own networking because Roblox handles it for you. You can’t come up with a custom database because Roblox handles it for you. You can’t even test or write shaders because, yet again, Roblox handles it for you. There’s a bunch of stuff that Roblox handles automatically that would distract or negate the purpose of going to college. The stuff that would be beneficial like working on team of people, leading that team, etc takes too much time and the return value basically doesn’t exist. It’s really, really hard to convince those who have something to lose anything but, that fact. It’s harder when there’s no value for the person attempting to do that for you.
I think that your target audience here is wrong. This should’ve been tested with highschool students before testing your luck with college students. Highschool students have far less to lose and that’s where most are still trying to find a passion. Plus, it’s easier to convince some highschool student that “Roblox will change your life” than in college where a possible parent refers this platform as a “bottomless money pit for my kids”.
Personally, I can see traction of this being semi-decent because there’s no baseline to base this experience off of but, this is volunteer work and I’d expect that most people, without clear motivation, will drop this initiative and end up wasting a lot of time.
Bottom line; it’s ridiculous that you’re exploiting the college minority on this platform and coaxing them into free low-risk low-cost advertising tools for a corporate entity while slapping the “oh yeah there’s value” punchline when there isn’t. I don’t want to offend the person or people who came up with this because I can imagine this took a lot of planning. This is just not a good idea. I think there are better ways this company should look into instead of banking on a bunch of college kids hoping that it goes ok. This seems severely out of touch with the tough reality that college / university students face.
Plus as a university person myself, I really don’t want to get bullied at a college / university level from parents, professors and other students thinking I am coaxing naive developers to a dead end. Point of college is to have a higher chance to break out of that dead end. Not move closer to it. It doesn’t help that any noticeable game that I could show to someone is low-effort child-friendly looking blobs of colors and money-grabs. My target audience are used to EU4/5, Unity, etc. I think if they saw Roblox, they’d think it’s a joke. No professor with years of experience would buy into any of this. Almost every person I’ve talked to thinks that Roblox is an endless money pit for kids, a disgrace to the game-development industry and a total waste of time. They’re kinda right. I have no issues existing on this platform and doing slow development but, seeking a career or being taught it while being in debt seems like an abysmal feat. I don’t think a endeavor this big would lead me closer to not being in debt so, as Barbara from Shark Tank always says, I’m out.
Also, y’all copied this: Developer community programs | Students | Google Developer Student Clubs | Google Developers
53 Likes
I mean, it’s alright I guess…? I got no words.
2 Likes
Don’t expect an upvote from me, I do not see new stuff other than talking to other students.
6 Likes
would love to do this if my whole school didnt hate roblox
9 Likes
This sounds awesome! Is this program restricted to institutions within the United States or is it available in other countries as well?
4 Likes
I have always wondered when Roblox would try to initiate something similar to this program; personally, I learnt most programming concepts from creating things in Roblox but imo I would extend this program below high school level or in high school level as most people already have learnt core programming concepts above university or college (assuming that most people would want to learn Roblox Studio for computer-science related studies)
8 Likes
Which colleges can apply?
- Any university, college, or community college in the U.S. is welcome to apply!
Can university students outside the U.S. apply?
As of right now, no. We have plans to launch internationally eventually.
Seems like Roblox is planning on launching it internationally, I think it’ll take quite a time though.
6 Likes
I agree, it really doesn’t sound like something university-level. There are plenty of other much more professional programming and modeling courses. Why would students choose Roblox over those?
In future job applications, seeing “studied Roblox development”, would employers think seriously of that?
An amazing opportunity for ambassadors for sure, but I can’t really imagine this taking off…
I might've misunderstood, could anyone explain to me what "introducing Roblox to colleges" really mean?
4 Likes
Such a great opportunity!! I’m honored to be a part of this growing program 
12 Likes
They probably want to attract people who study computer science or IT. They need more games that earn them more money. 
2 Likes
Such an amazing opportunity! Huge shoutout to the team for their hard work. Looking forward to seeing this program grow & creative minds prosper! 
10 Likes
You would put “University Ambassador Program” on your resume along with your role in it.
How would this program be any better than forming your own “game development” club at a college or university? Because for some universities, they like to see if you are a leader of something. Forming a club vs UAP, both are ways to put “leadership” on your resume.
4 Likes
It’s only in USA ?
Because i’m french … 
4 Likes
Wow! Seems really interesting, although barely my university would think on things such an ambassador program 
1 Like
We can ask our campus to open a roblox club ?
1 Like
Roblox as a university course is not ideal
A Roblox course for a university seems overly ambitious given the current platform’s capabilities. Not only does Roblox not provide enough tools and features for game development, but the limitations on monetization (such as the DevEx rate) and the gatekept developer relations pushes Roblox far away from aspiring developers looking for a fresh platform.
As a current university student, I am currently enrolling in courses to go away from the Roblox platform, not to continue to be sucked in it. As a developer since 2014, I know from personal experience the pain of trying to be self-sustaining, with such poor success financially speaking.
Encouraging industry students to enter the Roblox platform can lead to financial issues
Time and time again the community complains about the DevEx rate and the false value of Robux created by this rate. Let’s step back for a moment and contemplate this complaint and relate it to the current topic.
For context, I run a game that almost always has a concurrent player count of 1k-4k online, which is almost always more than Call of Duty: Black Ops 1. Yet, Black Ops continues to make way more than my studio ever could. Why? It’s simple, I get about 18%-20% of the original purchase value of Robux.
This example leads me to one conclusion: Roblox is not viable as a career. Thus, if it’s not viable as a career, it’s not viable as a university course.
Any student who takes a Roblox course and falls into the Roblox industry is bound to end up with financial issues.
Roblox needs to improve its reputation before its appropriate to appear on a resume
Roblox, as it currently stands, has a poor reputation among the general development community. To fix this, Roblox needs to address the biggest problems and tackle them from the root, instead of ignoring them until they hopefully go away.
Tell me, would an employer rather see I have a computer science degree, or a Roblox degree?
And of course, I guarantee no Roblox staff or relations will respond to this, because why would they, especially since they don’t care? Address these three points I made, and then I’m down to ask my university for a Roblox course. Until then, I look forward to the day when I can finally break away from the platform.
46 Likes
Those people clearly have issues then.
5 Likes
Until Roblox addresses and fixes the reputation it’s gotten, I don’t feel it will thrive in this environment. Maybe I’m wrong though. Once I go to college, I’d love to be apart of this wherever I go.
Game discovery, a 2D engine, things that would drive more devs to the platform is a must. I know these things aren’t simple, but universities probably wouldn’t take me seriously if I try this program in Roblox’s current standing. My current tech based classes don’t seem fond of Roblox, nor other game developers I’ve interacted with over the years.
Speaking of which, if anyone knows of any universities that have game development, game design, ect. as a major, I’d love to know. I’ve been searching off and on for a year, little luck.
4 Likes