“From the Devs”: Growing and Leveraging a Passionate Community on Roblox, by Ben_Est
Growing a passionate community around your content can help accelerate your career as a Roblox creator, sometimes even exponentially. Over the past decade, I’ve watched myself and others reach massive player counts, group members, and social media followers, yet, many of us aren’t quite sure how to turn all of these people into a spirited fanbase. I will go over some of the most effective tools, review how to find those who will stand by your side forever, and discuss how to leverage their support to accelerate your career.
Finding Your Community
To find a community on Roblox you need to discover what you want to create, create it, and get players to play so you can start finding those who could possibly become followers.
Finding your community on Roblox starts with discovering who you are as a developer. You have to identify what type of content you have fun creating that others enjoy playing. If you choose a more popular game style and genre you’ll have a larger pool of people to attract when searching for new members. If you enjoy creating less popular types of content don’t worry about not finding people, there are enough players on Roblox to have a community for pretty much anything.
Know what you want to create? Awesome! Let’s continue.
Now that you know what you want to create, the next step is to bring it to life. I suggest creating a very basic version of what you want to share with your community so you can get your existing friends to play it and give early feedback. If people are playing your game, you should also be playing and asking questions about how to make it better. Player feedback is vital to a good in-game player experience!
If you’re low on funding I suggest modestly monetizing early so you can build up a few thousand robux for ads. Ads can speed up the process of finding your community significantly, especially if they resonate with your audience, so I suggest running a high quality / high click-through rate (CTR) ad when finding a community. When your game becomes profitable consistently scaling becomes easier. If you don’t have the funding, don’t worry! You can focus on the next step!
Before we get into converting players into followers, you’ll need to decide where you want your community to be primarily located! I’ve created communities on Discord, YouTube, Twitter, and through Roblox groups. I suggest using each platform but choose only one to start with. It’s important that you focus on one platform at a time until you have engagement from the community every day.
Be sure to put the platform of your choice in your games social media links, this is vital for the next step. Once you make your choice you’ll be ready to turn the players of your game into followers!
Let’s take the players of our game and build a community! This is the most fun part of the process because you get to find and chat with like-minded people constantly. The best way to find people who will stick with you forever is to jump into your game with your dedicated players! Being the creator gives you a lot of in-game attention so it’s easy to start conversations. When you notice that someone plays your game a lot, ask them to join the social media community you chose. They can find the link by going to your games Social Links.
Once someone joins your social media, it helps to introduce them to everyone and get a conversation going. If you’re genuinely interested in the people who join your following, it will be easy to have conversations about what they enjoy. The more you know your audience, the easier it is to entertain them! For example, I ask my community what feature they want to be added to the game next and let them vote. Then, I proceed to ask them why. The more positive interactions you have with people like this, the stronger your community will be. This will compound over time and you’ll have a huge following in no time! The best part is, you’ll create awesome friendships with a lot of these people.
Leveraging Your Community
Now that you’ve grown a community that loves your content, let’s map out what we can do with all of this support!
The most obvious thing you can do with a lot of passionate followers is asking them to get their friends to join. Any social platform is more fun with friends! I usually host competitions and giveaways to convince my fans to invite others. People love winning and when you have followers you can empower them to do so :).
When I host competitions on social media, nearly every social stat grows. The best thing is, your community grows with you. When I host competitions I have my fans create a game with certain limitations. They usually have a week to come up with something and create it. On the weekend of the competition, I start a live stream and have everyone join each submitted game at the same time. After playing for a few minutes we all vote on the best game. Whichever game gets first place usually receives a huge shoutout on social media and a small prize. This is a fun process for everyone involved; those who created games have another portfolio piece to work with and will share your competition with friends, who might follow you. This is not limited to games, you could have a competition for any Roblox related asset!
You can certainly leverage your following to grow your social media presence and community further but you can also launch new content with a boost! Getting games noticed can be expensive- that’s why it’s important to have a community that is willing to give you feedback where it’s critical. When you create a game based on players feedback, the price of launching it decreases because people will play longer and share it with friends. When you have larger amounts of people in your community you can ask everyone to play your new creation. This is super helpful when you want a lot of people very fast without spending robux on ads! The longer you create on Roblox, the more your creations and following compounds. This is a beautiful thing.
Your Community Compounds
When I first started creating games on Roblox, I assumed that just because my group was growing a few members a day that it would keep growing at that pace forever. Thankfully I was wrong: the more members, followers, and subscribers you gain, the faster your small empire will grow! I value every follower individually because I know they will have at least one other person join if I do. It gets more difficult to show each follower attention as you scale up, so it’s best to read about how others do it when you get to that point. If you create a game that people love playing, you’ll start to notice that people are coming out of nowhere. This will cause significant growth if you follow the basic principles laid out in this post.
Always remember to treat each member with respect, even in the hard times! If you do, they will always love and respect you back. It may seem daunting to grow 10x larger than you are now but I guarantee that it will occur faster than you expect. My next goal is to create a game that hits a minimum of 100,000,000 visits and it seems unattainable, but I remember 10,000 visits feeling like a crazy goal starting out.
I wish you the best in your pursuit of creating a passionate community and leveraging it to grow at an insane pace! The only thing that separates those who make it from those who don’t, is that those who don’t reach their goals quit. Things always get harder just before reaching a breakthrough so keep going and you’ll be surprised by the results!
