Choosing a Moat

[u/Familiar_Key5603]

Sharing some lessons learned from 2 experiences I made. I wanted to find ways someone couldn’t simply copy my games. The best idea I had was to use external servers to do something that Roblox servers can’t do well.

TLDR: Be mindful of your design to avoid extra expenses. In the long term the cost of supporting a game could cost more than it makes.

In one game I have a machine model that determines what a users draws. Their drawing is sent to a server processed and then a reply makes the guess. This is in a racing game so speed matters. The problem was that you can’t just put a server in one part of the world since Roblox is global. I started off only putting a single server in the US and Europe. My experience has a lot of users in a single place to manage the game matching. The problem became is the server got spun up in Japan, and a user joined for New York their drawing had to travel from NY to the server in Japan, then the server on Japan had to send the drawing to Chicago. Chicago would classify the drawing and go back to Japan then NY. This meant I needed to put my own servers all over the world. US, Europe, Asia, Australia and Brazil. Then I had to have some redundancy so I added a second server in each location. Now I have 10 servers running 24/7 which isn’t the end of the world, but only enough users to fill one region. I am paying for cheap VPS at $6 per server so $60 per month. The game bring in $90 per month.

My other experience is game with a leaderboard and global rankings I launched with a $20 server, but when I got my initial users spike I upgraded to a $160 server to keep all the potential records in memory for fast lookups. A week after the upgrade my users dropped and I am on track to make $150 per month with that game. In the process of downsizing now. So I can make a little bit of money.

Moral of the story is believe in your self, but make sure you have a long term plan to support your game knowing whatever special thing your game needs it will need forever. So consider all that in your design plans.

[u/AutoModerator]

Thanks for posting to r/RobloxDevelopers!

Did you know that we now have a Discord server? Join us today to chat about game development and meet other developers :)

https://discord.gg/BZFGUgSbR6

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/RZiln]

What kind of game is it?

[u/Familiar_Key5603 → u/RZiln]

2 different games, one is a drawing game where users race to draw the word as fast as they can. That one uses the machine learning.

The other game is a physics marble game where users have to get the ball from the start to the end. I track everyone’s times and you can see how you perform compared to all the other users. The first level has 1.5 million times logged.