The Art of LiveOps: Jay Jodway on how Roblox empowers collaborative creators
A deep dive on how creators can embrace data in their LiveOps decision-making and what they can learn from mobile and console LiveOps.
The Art of LiveOps podcast provides an in-depth perspective on modern game development, with each episode finding host Crystin Cox (and sometimes former co-host James Gwertzman) interviewing a game development professional in the industry who can provide insight into what make a successful LiveOps strategy. As the team prepares to continue their journey through the world of LiveOps with a new season of The Art of LiveOps, we thought this would be the perfect time to take a look back at some of the highlights from the last few years.
When you think about the top game platforms in the world, Roblox may not immediately spring to mind. It should, given that it’s got over a hundred million players a month and millions of games to play. What’s more, it is growing in popularity across all demographics. Listen as Jay Jodway, Head of Top Developer for Roblox, outlines how, and why, Roblox empowers their community of creators with LiveOps tools from day one.
If you’re interested in checking it out, visit this episode’s page on Buzzsprout. We’ve also included some quotes from the episode below to whet your appetite. Enjoy!
On how Roblox creators work with their communities:
“I would say it starts with understanding what the players want and feeding that content demand. So, at a really high level, it could be like fun stuff that you see. Like the developers may put a poll in Discord asking, "What type of content do you want to see next in this update?," or "What kind of map?," or "What kind of theme should we create?" So a lot of the new content roadmap early on is informed by the community, which is pretty interesting. It's very different than the traditional methodology.”
On what Roblox creators have learned from mobile and console LiveOps:
“As developers continue to level up in an existing game, they start to adopt successful practices that they see in mobile games and console games. There's a lot of inspiration. And at a basic level, you see things like daily login rewards, developer contests that are, again, hosted usually on social media channels. We're starting to see leaderboards really pick up in popularity. But more so than all of the competitive LiveOps features, we see a lot more cooperative LiveOps, which is pretty cool. And there's certainly less emphasis on aggressive monetization and more emphasis on, "Hey, how do we create more engaging experiences with our next update?" So the thinking is a little different and it's more around just serving the needs of their community and doing it rather directly, which is pretty cool.”
On how Roblox developers are embracing data in their LiveOps decision-making:
“Some [developers] are still really looking at the high level engagement data in dashboard. And some of the more advanced developers like RedManta, who're building a really great game right now called World Zero and had prior success on the platform with game called Robloxian High School, are some of our biggest adopters of the PlayFab analytics. They're really pushing the limits of creating custom events to track behavioral data throughout the player life cycle and measuring the core loops, as I mentioned earlier. So we see a wide range of data adoption. It's really cool to see the developers level up.”
To listen to more episodes, visit the official page for The Art of LiveOps.