Covering Roblox games has shown me that many developers prioritize quantity over quality to keep players’ attention. I often see this with popular games, where it feels as though the developer is worried about losing its audience. And in an attempt to prevent that, they burn themselves out crunching to add new updates weekly. But these aren’t small patches or updates that make a few small tweaks.
Instead, they’re adding large new events or new worlds to explore. Crunch is bad enough on its own, but the overtime these developers are clocking hurts both themselves and their audiences. I’ve seen countless messages from Roblox developers where they’re apologizing for burning out. I can understand the worry about losing their fifteen minutes of fame when a game suddenly blows up and is printing money.
This produces new problems to manage that a small team may not be prepared for. And in some cases creates so much drama that a game crashes and burns, with a company later acquiring it. Which is a whole can of worms when they’re more concerned with monetizing on a platform that already has many predatory practices.
For those who survive going from a couple of thousand concurrent players to hundreds of thousands, the stress is bound to be high. What kills me as a player and journalist covering these games is seeing how grindy they become. It’s a poor solution for handling the constant need to update and entertain.
Instead of focusing on building interesting content, I often see developers release grindy updates. I’ve seen this recently with The Forge, which is disappointing since they have a good concept for a game. For those unfamiliar, it’s an RPG that revolves around mining rocks and fighting enemies to gather materials for smithing. However, each major update adds ores with ridiculously low drop chances and wildly expensive pickaxes.
If you want to make progress to fight new enemies or craft strong gear, you need those rare ores and pickaxes. Which is made worse when you have quests that also rely on acquiring those ores. I won’t argue that The Forge didn’t start with certain insane quests that had you mine hundreds of rocks or slay hundreds of skeletons. But at least those were completable, albeit tedious. Newer ones now rely on what feel like impossible conditions that test your endurance and are just a waste of time.
This isn’t an issue exclusive to The Forge, but it’s a common Roblox problem. By creating grindy content, you’re giving players something to do for hours on end. But it becomes a slog that leads to quitting in search of something better. The one good thing I can say here is that The Forge developers are aware of the situation. They posted a message about attempting to balance it better.
“We will work on the balancing side more with the Forge Testers to eventually make it less grindy and more engaging,” stated by The Forge developer, FireAtacck on Discord.
I’m glad they’re not oblivious, but I still think about other Roblox games with similar problems. While I haven’t kept up with Grow a Garden, I recall its emphasis on the fear of missing out (FOMO) via constant updates. Unlike The Forge, its grindy content is part of a shorter window. You’d have at most two weeks to experience an event and get what you want. This forces you to grind more over a short span while hoping for random conditions to occur.
But the Grow a Garden developers went a step further by making most of their content revolve around gacha. If you were lucky enough to get the right plants with the right mutations, you could get a gacha box. These are usually limited to a two-week or sometimes one-week window. And the chances for certain rewards can be as low as .05%. This is ridiculous to say the least. And that’s not even getting into discussing its microtransactions.
I’m not here to say I have the perfect answer for how Roblox developers should update their games. But it is unfortunate that the current system often leads to burnout for both developers and players. As someone writing Roblox guides, it’s frequently a Sisyphean struggle every time a game updates. I can only imagine how the players feel, especially if they have limited time to play.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.