I’m receiving reports that players on Xbox are no longer able to send text chat messages in games, presumably because CanUserChatAsync is now always returning false for these users. They’re also not able to use other features which accept custom text input.
A player sent in this screenshot - they’ve always been able to chat on Xbox in the past, but suddenly they’re unable to do so:
The reports started coming in yesterday, and since our game is a social game which relies on the ability to chat, we’ve experienced a major loss in players that coincides with the issue. Hopefully this can be resolved quickly.
Recently, we have been working closely with Xbox to ensure that the Roblox platform is meeting Xbox Requirements. This change was made yesterday, and we are still preparing communication to announce to the wider community. We will also be making changes to the Developer Hub Xbox page to reflect this information.
As your players discovered this means that text chat is no longer available. You did mention in this post that there are other features that accept custom input that are affected by this change, would you mind giving me additional information?
Any feature that requires chat privacy permissions is no longer available on Xbox (in Roblox High School 2’s case, this also includes the ability to set an RP name, as well as the ability to make server announcements).
It’s really unfortunate that this change was made with no warning whatsoever and with no opportunity to find an alternative solution. This has had a serious negative impact on our game - our average playtime on Xbox has dropped nearly 50% as a result of this change. Text chat is very popular among Xbox players because it’s the only way they can communicate with PC and mobile users - without it, they’re just stuck in the dark, unable to talk to anyone in games.
I can confirm this, Went to my brothers console to attempt to test the bug, the chat + over items that cindering mentioned are indeed happening, I hope this can be changed or somehow a bypass this.
I’m a slight bit confused, I rarely play on Xbox ever, but I never even had a chat feature. I never saw anyone’s chats and I never could say anything. I have been playing roblox for 4 years and have been developing for 2. I can say then whenever I played on xbox during those 4 years, I could not see chat nor speak in chat. I may be missing something, but that’s my perspective of this “bug”.
My best guess is that the xbox restrictions is roblox trying to keep their game rating E for everyone 10+(something like that) On Xbox there are more game restrictions.
However, the ability to not be able to have a chat for Xbox players will hurt the player base there for sure
Well that’s unfortunate. Seems like I’ll just ignore XBox development from now on considering the hussle of implementing specific bindings for controller input.
No reason to work on something if it’s meant for a very narrow niche.
You need to implement custom bindings for controllers, something that isn’t required, but possible for PCs. There is no reason to do that if not even 1% of your players will be playing on XBox because of a missing key feature in RP.
Xbox has extremely precise parental controls that allows parents to not only disable chat features, but certain parts of it and even which users are allowed to interact with their child through any type of communication, not just text chat.
As far as I know, any games that require an Xbox Live Gold membership should support these parental controls so their child can stay safe online no matter what game they are playing. I’m pretty sure Roblox doesn’t support the extensive Xbox parental controls that include things like only allowing Xbox friends to chat with you, etc.
I’m hopeful that these parental controls are supported in Roblox so that child safety is further improved on the platform. It’ll also allow for chat to be enabled on Xbox without any concerns for violating the parental controls set by the parent account.
This change honestly is effecting hundreds and hundreds of Roblox games and having minimal to large effects across Roblox. If I am understanding correctly, while I do think that safety is important, I think that it would make more sense for Roblox to temporarily keep a rating for higher audiences rather than just removing chat altogether. (See below reply)
Sort of off topic rant
The amount of revenue game makers (and even Roblox themselves) are losing from some changes is far more than it would seem for some people. Games such as Flee the Facility are almost impossible for players to learn and play without chat. Previously Xbox players were known for not taking warnings or suggestions and not communicating even though these players simply couldn’t see or use the chat. It makes them look bad to other players, creates unneeded toxicity towards them, and it makes the game look bad as well as making the game much less fun for all players. This isn’t really solely about this change, but about the state of Roblox as a whole right now.
A majority of Roblox players are young and don’t understand why it is not a developers fault when they are disconnected and given some obscure error code or their chat isn’t working. Countless games have been bashed for Roblox’s issues and there is no real way for developers to shield themselves from this. Roblox outages and changes have caused numerous games to lose huge amounts of revenue and lose players. Some players have reported losing hundreds of dollars in revenue at the fault of solely and entirely Roblox.
I seriously think that while Roblox was getting more transparent within the last few years, we’ve been losing that transparency very quickly within the past few months alone. Due to countless Roblox changes, bugs, outages, etc which have gone completely unmentioned by Roblox, developers are having to take the blame for them. I’ve seen a lack if incident reports and a lack of staff response on these topics. I’m starting to think that something may be going on inside Roblox right now because some of the issues we’ve been facing are still yet to be even acknowledged by staff. If Roblox keeps this type of stuff up everyone will be taking a huge hit and countless players and devs will leave the platform.
Game does not have an Xbox-specific version (a separate version of the same game available on other platforms)
So remove chat and basically cut off xbox players from pc and mobile players… ok? What is the point of having xbox players in non-xbox servers then if they can’t communicate???
