As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to start charging users for private servers.
This could make Roblox a lot of money!
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because as we improve the VIP experience we’d like to increase the costs of the servers over time.
Don’t particularly see how this would make Roblox or Experience Developers any more money, especially considering the example you provided. Allowing people to continue to pay at a lower price wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective. That’d be like if Netflix allowed pre-existing subscribers to continue to pay 13 dollars/month instead of 14 dollars/month when they made a change to the standard plan in 2020.
I agree with the first part, I’ve always found it quite annoying that Roblox kills off your private server straight away when there’s a change in price. When the private server cost changes or you cancel it yourself, its not like you get a refund for it anyways, so it wouldn’t really harm Roblox or Experience developers if they allowed continued access to the particular private server until the 30 days lapses where it’d ask for the monthly payment.
Many users never resubscribe after their subscription is cancelled due to a price change. Subscriptions should never be automatically cancelled because of a price change, that is a catastrophic loss of revenue and should be chosen explicitly. Grandfathering the old price prevents you from losing those subscriptions.
But couldn’t such system also cause players to pay a premium compared to others? What if the developer of the experience decides to decrease the price, would there be something to prevent “grand-fathering” of prices in that instance?
Also, real world instances show that price increases have little to no impact on total subscriber count. (yes I know this example deals with a mostly adult audience, but I would expect depending how much you’re trying to increase the private server rates, it would remain true in the context of Roblox.)
Most other services email customers ahead of planned price increases and then auto renew at the higher price unless the customer cancels.
Roblox, on the other hand, automatically cancels all active subscriptions when the price changes. This means people have to deliberately re subscribe if they want to keep the service, which many don’t do.
Roblox technically already has the notification part of the system. Automatically renewing at the changed price (particularly if its higher) I could see would cause some disagreements within the community (seeing as people already dislike the lack of acknowledgement to the users regarding the private servers they’re currently paying for) so I think choosing an option of cancelling the subscription once the monthly fee is required to be paid up would be the better option. Still don’t see how this (the grand-fathering feature request) would significantly affect Roblox’s bottom line positively.
