An open letter to the MYSverse community

Dear MYSversians,

It has been almost a month since we released Sumaya in open beta, and we are grateful for the support you have shown so far. We also want to express our utmost appreciation to the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation for providing crucial support for the project via the Digital Content Grant. Without the backing of both our community and the government of Malaysia, we never would have been able to push Sumaya out after years upon years of delays.

However, I cannot say that the product we have released lives up to our standards, especially given almost 6 months and RM150,000 of government funds. That level of investment is not reflected in the quality of Sumaya in its current state, and I take full responsibility for that.

The reasons are numerous and I have personally conducted various reflections and meetings with the Sumaya project team and the MYSverse Administration. I do not want to list every single thing that went wrong because I don't think that is really what an open letter is for. But there are a few things I want to be upfront about.

Honestly, we underplanned. Six months sounds like a long time on paper, but in practice we treated the first half as the planning phase and the second half as the execution phase, when both of these really needed to be happening together from day one. A lot of the issues we ran into later were the cascading effect of that one early decision.

We also did not cast a wide enough net for talent. To be fair, we were working within certain constraints set by the grant, but I will still be upfront and say that we mostly drew from people we already knew within MYSverse. Everyone involved is technically capable and I want to make that clear, but we did not put the kind of structure around them that a project at this scale actually required. That falls on the management side, which includes me.

As co-founder, the overall responsibility for Sumaya's direction sat with me, and I held back from enforcing standards because I did not want to step on toes. In hindsight, that was a mistake. By the time I did step in, we were already in the final stretch and a lot of things that should have been resolved months earlier had to be sorted out at the eleventh hour. Monetisation, marketing and the first-time user experience all got pushed to the last few weeks of the project, which is not how any of those things should have been handled.

I also want to be honest about something larger than Sumaya, because I think the community deserves that honesty. Development across MYSverse as a whole has slowed down considerably over the past year. Bandaraya, Lebuhraya and our other titles have not been getting the consistent updates they should have. The people on our team do still care about this stuff, and I want to make that clear. The issue is that our developer structure as it currently exists just does not make consistent contribution easy or rewarding. Most of our developers are juggling studies, full-time jobs and other commitments, and the framework we built around them was honestly not designed to hold up against that kind of reality. The Sumaya grant brought this issue into focus. It did not create it.

This is why we are starting on a set of Developer Team Reforms over the coming weeks. The first step has already been taken with the change in our Head Developer's role, which Robz has communicated separately. More changes will follow, including how we recognise active contributors, how we onboard new talent and how we make a respectful path for members who used to contribute but cannot anymore.

I want to be upfront that none of this is going to be quick. We expect the reforms to take months, not weeks, before they actually start to show results, and I would rather take the time to do this properly than rush something out for the sake of looking productive.

For Sumaya specifically, we have committed internally to a fuller V1 release before Merdeka. That release will include a meaningful map expansion, a monetisation layer that goes beyond what we currently have, and most importantly, fixes to the discoverability and first-time experience issues that have held the game back since launch. We are also putting together a smaller and more focused team to deliver on that.

I want to be careful not to turn this letter into another list of new promises. We have published roadmaps before that we did not deliver on, and I do not particularly want to add to that pile. What I will say is this. We know where we have fallen short, we know what needs to change, and we are working on it. Whether or not you can see it from the outside, things are moving.

We will prove this to you slowly and quietly. With updates that actually ship, and with games that improve over time. Talk is cheap, and we know we have done plenty of that over the years.

And honestly, if you feel the pull to try other experiences in the meantime, don't feel guilty about it. There is a lot of creativity in the Malaysian Roblox community outside of MYSverse, and more of it deserves recognition than it currently gets. By the time you come back to us, we want it to be worth the wait.

Thank you for sticking with us this far. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we know it.

~ Yan