Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: selling premium access to your game using Game Passes, ROBLOX named one of TIME’s 50 best websites of 2012, the richest ROBLOX users, running a successful Personal Build Server and more.
Follow in the footsteps of MMO giants with Game Passes
The MMO industry is shifting from a traditional subscription model, where you pay upfront to have access to a game, to a “freemium” model, where the basic features of a game are free to play and you pay to access premium content. While ROBLOX users had already found a way to replicate this trend using “VIP T-shirts,” we introduced Game Passes to make it easier to set up and sell special access in your ROBLOX games. You can check out our blog post for an introduction to setting up a Game Pass, and this ROBLOX Wiki entry for help with giving your Game Pass an in-game effect.
Interested in the business side of MMOs?The way MMO developers make money is changing, after about 15 years of the traditional subscription model. Recent games, like League of Legends, The Lord of the Rings Online and Tribes: Ascend, offer a largely free-to-play experience, with sales of bonus items, abilities and content. Your first thought, with Game Passes, might be to require ROBLOX users to pay to play at all, but you might have more success offering paid bonus content on top of a free game. Here are some articles addressing this shift: |
ROBLOX: One of TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2012
TIME Magazine named ROBLOX one of its 50 Best Websites of 2012. You can, of course, check out the feature right here. The 50 best websites are those that TIME editors “find to be useful, entertaining, innovative or just plain addictive — and, in some cases, all of the above.”
What it’s like to be part of the ROBLOX team
Not only do you get to be part of a web platform recognized by a national magazine, you also get to be part of a team where everyone is encouraged to act like a CEO.
We want everyone who works here to be invested in – even concerned about – their projects and ROBLOX’s future. We want everyone to have a drive to contribute to the greater ROBLOX whole, whether that’s through improving ROBLOX.com, the ROBLOX game and building experiences, ROBLOX’s brand awareness, our human resources operations or something else.
You can read the entire blog post about ROBLOX’s values here.
The wealthiest ROBLOX users: who they are, and how they got rich
We decided to talk to the richest active users on ROBLOX to find out how they achieved their success. In this first installment, you’ll hear from the fourth- to seventh-richest ROBLOX users about how they used popular games, item selling/trading and conservative spending to amass a fortune. The top three richest users will be coming in the future, so stay tuned for more.
Running a successful Personal Build Server
It’s pretty easy to run a personal server on ROBLOX, but it’s not as easy to make it a place of productive, collaborative building. The key is to be in control of your server and exactly what users have building privileges. You can read more about running a successful Personal Build Server and ways to customize your server in interesting ways right here.
Techniques for creating advanced first-person shooters
One of the most popular genres on ROBLOX — and the gaming market at large — is the first-person shooter. There are plenty of fun, interesting FPS games on ROBLOX: we blog curators are partial to Paintball!, Call of ROBLOXia 5: ROBLOX at War and WWII: Battle for Carentan. Obviously, you’ve got some stiff competition. So, to help you break into the upper echelon of FPS games, we put together a number of tips addressing level design, spinning the standard FPS gameplay and more. Read the complete article here.
Bits
- ROBLOX user Dayren has created a YouTube video called Roblox Video Making Basics. It’s a good resource for Windows users who’d like to make videos at no cost using our built-in capture tool and Windows Movie Maker.
- More of a “bite” than a “bit,” we received some cupcakes this week at ROBLOX HQ. I, of course, had to have one of the ROBLOX-branded ones. Tasty.
