Next week, we will be removing the ability to sponsor and sell gear on your game page for use in that game. You will still be able to use and sell gear and marketplace items within your game.
Please note, if you are currently enabling the use of gear inside your game by allowing that gear to be purchased on your game page, you will need to transition to other methods. Roblox will no longer be automatically inserting the gear into the player’s backpack when the player joins the game.
As an alternative, you can use the MarketplaceService PlayerOwnsAsset function to determine if the player owns an asset and the LoadAsset function from the InsertService to grant the player the gear.
Can we also expect the gear settings that allow what gear players arae allowed to use, be removed? The settings seem useless to me as was selling gear since nobody used them.
or maybe even removing gears entirely
Good update though! Gears have for years now been relegated from actual functional gear to just an accessory at this point. Making room for new features is always welcome.
Sponsored gears have always been a foolish, if not useless decision to make as a developer. The fact that users had to buy the gear and you only got 90% of the profits meant that developers would simply implement the gear with their own code/make their own gear while keeping all the profits.
Consider this.
Situation A: You want a paid gear to be used in your game. You could either create a gamepass or use sponsored gears, the difference being that you get 70% of the profit earned from the gamepass whereas you’d only get 10% of the profit with sponsored gears.
Situation B: You want an unpaid gear to be used in your game. You could either script in the gear yourself or use sponsored gears, the difference being that users can use the gear for free with scripting whereas you’d make the gear paid on top of getting minimal profit.
Situation C: You don’t want to use a gear and will script your own game. Gears aren’t versatile anyways. This constitutes the majority of the games out there on Roblox.
There has never been a logical reason to use this feature, unless you were incredibly thoughtless. Combine this with the lack of customization for points A and B and you’ve made you decision.
You aren’t going to use sponsored gears.
I’m glad this is being removed. It will stop the minority reckless from making a huge mistake. The feature holds no sentiment in me and it only held back Roblox as a platform.
I’ve always disliked Game Sponsored Gear. This was an unused feature that basically nobody used, instead using gamepasses and a lot of developers did not realize how much tax they were being robbed out of. Goodbye Game Sponsored Gear, you will not be missed.
This feature was pretty popular back in the old days, and allowed people who didn’t have much programming language add gears to their game with ease. It’s sad to see it go, but all good things come to an end. I do have a couple questions, though.
What will happen to games that have not been updated by the owner that may depend on this feature?
Gears really aren’t that popular anymore. Back in ~2013 they could’ve been the big thing, but these days they’re essentially nothing. Will gears no longer be available for purchase later on?
Anyways, this was really unexpected. In my opinion, they should be deprecated for ~1 month and be removed in around mid Jan 2021.
That’s all I have to say.
Hi there, I tend to agree with this update, especially considering that gears are almost obsolete, and people usually will buy them from the place they know they can purchase a gear, the catalog. There is absolutely no reason to keep this, so I think this is quite modernizing in a sense.
It’s a bit of a shame to see this go - all reasons understood, of course. Games don’t really even feature user-owned gear anymore, and a lot of gear is broken at that. If Roblox were to update at least most of its gear, I might’ve even been interested in making a game that let players use their owned gear.
I don’t think old games should be a worry, if they aren’t updated then oh well. Old games have been screwed over several times anyway, such as by forced FE, removal of LoadLibrary, etc…
I have been lowkey expecting this change for months now. I’m not surprised at all about it’s removal. Gears them self have been getting outdated and broken for years now.
Not that kind of sponsorship, it is talking about gears. You could sell a gear in your game and get some robux off of the sale. Roblox is removing this since gears are useless now.
I agree with you, forced FE, LoadLibrary removal, etc have really screwed over games from the old era of Roblox. Some developers have fixed their games to be compatible with FE & LoadLibrary, while others have not.
This is great! I don’t think any games actually used this feature.
I wanted to make a feature request to remove these… (I’m not a Regular, though)
I think that Developer Products should go where Gear used to go… it would be nice to buy Developer Products from the Store page instead of only in-game.
Should Developer Products replace the spot where Gear was?
Developer Products would be a much nicer replacement for the soon to be dead section of Gear. That way, developers won’t have to waste time creating a UI where players can buy, say, more cash, for example.
Was a good feature for people who weren’t exactly great at programming, but as time went on, I seen less and less games even support the use of gears and rather opted for their own tools. Not to mention some tools broke with filtering enabled (no clue if they got fixed). Its a feature that was once loved by a very small amount of developers to not being used at all. Glad to see it go.
@ibonkusomuch
There’s lots of games where a developer product will only work in certain situations (like a revive product in a story game), which could lead to people getting confused, purchasing something that doesn’t do anything (until the player dies and gets immediately revived, assuming the developer is handling ProcessReceipt correctly? please correct me if i’m wrong) which would lead to a lot of confusion. I also don’t see why this is nessacary.
@p0s_0
Every game with gamepasses or products should have an in-game purchase UI. With that you’d be able to grant players whatever they bought immediately, and it’s more convenient to do it from in-game instead of from the app/website. Especially for mobile/xbox users using the app that would have to leave the game to buy something if you don’t make an in-game one!
Should consider converting all gear to another type of accessory and/or make it where you can have your gear show up on you in a holstered position (with some sort of holstered mode for gears in the avatar customization page) so that they actually have some use in games.
In relation to the removal of features and such, one thing I liked doing for a while, sometimes, was to play some of these older games (not multiplayer, and usually ones which had been uncopylocked at some point) in older builds of Roblox Studio - however, since Roblox killed their former asset endpoint (https://www.roblox.com/asset/?id=) a few months ago, this is no longer really possible.
Obviously, I wouldn’t use these builds to make new work, but it was nice to look back on things in a different sense, as they were built to be played, rather than how they are rendered today.
