As Roblox expands worldwide and developers form teams and companies around increasingly-profitable ventures, comparisons to the “real” video game industry become inevitable. The most striking comparison to me is the role of designers in the creation of a game. Roblox has allowed individual amateur developers to create projects that rake in millions of dollars and billions of play sessions. It’s a great equalizer that eliminates the need for many of the roles you see in traditional game studios: investors, executives, accountants, businessmen, and, in the eyes of many, designers. However, the lack of thoughtful design and the stigma against designer-types has been the fundamental flaw leading to the inevitable failure of projects from countless Accelerator/Incubator teams and studios as big as Red Manta.

It is because of this widespread dimissal of designer-types and ignorance around thoughtful design that the games on the front page of Roblox are so simple. It’s not because “that’s what players want” or that “Roblox’s audience is primarily small children who cannot handle more complicated games.” The downright contempt of kids’ problem-solving skills in games is a can of worms for another article. It’s because the design of simpler games is a lot harder to mess up. The fewer moving pieces, the easier it is to make something that actually works, by pure dumb luck or some sense of intuition.

In the wider games industry, studios have entire departments of people responsible for building the mechanic design of their games. It isn’t a gut feeling or a random call. It’s a carefully planned out and peer-reviewed approach to creating a game starting from before any code or assets are created and followed up all the way to release. In the rejection of the traditional industry studio, designers have become a tragic casualty.

The mainstream game industry is by no means an ideal template for Roblox studios. It’s definitely bloated and headed for a big adjustment, crash of 1983-style. We see publishers like Activision giving huge bonuses to their executives while simultaneously laying off huge chunks of their development staff. I think that these recent layoffs are a canary in the coal mine for the industry as a whole. But let’s get back to Roblox.

Developers look at this inefficient model of the biggest studios making the most mainstream games, and then they look at Asimo and Badcc who’ve made millions of dollars entirely by themselves. In this kind of atmosphere, it makes sense to throw out any roles that aren’t seen as directly contributing to the project.

All of this has created an environment in which it is impossible to be primarily a game designer, rather than an adept builder or scripter with some design intuition. This spits in the face of the idea of specialization! People have different talents, and a small percent of the population is insanely adept at very specialized tasks. How unlikely are you to find someone who is both incredibly talented at programming and also has the type of mind that can design an intricate and fun game before the project even starts, down to the finest details?

Throughout my two internships at Roblox, I’ve seen over 30 teams present their ideas for a new game and then try to make it a reality. Teams with insanely talented scripters and builders. Teams with proven developers. However, the results are almost always the same. They come in with vague ideas and try to piece together cool mechanics. They want to make something more complicated than the background noise of the front page, but they don’t have any direction or details planned out. Pretty much all of them fail.

Then there are the big splashes. I’m going to use Red Manta as an example here. I have the deepest respect for the founders of this studio, but if a team led by veteran developers with massive funding and incredible talent can fail so catastrophically, there is certainly a lesson to be learned. By looking at public salary offerings, as well as how many people worked on the project and for how long, it can be extrapolated that Red Manta spent somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 on salaries for Pirate’s Life, a game that flopped on launch. Looking at Pirate’s Life, you see incredible polish, beautiful worlds, awesome tools and mechanics. What you don’t see is an overarching design connecting everything together.

It isn’t luck that makes a game successful. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be. To the big studios headed by proven devs throwing tons of money on their projects and to the aspiring developers looking to form amateur teams: realize that the mechanic design of your game is just as important as the scripting and building and art and polish, if not more. Realize that being able to design an intricate project and see that design to completion is a unique skill, just like being able to lead a company, script impressive mechanics or build mind-blowing worlds. If we are to create more complicated and fulfilling experiences, there must be a fundamental shift in how all of us view game design and designers.

There are people out there who are insanely good at putting together the abstract ideas and planning required to make a complicated project, but that are not veteran builders or scripters. It’s time to start recognizing and promoting those individuals with the right specialization to make games fun before they’re even released. It’s time to start looking at thoughtful and intricate design of gameplay as its own craft, crucial to the success of a large project.

There is a huge demand for well-designed games on Roblox that are more than just Skinner Boxes or “social experiences”, and there is an increasing audience and monetary incentive to develop on this platform. If Roblox teams don’t step up to the plate, someone else will.