Have you considered publishing games on Roblox?

Reading news like this:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/302322/Roblox_set_to_pay_ingame_devs_over_30M_in_2017.php

I'm seriously considering to open a dev account in there and publish some games on their platform. It kinda is the equivalent of selling HTML5 / Flash games to web portals: They have the audience, I can provide games.

The average age for developers in there seems to be around 18 - 25 (with most players being 8 - 18).

I'm 36 and I have finished a game using Unity, which is being sold on Steam & consoles... But doesn't make enough money as to be a successful business, I still keep my day job.

So, I thought that maybe publishing games in Roblox could be an easier way to earn serious money, given the enormous audience they already have... but the age difference throws me back, would it be weird? It kinda feels like entering a kid's party :/

What do you think?

 

That's a bit of a steep climb. I wouldn't trust it so fast. What are the chances that they are just boosting company's success before selling it?

If you already have a platform, I'm not sure what's better. Compare making another game for steam & consoles VS making a new game for roblox. Then you can decide what is better choice (money-wise and time-wise).

A quote that could be attributed to developemnt of every game with a wide audience

 

I think you created an account solely to advertise your own platform. Brand new account on both Unity and Unreal forums with the exact same copy and pasted post. Though this may just be a coincidence. I guess we'll know if you reply to any responses to either of them.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?151244-Have-you-considered-publishing-games-on-Roblox

 

My kids play a ton of Roblox every single day. I thought I would try and use the editor and maybe create some prototype levels and just test out their development environment. If you're used to the ease of Unity, well forget it with this editor. In my own opinion it really sucks. It's not developer friendly. For example if you want to create a real time light, you can't just create a real time light and be done with it. Nope. You have to create a meshpart object, create a light, drag the light as the child of the meshpart object. At that point you can rotate, translate and scale the child object which is the light. Another fun example is scaling. You cannot scale all axis's at the same time...not in the Inspector window, nor with the gizmo. So you have to scale things in one axis at a time! This kind of represents how it is to work in the Roblox editor. Everything takes several steps where it takes one step in another professional engine or editor. You're extremely limited on the amount of polygons you can bring in with custom meshes (i.e. ones you've built yourself in Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, etc. It's just really designed to look like crap at it's core too. I dunno, not for me. Would much rather develop in Unity, and if I had no Unity would use something like PlayCanvas (which by the way I love!).

 

I'm the original poster, "CuriousGuy".
I can't login back with that account, since I used a throw away email to create it, because I wanted to stay anonymous.

Look, I understand it certainly can look like that, but let me assure you that I'm not from Roblox and I'm not looking to promote their product whatsoever. Quite the opposite, I saw the news regarding devs making tons of money and I searched everywhere to see what other developers thought about this possibility. Since no relevant info came up, I decided to write several posts across different gamedev communities to bring up the question, because the thing that holds me back is their really young audience. If I were here to promote Roblox, I wouldn't mention that as a downer, don't you think?

I created new accounts to post this message because I wanted it to be an anonymous question.

If I had thousands of followers on Twitter I'd made a poll there but I don't, so this is the closest I could come up with.

Thanks to FMark92 & JamesArndt for your kind responses! You're being really helpful

 

If it is in a developers space, there's money to be made and fair incentive from the platform then devs will generally take a whack at it. Personally, it's not really a platform space that interests me so I would say no.

I don't see why the question justifies anonymity and all the confusion you're stirring up because of your accounts, but it really doesn't matter because this isn't really a mountain of a thing you're asking about.

 

Simply responding to both threads has already marked you as a legitimate user. Spammers, and to a lesser degree some of the people who are creating threads solely to promote a product, never make responses.

How much did you promote your game both prior to release and after the fact? If you went through the usual methods of promotion (facebook, reddit, twitter, etc) then my suggestion would be to not waste your time and just start making another game. If you didn't promote it whatsoever then my advice would be to try those first.

Like you noticed Roblox is primarily kids. My niece (8 years old) and my nephew (5 years old) regularly play it and the people who created Let's Plays almost always have their kids involved which leads me to conclude that the people who play it wouldn't likely be your target audience (assuming your game isn't aimed at kids).

 

Thank you for your replies.

I'm not looking to port my finished games to Roblox, though. I was wondering if decent money could be made in there, making simple games. New games would be built targeting their audience, starting from scratch.

I thought maybe some of you tried it (professionally) and had some advice, or maybe this is intended to be used by kids only and more seasoned (and old xD) developers are not welcome.

 

Those numbers don't jive. average between 18-25 with teh most players being 8-18?
I highly doubt the age range is that wide - probably more like 8-16, but even so - that isn't a terrible range. Create a game to a set demographic - you don't have to target the entire user bases age range.

Easier wat to earn serious money? Those don't exist unless you are bringing 1m+ to the table. Easy and serious money do not belong in the same conversation.

I don't think this is the case - because people are following too closely for them to be fudging numbers - and plus - it's kind of illegal. I think the numbers are legit.

James - I also looked into this after seeing my son playing it for hours and hours. In my opinion the people making bank are the ones creating assets to be purchased by the developers. They are looking for - like you described - simple blocky crappy assets to populate there games with. This is only based on an afternoon of research - which I decided - I'm too busy to look further into.

 

Those numbers sound about typical. $2 million each to the top devs. That leaves 1.5 million to be paid out among the other 1,999,998 devs. Which works out as less then a dollar per dev.

Its very typical of most game portal services. The top guys can make decent money. But there is virtually nothing for everyone else.

 

Wouldn't it be $7.50?

 

Typo on my part, fixed.

 

I'd rather eat my own feet than dive back into trying to do anything remotely complex in Roblox.

 

I think there will be too many people trying to get a piece of that 30 million, meaning you'll have more luck with making more of your own games elsewhere.

It is a lottery. The odds of getting a prize are very low, and most people will earn nothing.

 

Investing in your company is illegal? How? Nobody is talking about fudging numbers.

 

Faking financial data in order to make your company more attractive to investors is illegal.

On the other hand pursuing short term results over long term successes to attract investors is par for the course.

 

I fixed my post. I was talking about investing in short term stimulation.