Roblox Connect: Linking friends together
Roblox's bid for more engagement among older users, with quite a few flaws in its execution
Laugh now, but Roblox Connect has the potential to be the catalyst for social experiences on Roblox, despite being currently let down by its poor implementation.
It’s not the sheet of wallpaper, lit up by cosmic lights which you see when you first enter the experience, as you open up the phonebook to dial a friend to wake them up from their non-existent sleep. It’s not the sound of the user interface as you scroll through the rolodex, or the ear-piercing ringtone that you hear whilst waiting for someone to pick up.
It’s that you can make one-on-one voice calls to others on Roblox.
Sure, the younger you are, the less likely you are to enjoy a phone call, presumably between a business regarding an appointment or a job application. Whilst David Baszucki may envision Roblox being used for those purposes one day, it’s more likely that Connect and other experiences like it wouldn’t be used for serious negotiations but instead for pleasure instead - and Connect nails this well, if you like to only chat with others in a one-by-one setting and not in a group, which is an unusual move to make.
There are 2 environments where a call can take place, a beach resort on an island and a forest, with each environment containing 3 locations each demonstrating how the dynamics of communication can change with: a communal gathering space (Campfire & Bonfire), a boxed-off space (Dock & Cabana) and a showcase space (Waterfall & Beach). In each space, there is a boombox which plays royalty-free chill music on repeat. In the Campfire space, there are also marshmallows on sticks which you frustratingly can’t drop. Asides from that particular pain point, the places are crafted in a realistic art-style, seen before in other Roblox showcases to promote its use on the platform. Once seen as impressive, it is nowadays much more normalised and far less spectacular.
Whilst Voice Chat is required to use Connect (you will not be able to start or take calls if it isn’t enabled), it can be turned off within Connect itself, although do note that Roblox has turned off the ability to chat with text, with the only forms of communication allowed being through voice, facial animation and through emotes through the Emotes bar (i.e. no emotes from the Marketplace). There are three types of camera modes which you can view the other person through: the default picture-in-picture mode typical of other communication applications such as Discord and Microsoft Teams intended for newbies to the Roblox platform, Freeplay which provides the default Roblox camera experience and Cinematic, which pans around the camera such that both players are in frame at the same time. During my time using Connect, I primarily used the latter two options as I wasn’t using facial animations or voice chat, which would have made Picture in Picture much less natural, with Freeplay being more familiar and Cinematic being a neat novelty of a camera mode. However, Roblox purportedly tracks device orientation on devices with accelerometers (which I didn’t get to use), using it to create a depth effect which may make it more appealing.
So why does Connect exist? The fastest growing demographic on Roblox are those 17 and over - adults, as well as those who will soon become adults. These comprise 41% of daily active users (as revealed in this year’s Investors Day), a number that would be impossible to think of even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Roblox hit rates of astronomical growth. What we could imagine back then was a shift by Roblox to move from being a platform purely catering to games to one which catered to the diversity of social experiences on the platform. Connect not only serves as a starting experience for adults unfamiliar to Roblox as a platform but do know how to use Zoom or Skype, using it merely as a means to communicate with others; but it also acts as a neutral starting ground which appeals to a wide range of this 17+ audience, for a new type of social experience to develop off of - with Roblox encouraging this by open sourcing Connect.
That doesn’t really seem to be the case here, however. The starter place seems unwieldy to work with, with scripts chained to other scripts either chained to bulky UI frameworks or to functions interacting with components on Roblox’s end which you can’t playtest within Studio, with other places in the experience being large inaccessible to Studio unless you know how to make HTTP requests to Roblox (or get an extension to do that for you). The new functions in SocialService pinning Connect are also impossible to debug, with any implementation error merely throwing a “Sorry” dialog box, with no errors to note down, either in the modal itself or within the Console.
For Connect and similar experiences to succeed, it needs more support from Roblox itself. Despite the experience maintaining a healthy number of players and a like-to-dislike ratio on-par with most popular experiences on the platform, it isn’t well spotlighted anywhere else other than the Developer Forum and there isn’t any sort of experience sort to speak of, unlike with educational experiences or currently with subscriptions. Bugs with the calling feature were also noticeable, with banned users receiving calls from Roblox that they were unable to pick up.
It just feels like there could have been more to Connect than what it was hyped up to be, and for that, we’re happy that it exists but also disappointed because it could have been so much more.