I’ve been playing Roblox since 2013 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dev offer a free trial in-game. I can think of one main reason as to why they don’t do this and that’s because of alternate accounts. However, I believe that there’s a smart way to enable free trials without worrying about people creating alts to abuse the system.
Example: I’m thinking of offering a free trial of immunity to new/underperforming players. The free trial would last just long enough to show them how much better the game would be if they purchased the immunity gamepass/developer product. The free trial wouldn’t last long enough for them to gain any meaningful amount of levels or items, so there wouldn’t be much of an incentive for them to create an alternate account just to get a free trial again. No one wants or needs multiple low level accounts.
There could be something I’m overlooking, because if it was a viable strategy more developers would do it. I’d really appreciate it if you left your thoughts below, thank you for taking time out of your day to read this.
Sorry if I’m replying to a 11 months old topic, but I do have many opinions about how developers can actually make a free trial system properly. The main problem is it requires the game to have 2 separate universes which means the statistics (e.g. visits, favorites, L/D) will be separated.
Have 2 separate universes, one with paid access and one for free players.
To account for “alt abuse”, here’s my opinion for at least partially solving it: For accounts made over 1 year, no verifications required. For newer accounts, an email checking (by checking the green plaid hat Verified, Bonafide, Plaidafied - Roblox) or :IsVerified() verification is required.
The paid access has every features the game should have. The free version however, doesn’t have any data saving feature except for tracking total playtimes (or playtime per month if you want the free players to try again each major updates).
The free version may have most of the social features crippled out. You can make the chat feature being extremely rate limited (e.g. 1 message per 5 seconds) or no chat feature at all. You can turn down the max players to a small size (e.g. 4 players) or even make it singleplayer only.
And finally after the free players reached their playtime limit, you can “kick” them in friendly ways by disabling their Character and giving the popup GUI to buy the game, which will :Kick the player after certain durations. You can also implement a “grace period” system which will let the player finish their race, fights, etc. until the end of the battle.