5 reasons why Roblox games fail (and how to avoid them)

hi everyone welcome back to another video today we're going to be discussing why do some roblox games fail and in this case we're talking about games which have a low concurrent player count a low like ratio and games that just don't make enough money to make a profit that is what i consider a failed game because you want to release your game you want to be in profit you want to get your money back from your adverts but a lot of the time that doesn't happen and it can be hard to find out why a game does fail you know if especially if you put a lot of effort into the game and you can't really see what's going wrong and why it should fail but trust me i've had my fair share of games failing i know what it feels like to have to put in the effort and then to see the game fall flat on its face and it can be hard to figure out why the games fail but hopefully the tips i'm going to show in the video the reasons why many games fail will help you recognize why your game might be failing and hopefully you can avoid your game from failing by taking some of these things into account and taking action on them before you release your game so the first thing i want to talk about is the tutorial so the tutorial is a very hard thing to nail in your game you obviously want to teach people how your game works but you also want to keep them engaged you don't want to you know make them leave the game because they're bored you don't want them to you know to get fed up with with so many steps in your tutorial so it's a hard thing to get right but you don't want it to be too long you also don't want it to be too short because you want to outline everything that there is in your game without turning people away so firstly if you don't have a tutorial in your game get a tutorial right that's the first primary reason why a game will fail because you haven't got a tutorial you aren't um instructing people on how to play the game and if people if they just join the game and you don't tell them how to play if you don't have someone there guiding them on how to play they're just going to leave they're going to leave they're going to find another game because they think it's too hard they don't understand it so firstly get that tutorial in there but if you do have a tutorial and your game still isn't gaining ground it's still failing then look at the length if it's too long if it's got you know over 20 steps then that's probably too long you don't want your tutorial to take i'd say two to three minutes is a good tutorial length obviously it depends on your game and the amount of things that you have to teach about your teach your players but the less things you have to teach your players the better ideally you want your game to be self-explanatory and obviously that might not be possible but in the tutorial you just want to explain the things that need to be explained the things that you know people need to know but also you know you could have a great tutorial but it could just be failing and making your game fail because one or two steps are just too difficult to understand or they don't communicate the message well enough so something i recommend is implementing some tracking either through game analytics that's the service that i use it's a free service which allows you to attract custom events so you can see at which point of the tutorial your players might be leaving so you might find out that the majority of your players are quitting the game or they're not getting past the 10th step and you you might see that oh yeah the 10th step is a little bit difficult to explain and we'll change the wording of that step or we might remove it and that can really help your tutorial so get a tutorial in the game get some kind of tracking in there to log um all the different steps of your tutorial and even you don't have to have a tracking service you could even just you know stay in your game for a for a while and see players coming in and just you could have a value in their player that tells you the step that they're currently on and you can just watch them play the game and see where they where they leave and if you if you see a pattern with multiple players then that's something to change in your tutorial so a tutorial teaches people how to play your game but make sure that it isn't too long and it's not too short either because you want it to teach people how to play the second thing we want to consider is the progression in the game now we want our players to feel like they're achieving things in the game you know if you take a adopts me for example you can adopt a pet or an egg and you can hatch the egg and you can grow your pet you can teach it tricks you can see your pet grow up and you you can achieve things in the game you can see your pets growing up and you can you can see that you've achieved things in the game and that's something that makes people want to come back but if your game doesn't have anything like that where your players feel like they're achieving things and that they're making the time the time they're spending in their game if they're feeling that it's not you know it's not really getting them anywhere you know then they're probably not going to be engaged with your game you want to make them feel like they're achieving things you want to reward them when they when they reach certain milestones in your game and if you're not doing that then you know they might just become disengaged they might not want to come back and as well if you are selling out that's how i like to put it if you're selling out by having paid to win or you know infinite money game passes then people are just completing the game straight away you don't want to make people you want to give them the opportunity to complete the game in their first couple of visits you don't want to you know take an obby for example you can complete that in in one visit all right and once they've completed the obby they're not going to come back so make sure you've got some kind of progression in the game so whether that's like building a business and it takes a while to earn cash and then maybe they reinvest the money that they've earned to buy a better item which then helps to generate more cash you can see where i'm going with this you want to make it so that the game progression spans over multiple visits so that they don't complete the game in one go you want them to maybe make some good progress in the first visit and then they're excited to come back because they want to unlock the next level in their in their game if it's a restaurant tycoon game for example then maybe next time they join they can make enough money to to buy the next restaurant you get the idea right that leads us on to retention and that's all about keeping players in your game making them come back for more and making it so that your game can't be completed straight away like i said earlier with an obby once you finish the end of a knobby it's unlikely that a player is going to want to come back because they've already completed it they've already had the thrill of playing it experiencing it exactly for example but if you take a game like adopts me you know you want to come back you want to adopt another pet because there are so many pets that you can unlock and that you can train up there's always something new to do a football game for example or the every match is going to be different or a game such as liberty county or emergency response there's always going to be a new like criminal to catch different servers are going to be different there's going to be different people in the servers different people to it to play the game with and you can play the game over and over again with with friends or different people and still get enjoyment and fun out of it and that is what having good retention in your game is all about keeping people coming back to the game not just different people but the same people if you keep them coming back then it's a good sign that your game is doing well and a failing game is likely to have low retention it doesn't keep players coming back and that's why the concurrent player count will be low because people aren't coming back people aren't staying for long in the game and so that they won't have any friends joining them in the game the chance of that happening is much lower and that's how games grow if a player is in a game and their friend joins then there's a higher chance of you earning money from that one player because there's a chance that their friends might spend money or they might attract more people to the game now moving on and probably the most important thing if you want to make sure your game doesn't fail is to make sure that your experience on mobile is very good and as good as your desktop version now many people when they just develop a game they just focus on the desktop side because that's what they use to design the game and that's what they're always using to play test but on the roblox developer website it says that over 50 percent of 55 even of roblox game sessions are on mobile so more than half of roblox players are mobile players more than desktop so if you're just designing your game for desktop then you're completely forgetting about this demographic of mobile users and playing a game on mobile is very different compared to a desktop game so you just can't publish your game without creating a mobile experience because there's going to be buttons which might not fit on the screen there's going to be aspects of your game which just don't work since there's no mouse and keyboard the playing style will be different so you need to make sure that the user experience is good that you've tested your ui and you've actually put some decent effort into making it compatible not just compatible but a good experience for mobile players and when you do that you should see a lot more mobile players start to stay in your game for longer especially if you can see if you've got a failing game and you can see on your graphs that you've got a lower average play time on mobile then this might be something to focus on but definitely make sure that you've got an equal if not better playing experience for mobile as well as desktop now the final piece of advice i want to give you is make sure that your game isn't too hard there's just some games which won't make on roadblocks because they're too hard to understand or they have too much of a learning curve for new players don't get me wrong as roblox tries to age up the platform these games may become more sustainable in the future but right now roblox has a core audience of young people and so if your game's too hard or is just maybe targeted at a higher age range it might be hard for it to get off the ground and an example of this is risky strats it's a tactical game which requires a lot of skill and also takes a long time for players to learn because it's about battling and managing units and armies and for younger players this can be hard to understand and grasp because it's very hard to win so you're gonna have to play a lot of the game and learn a lot in order to win and this game has a low concurrent play account now i'm not saying that this is the main reason why it fails but it's definitely a factor because you need to have skill and you need to be a long time player in order to get good at the game so if your game has too much of a learning curve and it's hard for new players to understand this could be a reason as to why it's failing and it's not getting off the ground because it's not attractive to the young audience of roblox so try to simplify your game as much as possible sometimes this might mean that you have to go back to the drawing board and you have to remove some elements of your game but this is all about learning and if you rush into a game these are the types of problems that you encounter because if you don't think about your player base you don't think about who's going to who's going to be experiencing your game and and the features that are going to be in it you will stumble upon problems like this where your game fails because maybe it's too difficult and you need to go back to square one a little bit you need to backpedal and rework a few aspects of your game because i've had this problem before there's definitely been a few things which had i have maybe done a little bit more research or planning on i wouldn't have encountered problems like this and my games might not have failed but all in all it's a learning experience and if your game does fail then it's a good experience for you because you learn what's gone wrong and then in the future you won't make those mistakes again so i hope this video was useful if it was please drop a like let me know any comments you have have you had any games that have failed in the past what have you learned from the video let me know don't forget to subscribe for more weekly roblox videos and tutorials and i'll see you in the next one thank you for watching

Channel: AlvinBlox

Views: 232,435

Keywords: roblox, alvinblox, roblox scripting, roblox games failed, why do roblox games fail, how to make a successful roblox game, how to make a front page roblox game, how to make a roblox game 2020, how to make a roblox game from scratch, how to get famous on roblox, how to get your roblox game on the front page, successful roblox games, most successful roblox games, roblox front page

Id: T9MyO6sVVVI

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021