To start with, this title would have been "s&box's communication barrier and how it impacts player retention", but the thread title field doesn't allow for that much text. Common and reasonable decision, right, but it's also a sort of ironic symbol of what I'm about to discuss here.
If you care, no AI was used while writing this post.
If you care, no AI was used while writing this post.
The problem
The general concept I want to discuss is that s&box is reasonably good at facilitating the first interaction between a player and a game, but very poor at facilitating the second. In other words, s&box provides a good set of tools to acquire players, but almost none of the needed tools to turn them into an audience.
Why this matters
As a game developer, one of, if not the most impactful influences on your game's success is consistent, repeated feedback. This inherently demands player retention. Clearly, without players, you cannot get feedback. The problem developers on the platform face currently is that s&box offers too few tools to facilitate these needs, instead needing to rely on social media, like the subreddit, discord or other places. In some ways, the platform actively bars us from being able to reach out to players in the ways that we need and/or want to in order to maintain interest and improve on the initial vision for a game. This is maybe the most direct impact on the platform's overall player retention.
The circular ecosystem
It feels obvious to say out loud (and it is, but it's worth saying): If s&box can't retain players or pique their interest, everything inside of it fails. Interest in s&box implies that the games available on it are capable of interesting and retaining players. What that means, cyclically: if s&box manages to retain interest and some semblance of players but the games on the platform are not capable of also doing that, then s&box fails in the end as a platform and can only be useful for prospective developers as an engine.
However, and this is also cyclical: prospective developers need incentive to make their game on the platform too, and the excellent set of tools the engine offers are ultimately not enough for most. Exporting to steam is well & good, but how are we funding the engine and its use if the platform decays? There are many ways to do so, but none of them were the original goal for this thing or "what was promised".
I think I can speak generally for the community and, likely, Facepunch to some degree when I say that nobody is here for the platform because they're excited about clones, AI slop and uninventive rehashes of existing concepts endlessly. That's coming from the guy who has been working on TTT for the last 9 months. I love that project, but mostly we all want to make something we're proud of, something uniquely ours or that serves as inspiration or a tool to create for others. The issue is that we can make something we're proud of outside of s&box, with different and equally capable engines available for free and may even be able to make a living off of it if we're a little clever and lucky. The current instability of the platform and general lack of morale surrounding it and its prospects is a challenge in its own right.
I bring this all up to say: If we want to get the ball rolling again, it isn't really a "wait for Facepunch to do something". Obviously, support is required and this post suggests what that should be, but ultimately I don't think the long-term intent for s&box is to have FP supplement its playerbase endlessly with games they themselves develop for it. If something is going to change in the future, it must be, in no small part, the platform's active developers retaining their own players, with more tools to do so offered by the platform.
However, and this is also cyclical: prospective developers need incentive to make their game on the platform too, and the excellent set of tools the engine offers are ultimately not enough for most. Exporting to steam is well & good, but how are we funding the engine and its use if the platform decays? There are many ways to do so, but none of them were the original goal for this thing or "what was promised".
I think I can speak generally for the community and, likely, Facepunch to some degree when I say that nobody is here for the platform because they're excited about clones, AI slop and uninventive rehashes of existing concepts endlessly. That's coming from the guy who has been working on TTT for the last 9 months. I love that project, but mostly we all want to make something we're proud of, something uniquely ours or that serves as inspiration or a tool to create for others. The issue is that we can make something we're proud of outside of s&box, with different and equally capable engines available for free and may even be able to make a living off of it if we're a little clever and lucky. The current instability of the platform and general lack of morale surrounding it and its prospects is a challenge in its own right.
I bring this all up to say: If we want to get the ball rolling again, it isn't really a "wait for Facepunch to do something". Obviously, support is required and this post suggests what that should be, but ultimately I don't think the long-term intent for s&box is to have FP supplement its playerbase endlessly with games they themselves develop for it. If something is going to change in the future, it must be, in no small part, the platform's active developers retaining their own players, with more tools to do so offered by the platform.
Why players (not developers) play s&box
So, what DOES keep people interested, besides obvious hand-wave answers like games being good?
Particularly in the early days of platforms designed like ours, a reason to launch the game is to discover some cool and unique small projects, play an assortment of them for 15-20 minutes a piece, then move on. This is fun, we've all done it, it's part of the charm. It will continue to be a draw forever, but it isn't the long-term incentive for people to come back to s&box.
For a new player opening s&box, they're here to do that, or try and find a game they like playing and interact with its community to some degree or another. However, once the "honeymoon" phase is over and the player found a game they like playing and will have continued interest in, their reason to open the platform shifts instead to returning to that specific title, as long as their interest in it remains.
As the successful platforms like s&box (Roblox, or even Fortnite and Minecraft are examples of this concept at work) mature over time, they start looking like an assortment of micro-communities oriented around specific games that their individual players enjoy. Each of those communities ranging from tiny to enormous all coexist under the same banner of "Hey, here's something to do" while barely knowing or caring about what the other is doing. There's one other platform that behaved like this, too... I'll mention that one in a bit.
In that abstract sense, s&box only needs to be concerned, game discovery-wise, for "new" players. For all intents and purposes, anyone opening the platform with intent to browse for something different than the last time can be served identically to a new player. No real pressing concerns there. What is not yet fully facilitated is the returning player with a specific game of interest as their incentive to return to s&box.
Particularly in the early days of platforms designed like ours, a reason to launch the game is to discover some cool and unique small projects, play an assortment of them for 15-20 minutes a piece, then move on. This is fun, we've all done it, it's part of the charm. It will continue to be a draw forever, but it isn't the long-term incentive for people to come back to s&box.
For a new player opening s&box, they're here to do that, or try and find a game they like playing and interact with its community to some degree or another. However, once the "honeymoon" phase is over and the player found a game they like playing and will have continued interest in, their reason to open the platform shifts instead to returning to that specific title, as long as their interest in it remains.
As the successful platforms like s&box (Roblox, or even Fortnite and Minecraft are examples of this concept at work) mature over time, they start looking like an assortment of micro-communities oriented around specific games that their individual players enjoy. Each of those communities ranging from tiny to enormous all coexist under the same banner of "Hey, here's something to do" while barely knowing or caring about what the other is doing. There's one other platform that behaved like this, too... I'll mention that one in a bit.
In that abstract sense, s&box only needs to be concerned, game discovery-wise, for "new" players. For all intents and purposes, anyone opening the platform with intent to browse for something different than the last time can be served identically to a new player. No real pressing concerns there. What is not yet fully facilitated is the returning player with a specific game of interest as their incentive to return to s&box.
Genre discrepancies
If you've been around and paid any attention to social media like the subreddit or discord for s&box, you've probably seen a fair bit of hate or jealousy for games like Mow the Lawn, various idle clickers, "AI slop" (and actual AI slop) and other games that are seeing some amount of success, whereas the perceived "quality" titles that exist on s&box can't hold onto theirs.
To sum up what people are frustrated about but I haven't seen explicitly stated, games that can be engaged with "asynchronously" and at the player's convenience are structurally advantaged on a (low population) platform like this because they are able to foster and coordinate a community more effectively.
What success ends up looking like in this setting is that many of the popular games on the platform allow for solo play but offer a sense of status, belonging and progression amongst the wider collective audience for that game. Games that win have optional "at your convenience" multiplayer elements to them like leaderboards, global chat and so on. It checks all the boxes for long-term player incentive, because you can play alone and still have the sense of participating in a community from that solo progress.
This isn't the problem. Too frequently I see people blaming these types of games, then, widely, s&box is perceived as incentivizing games that only want a quick buck, are commonly considered to be low effort, greedy, or whatever. The reality of this dynamic is more along the lines of "They're playing to the strengths of the platforms, game genres that do not do so inherently cannot maintain their players long-term without the right tools available".
In a word, it's about coordination. Those genres have no difficulty providing a multiplayer experience because they are designed to not need any coordination to experience it.
Games that are exclusively single player are, in the grand scheme of the s&box player demographic, offering the opposite of what someone opens up s&box to experience (as discussed earlier). There is no coordination required, but often, people just aren't seeking that kind of experience. Games that need multiple players in order to be played or at least enjoyed to the fullest are catering to the general demographic, but suffer from a much higher barrier to entry. If nobody is currently playing a game, it demands a VERY motivated player to want to join, wait in the game alone until others finally arrive (if they EVER do), then finally get the experience they're looking for. It's almost an insult to their time to have opened s&box at all if the game they're hoping to play is also asking them to organize enough people to play it first.
There are LOADS of multiplayer games on the platform that need a bare minimum of 2, but ideally more players to really enjoy them. Not every game can succeed, obviously, but the point here is that plenty of these titles don't actually have a problem of interest, the problem is with their ability to coordinate players. Let's say 80-100 people click on your game in a day or otherwise have some amount of interest in playing it... But none of them get on to play at the same time, because nobody is currently playing. In theory a game could have enough latent demand to keep a healthy lobby going all night, but it never happens because nobody takes that first step. The same might be said about s&box in general, too.
Instead, getting enough players on at once to make a lobby happen requires external platforms like discord, and now we're asking you to be in our discord as a prerequisite to enjoy our game, get a notification role, whatever... It's just not ideal, it makes keeping a player's interest twice as challenging. When is the last time you watched a YouTube video and actually liked and subscribed, let alone click on their Patreon or their steam page or whatever to wishlist or donate?
In effect, the need for these other platforms is like s&box exporting its own retention structure. The relationship between player, developer and game just gets sent to some 3rd party and all the connective... tissue, along with any sort of capability to retain those players is left up to Discord or whatever it might be. We should not be doing that!
To sum up what people are frustrated about but I haven't seen explicitly stated, games that can be engaged with "asynchronously" and at the player's convenience are structurally advantaged on a (low population) platform like this because they are able to foster and coordinate a community more effectively.
What success ends up looking like in this setting is that many of the popular games on the platform allow for solo play but offer a sense of status, belonging and progression amongst the wider collective audience for that game. Games that win have optional "at your convenience" multiplayer elements to them like leaderboards, global chat and so on. It checks all the boxes for long-term player incentive, because you can play alone and still have the sense of participating in a community from that solo progress.
This isn't the problem. Too frequently I see people blaming these types of games, then, widely, s&box is perceived as incentivizing games that only want a quick buck, are commonly considered to be low effort, greedy, or whatever. The reality of this dynamic is more along the lines of "They're playing to the strengths of the platforms, game genres that do not do so inherently cannot maintain their players long-term without the right tools available".
In a word, it's about coordination. Those genres have no difficulty providing a multiplayer experience because they are designed to not need any coordination to experience it.
Games that are exclusively single player are, in the grand scheme of the s&box player demographic, offering the opposite of what someone opens up s&box to experience (as discussed earlier). There is no coordination required, but often, people just aren't seeking that kind of experience. Games that need multiple players in order to be played or at least enjoyed to the fullest are catering to the general demographic, but suffer from a much higher barrier to entry. If nobody is currently playing a game, it demands a VERY motivated player to want to join, wait in the game alone until others finally arrive (if they EVER do), then finally get the experience they're looking for. It's almost an insult to their time to have opened s&box at all if the game they're hoping to play is also asking them to organize enough people to play it first.
There are LOADS of multiplayer games on the platform that need a bare minimum of 2, but ideally more players to really enjoy them. Not every game can succeed, obviously, but the point here is that plenty of these titles don't actually have a problem of interest, the problem is with their ability to coordinate players. Let's say 80-100 people click on your game in a day or otherwise have some amount of interest in playing it... But none of them get on to play at the same time, because nobody is currently playing. In theory a game could have enough latent demand to keep a healthy lobby going all night, but it never happens because nobody takes that first step. The same might be said about s&box in general, too.
Instead, getting enough players on at once to make a lobby happen requires external platforms like discord, and now we're asking you to be in our discord as a prerequisite to enjoy our game, get a notification role, whatever... It's just not ideal, it makes keeping a player's interest twice as challenging. When is the last time you watched a YouTube video and actually liked and subscribed, let alone click on their Patreon or their steam page or whatever to wishlist or donate?
In effect, the need for these other platforms is like s&box exporting its own retention structure. The relationship between player, developer and game just gets sent to some 3rd party and all the connective... tissue, along with any sort of capability to retain those players is left up to Discord or whatever it might be. We should not be doing that!
The solution
Right now, s&box is framed and optimized around packages. Browse, launch, rate, favorite packages. This is super cool actually, although it feels like I never see it discussed. The term in itself speaks directly to how much the platform is currently offering developers... But not so much players. It's sort of transactional, even... Discover, launch, play, leave. That's cool, as mentioned before, but it's not a winning long-term strategy.
What developers need to succeed is infrastructure to build and coordinate their community with.
Community infrastructure bridges that enormous gap I discussed above. I know this horse is dead and forgive me for bringing it up for the millionth time, but it's an important point. GMod's longevity came, enormously, from persistent communities surrounding gamemodes and even just specific servers within that gamemode. It also surrounded other dynamics and communities of interest like the workshop, forums, and specific creators. Niches within niches. s&box is already naturally split this way too, even among developers, based on what they're working on or what they're interested in.
We all know that s&box is NOT GMod 2 functionally. You might want it to be or not want it to be, it doesn't really matter. The point is the ecosystem, for players that aren't also developers, is serving a nearly identical demographic. I don't mean people who like GMod or want GMod 2 or whatever someone's vision for the platform might be, I just mean people who are looking for interesting games with interesting communities to interact with. s&box has excellent architecture built up for publishing and creating software, but it's lacking the tools to help convince people using that software to become part of a durable audience. The next steps towards a thriving platform are all going to be about that end of the deal.
What developers need to succeed is infrastructure to build and coordinate their community with.
Community infrastructure bridges that enormous gap I discussed above. I know this horse is dead and forgive me for bringing it up for the millionth time, but it's an important point. GMod's longevity came, enormously, from persistent communities surrounding gamemodes and even just specific servers within that gamemode. It also surrounded other dynamics and communities of interest like the workshop, forums, and specific creators. Niches within niches. s&box is already naturally split this way too, even among developers, based on what they're working on or what they're interested in.
We all know that s&box is NOT GMod 2 functionally. You might want it to be or not want it to be, it doesn't really matter. The point is the ecosystem, for players that aren't also developers, is serving a nearly identical demographic. I don't mean people who like GMod or want GMod 2 or whatever someone's vision for the platform might be, I just mean people who are looking for interesting games with interesting communities to interact with. s&box has excellent architecture built up for publishing and creating software, but it's lacking the tools to help convince people using that software to become part of a durable audience. The next steps towards a thriving platform are all going to be about that end of the deal.
Levelling the playing field
As the title of this post suggests, I think the biggest barrier is communication. What we need is to be able to build communication infrastructure that helps turn the latent population's interest into concurrent population.
Basically, there are 3 relationships that need to be facilitated to keep the gears greased: The player and the game, the player and other players and finally, the developer and their game's players. That's the focus of this post, so I've listed some options to explore that I think would be helpful:
Basically, there are 3 relationships that need to be facilitated to keep the gears greased: The player and the game, the player and other players and finally, the developer and their game's players. That's the focus of this post, so I've listed some options to explore that I think would be helpful:
- Favoriting a game, optionally, can act as a subscription to game announcements, or a "follow" feature
- Potentially exposing some concept of "players who follow this game" as a metric and/or lightweight community infrastructure as opposed to solely relying on external platforms like discord
- An "event system" where developers can create platform-native events with a scheduled date and time, where followers can RSVP and get a notification (This feels like it'd slot in or piggyback well off of the planned game jam functionality, which seems like it'd be designed very similarly structurally). Could do something cute too, like a platform-wide event viewer to see what's happening right now and what's planned for an assortment of different games
- Lightweight update/news feed on the home screen for games the player chose to follow, personalizing the activity feed to some degree or potentially replacing or redesigning it around these and current events
- Granular notifications as options for developers and for players. Updates, event/playtest, major release or so on, and players could similarly choose what to focus on, to see and what not to see on their activity feed
- Platform native feedback mechanisms of some kind. The review popup is probably already enough here, but maybe a link to a game's discussion thread on the forums the developer decides they would like to be there could facilitate more discussion & feedback
These are exciting and powerful opportunities, I think, but they're also dangerous waters to be treading. I'm sure some of the potential landmines are popping into your head as you read this, so let's cover those, too.
Striking the balance
There are some bright red flags about offering tools like this. Devs being given the chance to spam everyone who ever launched their game with annoying promotional shit is the last thing anyone wants to deal with.
- Everything should generally be opt-in. Duh! Maybe some small amount of communication, platform-automated or manually from the developer could make the assumption of interest based on metrics like hours of play or favoriting the game (Like the current main menu "Continue Playing" card, for example) but generally this has to not be annoying. Less dev-controlled mailing list, more player-controlled sub feed.
- More community infrastructure != "increase how much a dev can access players". What it means is increasing the platform's ability to mediate communication between a developer and players, not... you know, spam or other harmful and irritating stuff. Most of the communication we need isn't direct communication, like the frequently complained about inability to reply to reviews. That really isn't necessary.
- It's also not personal or direct connection to players. Devs don't have to know exactly who is following their game in a system like that, more just... how many, or at the most, a set of genre interest metrics or something... But probably not even that.
Why this makes things better for everyone
If an individual game catches a player's interest, they would return to the platform so long as that game has enough reach to be able to inform them on entry. "Hey, there's a new event going on right now" or "Hey, we have a playtest scheduled at this time", so on and so forth. If each individual niche is provided the tools to be capable of retaining their players, the platform as a whole benefits simply via them existing in the ecosystem for a consistent period of time. We're halfway there already with the platform-wide cosmetics that games can choose to adopt. "Oh shit, I can wear that while I play this?"
This also improves the question I have CONSTANTLY seen asked, whether directly or indirectly: "How does Facepunch get 10k people to open s&box?" Instead of all the onus on them, it starts looking like "How can 500 different developers each give 10-20 people a reason to get on s&box?". Players don't have to be in love with s&box itself as the singular entity, maybe they're just here for Marble Racer or whatever. It doesn't matter.
I also think these skills are just generally required for a team or solo dev to hack it in the game industry, anyway, so it's also serving developers in that way.
...I think that's it. I'm hoping the team at Facepunch can read this & take it to heart, because I think it's the most important direction to be making progress on for the longterm viability of s&box as a platform. Let me know what you think!
This also improves the question I have CONSTANTLY seen asked, whether directly or indirectly: "How does Facepunch get 10k people to open s&box?" Instead of all the onus on them, it starts looking like "How can 500 different developers each give 10-20 people a reason to get on s&box?". Players don't have to be in love with s&box itself as the singular entity, maybe they're just here for Marble Racer or whatever. It doesn't matter.
I also think these skills are just generally required for a team or solo dev to hack it in the game industry, anyway, so it's also serving developers in that way.
...I think that's it. I'm hoping the team at Facepunch can read this & take it to heart, because I think it's the most important direction to be making progress on for the longterm viability of s&box as a platform. Let me know what you think!
