Fueled by ROBLOX. It’s the foundation behind all of the updates you’ve undoubtedly noticed in the past few weeks and months. Developer Products, massive games composed of multiple places, Data Persistence, the Developer Exchange program — these are all features we’ve enabled to ensure that you  have not only all the tools you need to build anything you can imagine, but share it in a way that earns you recognition, massive profits, real currency, and credibility as a game developer.

That said, we understand that many of you have questions about what these changes mean, both for now and for the future. That’s why we decided to answer some popular inquiries in this blog article. It’s been awhile — so we tapped Creative Director John Shedletsky to respond to some feedback!

[Editor’s note: Though we have sometimes used the term “universes” in the past, now that this capability has been introduced we’re referring to these simply as games. Every game has a “lobby” or starting place through which players enter the game (though of course a game can also have multiple other places within it). Going forward, you’ll see us talk only about Games and Place — we hope that you do the same!]

Janthran: How does the accounting for “Active Player Count” within a game work for the purposes of a game showing up on the “Popular” sort on the Games page?

Shedletsky: Here’s how it works. All running places in a game contribute to the “Active Player Count.” This is the number you see on the Games page. However, only the lobby of your game appears with the aggregated count — places that exist inside the game you create are invisible on the Games page.

Follow up from Janthran: Do game owners get a ticket for each visit to each place in a game?

Shedletsky: No. The traffic bonus is only awarded for visits to the lobby (starting place) of any given game. No bonus is given for intra-game teleports. Also, I’m sure some clever ROBLOXians will try to make an infinite amount of tickets by teleporting people back and forth to their start places. But like all other traffic awards, we throttle these cases based on visit-frequency.

DrViridium: Do game visits count towards your total visit count on your profile?

Shedletsky: The “Total Visits” counter on your profile only includes visits to active places. We believe it is probably correct to count intra-game visits on this page. Are we right? What do you guys think?

Arceuslnator: Why is selling cross-game Developer Products disabled?

Shedletsky: OK. Say I sell a Developer Product for your game. People pay me for it. Then they go to your game, and it doesn’t work. They become angry — is that really what you want?

Follow up from Arceuslnator: Are there any plans to allow game owners to create Developer Products with a script? Similar to the way places are created?

Shedletsky: Interesting suggestion! This is something we may implement in the future. It would be easy to add technically — though it would place much more responsibility on the game creator to keep up with their books.

TylerMcBride: Badges from a game should be awardable anywhere in a game.

Shedletsky: I agree. All badges for a game (and all Game Passes for that matter) should appear in the start place for that game. This is a design oversight that will be corrected soon.

Pyrolysis: How about adding the ability to show a custom message during a teleport?

Shedletsky: Ha! Sorcus and the Games Team would love that. We’re thinking about putting up a transition image while a teleport is occurring — as it stands now, the screen flashes in a rather unaesthetic way.

Money128: My friend and I are creating a game together, and want to share in the potential profit we earn. Wouldn’t it be better if we could have a teleportation system so that those who want to use PvP mode (online) would be teleported to either of our places? We haven’t discussed who would get what, but it’d be cool to form “alliances” between you and your friends.

Shedletsky: Let me try and address these comments one issue at a time.

1. Collaborative building of games is a huge and popular request — many of our top builders want improvements to ROBLOX Studio to better support teams of developers working on the same game. There’s a lot to do in this regard — it would make more sense to talk about this in a separate blog post.

2. Sharing profits is another popular request — the best way to do this would be to create special Groups seen as “companies” or “corporations” or “studios.” The studio would own all the stuff you’re working on, and you and your friends would own “stock” in your endeavors. You could then create fractional ownership on whatever you’re working on, and profit from your studio’s activities. In a really slick implementation, the stock would even be tradeable.

3. Your comment on “alliances” is interesting. Most games made by multiple people would have to share a common code — so that when players teleported from one level (place) to another, their stats would be saved. This would mean that whoever owns the game code would be in complete power within the game. Within this type of framework, I could imagine a situation where people would have to apply to be included in your game. Whew.

AetherKnight: All we need now is the ability to spin up new instances with scripting. That would mean RTS games could have lobbies and no one would have to wait for a new game to start!

Shedletsky: The last obvious remaining piece of functionality for us to add before players can build their own matchmaking systems is the ability to programmatically create new instances of your games. We’ve actually laid the groundwork for most of this — we just need to wrap it all up. We’re unsure, however, whether this is a feature that people actually want — let us know in the comments if this is a feature you would find useful! 

To close this article, I took a look back at some stats from the last month to see how much money Developer Products has earned some of our top developers. I don’t want to give away any personal information, so let me just put it this way. In the last 30 days, our top 20 developers have earned well over 6 million ROBUX collectively — the games on this list are definitely familiar. Murder Mystery, Darkness 2, Catching Fire: The Hunger Games Sequel, Wheel of ROBLOX — these are just a few of the games that are earning massive amounts of ROBUX utilizing Developer Products in unique ways.