We have a really big announcement!
But before we get to that, everyone wants to know when RB Battles Season 3 is going to be and the truth is.. so do we. We haven't been keeping some top secret release date from you all, we have just been doing our best to keep things moving along as fast as possible every single day with the goal of just launching as soon as we possibly can, and when we receive a bunch of messages asking when Season 3 will be, we're left with the tough decision of ignoring it or making an estimate.. The problem is there's just too many dependencies, people to rely on, and room for error during the process of organizing and preparing the event for any of our estimates to truly be accurate. We've set internal deadlines for our team and everyone involved on multiple occasions in early 2021 before we even announced anything to you all and various things just keep setting it back further and further.
Why are there delays?
Just to put things into context, here are some of the details of the set backs so you all can fully understand why these delays are happening.
Relying on a Lot of People
The biggest thing that has delayed RB Battles season 3 is the fact that (due to the nature of how the event is structured) there happens to be a lot of dependencies and reliance on various different people to do their part. If something doesn't happen in a timely manner, it often puts a hold on everyone and everything else that is depending on that thing being completed before they can proceed. Mostly due to everything going on in the world right now, organizing all of the different people participating/collaborating for season 3 has been extra difficult the past year. On multiple occasions we were sure all of the participating games and competitors on the bracket were finalized and we were just waiting for things to take shape and then something happened last minute that required us to have to delay recordings and/or find replacements. Even just having something like this happen once delays everything by multiple months at a time for everyone involved. Most events can generally just move forward with the event even if a few of the people participating fall through, but unfortunately the way we do things for RB Battles, we can't really get away with moving forward with the event if we have missing participating games or missing competitors. Because of this, when things don't go quite as planned with either a game integration or a competitor, we either need to keep waiting/trying to make it work or find replacements and start all over, and we've been doing a lot of both of those things for the past year and a half. To be completely honest, everyone has been amazing to work with and mostly everyone has been very prompt with their deliverables and scheduling. We feel really bad about it because the people who are prompt have essentially just been waiting around for many months for everything else to be ready, only for us to tell them over and over that things are still not ready. The reality is that although literally everyone has been amazing to work with, a few of the devs ran into snags with development scope for their integration (which is very common, it just happens sometimes) and a few of the YouTubers ran into issues with scheduling. In a few instances, it resulted in some of the devs and YouTubers fully dropping out and leaving spots that need to be re-filled and there's really not much we can do about these things happening, it's just how things go sometimes. Our only option is to just find replacements and keep production moving as best as we can. It's almost hard to believe how smoothly everything just fell into place with season 1 and season 2 considering how much of a struggle season 3 has been, but the good news is things are starting to move along and we're finally beginning to make some good progress! At the end of the day, in our opinion our favorite part of doing this whole event is how community driven it is with all of the various developers and Star Creators that participate and take it to the next level. We feel this community aspect is one of, if not the most valuable aspect to the entire event, and because of this we strongly believe it's important to not give up on it, no matter how much it tends to delays things.
Ambitious Ideas, Limited Funding, & Lack of Resources
Due to the fact that we had so many delays already on the collaboration side, we decided to take the extra time as an opportunity to put extra effort into our development side of the event. We ended up committing to making this event even cooler than we originally planned and as a result we expanded our scope further than we could have ever imagined.. We're working on some seriously awesome stuff for the RB Battles game as well as all of the "live event" related stuff. With that said, the truth is even though we've been working on the development side of things for this every single day, our progress isn't nearly as far along as we had projected and this is largely due to the fact that for some reason a bunch of highly funded studios have been popping up this past year and hiring many of our main devs. When this happens we're left trying to find new devs to take their place which requires a lot of searching for devs (many of which are people who really wanted to work for us but got hired by a studio with irresistible offers before we even got a chance to reply to their application), interviews with the applicants, onboarding calls, and training often times only to have them leave a week later after all of the time we put into getting them situated. This has been a sort of ongoing struggle from the very beginning of the game and caused us a lot of stress over the past couple years because due to devs leaving and having to hire new devs, we've had to pay various devs to rewrite many parts of our game on multiple occasions and that has set us back a lot in terms of time and money. You might think we make a lot of money from this, but believe it or not due to all of the issues we've run into with the game and rewrites, we're very much at a loss right now. We fund all of the development of the game and the event out of pocket and the fact that we had to take our game down to rewrite and remake a lot of things one last time, we actually haven't generated any revenue since Season 2, so every month that passes and every time we are forced to delay, we honestly just go further and further into the negative (we pay all of our devs at the end of each month). On top of that, since the RB Battles Season 2 event was so rushed to release, we didn't have time to implement all of the monetization we had planned by the release of the event, so the revenue generated from that wasn't even all that great. After that event, we committed to making sure we don't miss any major steps (such as monetization) for the next event to hopefully make up for our losses. Don't worry about us though, we're doing fine and we're totally okay with taking a hit until we can launch this event (we just want to put on a really cool event for you all), but at the same time we need to be responsible with our money and we're realizing we really just need to make some moves to start bringing in some passive income now while we continue development to ensure RB Battles events can continue (more info on how we plan to do that in the announcement at the end of this post).
Leakers
I can't believe this is even making it into one of the points of our list, but it needs to be said.. for some reason there has been a huge problem with leaks this year and it has been causing us to jump through hoops to figure out how to be secretive about various things and having to ask all of the participating games to go above and beyond to implement security in weird ways that they're not used to doing which added unneeded development time. This has been getting in the way of various aspects of the project and causing delays in unexpected places. For example, we had to delay a recording an entire month because we had players getting into a game for a recording that was intended to be private. We never expected this to get in the way of things, but it really did and has really set us back in many ways.
Community Suggestions for Launch
We've noticed on Discord and Twitter that many of you have concerns about the fairness of the event if RB Battles Season 3 launched at a time that everyone is in school since there's a possibility that everyone will be racing for exclusive items again while some people are in school. This is a totally valid concern, we hear you, and we totally agree. Because of this, we believe it will be to everyone's benefit (us, our dev team, the integration developers, the competitors, and the community) for us to really just do things right and pick a release date during a time when school isn't in session so everyone can participate fairly and also so everyone involved in creating the event can take a little extra time to polish things up and make all of the hard work and struggling that went into this event worth it. We're just as excited to kick things off as you all are, but we really do believe we're making something special and don't want to rush it if we don't have to! A wise man once said, "A delayed experience is eventually good, but a rushed experience is forever bad" or something like that.
Now for the BIG announcement..
To help fund the game development that we're paying out of pocket (and also to provide some additional earnings for our dev team), we will be occasionally releasing fun small scope Roblox experiences as a way for you all to support us in the meantime. We realized after releasing RoBattle.io that we are totally capable of making fun little games in a very short time without causing too much of a delay on the event development.. so we figured if we set aside a bit of time here and there to release fun little side games, we could actually generate some revenue to help fund the production of RB Battles Season 3 while having some fun in the process! If you want to support the development of RB Battles Season 3 while having some fun playing unique experiences, these games will be posted to the "Fund for Games" group on Roblox! In addition to this, we will also be releasing non-championship RB Battles videos on the Roblox Battles YouTube channel and have some really fun ideas for that as well!
By the way, we are always looking for new developers and once things get back to normal, we plan on really ramping things up with development and our studio. If you're an experienced developer with a particular interest in pushing the limits of what's possible on Roblox and you want to work with us to make the next level of experiences on the Roblox platform, be sure to contact us!
TLDR
We want this event to come out just as bad as you all, but in order for it to go smoothly and be fair for everyone, it's in everyone's best interest for RB Battles Season 3 to launch at a more ideal time of the year.. In the meantime, we're going to release some fun side games to bring in some extra revenue so we don't go broke before the event (that's a joke, we're not gonna go broke). We're extremely passionate about RB Battles and the RB Battles Championship event and we're doing everything we possibly can to make something amazing and memorable for the Roblox community. When we have a better idea of when we are releasing Season 3, we will let you all know!
Stay tuned to our Discord and Twitter for announcements on those "Fund For Games" experiences releasing very soon!
Thank you for the support!
- Hosts
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