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Comment by bentcorner | Hacker News Reader

In my (non-finance, parent of a roblox-player) opinion, the problem that Roblox has is that every single roblox game has a "roblox" essence. Every roblox game is undeniably roblox, and to broaden their market and attract higher-paying users, I think they need to fix that.

There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.

If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.

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I'm a dev on the platform and agree that there is a lot of jank in Roblox games.

There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.

Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.

Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.

Sorry to hijack your comment, but could you recommend some kind of guide for someone who wants to start? There are lots of stuff out there but I need a filter.

I would suggest you start like one would with anything programming. Come up with some simple ideas on what to build first and give it a try. Their documentation is pretty good and Lua/Luau is dead simple to work with.

Sure, but it's not like Roblox is special here, compared to Flash games / Blizzard games' custom maps / Valve game's mods / Minecraft-Factorio mods / HTML games / dev's own website / Steam Greenlight / Itch.io / Unity (yuck)...

Roblox got the multiplatform MMO experience dead right. Minecraft is atrocious in comparison; just creating an account is a painful exercise with Microsofts SSO setup and all. And then there is the Java/Bedrock schism which prevents seamless coop play. And don't get me started about modding scene on the matrix of Java/Bedrock and their own version ladders...

I’m not sure… maybe. But at the same time, I think that having access to thousands of games that more or less look and play the same has its advantages and might be a big part of its appeal. If you had Fortnite reimplemented within Roblox, why would you play the Roblox version? I don’t know.

On the other hand, as a Roblox-father also, I do enjoy some of the more polished games, but I almost always fail to get my son to be excited about them enough for us to spend our shared playtime in them instead of the other crap. No free lunch I guess.

There’s been a few high polish games that aren’t Robloxlike. There’s just been very few that are breakout hits on the platform or offer any incentive to an external audience. You’ve got to remember that the main audience right now is kids on low power devices who can’t run a lot of the more polished games so they tend to fall off the discovery cliff.

Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.

I get the impression that they are actively trying to attract older players, perhaps at least teenagers or young adults. I assume because so many young kids play Roblox they are running out of new users on that front. And I agree with your comment and others here; the extreme majority of Roblox games are poor quality and it is very hard to sift through and find anything interesting. I think if Roblox could fix that they could continue to grow even more. Perhaps they could begin to compete with "real" platforms like Steam for attention.

Hard agree on the jank, but it may not be possible to fix that while keeping the upsides of the platform.

I don’t think there’s anything inherent in Roblox that means the characters have to look and be animated like janky robots.

It takes a huge amount of effort to overwrite & re-animate the default ROBLOX characters and their animations.

Yeah, I meant from the perspective of the roblox devs. They can add a more organic default animation if they want. They choose not to.

I've been getting randomly flung by the terrain in Roblox since 2008.

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