Hey guys, I’m seeing a lot of recruitment posts continuously get taken off topic or loses its main focus because of the constant flame on the prices offered. Time after time, even though the post has bigger issues, like a lack of information on the game, the lack of a sufficient portfolio from the original poster, and even a lack of what’s being looked for in a team, and their responsibilities to the game.
I understand that the community has a special way that we handle posts like these. Like offering some sort of payment up front and a revenue percentage. I’d like to go through the difference between Joining a team and being a freelance.
Freelancing
Being a freelance means that you were paid to create a particular asset or assets. These transactions usually happen upfront with a 50% security deposit, and then when the job is complete a final 50% payment before the assets are released. Upon which the transaction is complete, and there is no revenue percentage.Revenue Percentage
A revenue percentage is pretty much a royalty. The things Roblox likes to hand out to games in the Stars Program when for an example, a toy is purchased. Maybe somewhere along the line of accepting upfront payments in order to prevent scams we lost sight of what was most important and started scamming the actual developers of games for a royalty.In hindsight, to accept the pay of a freelance and request a royalty is not equal to joining a team. You are not part of a team. You are a contractor, you are a freelancer, you are someone brought into the team for a temporary term in order to speed up the process of development. By no means at all are you part of the team itself. However you should still be given the credit you are due. (Credit being a mention in the credits of the game, and payments outlined in the freelance transaction)
Being part of the team
To join the team, a team at all on Roblox. I'd call it the same as joining a Studio as an employee. You work together to build a game, and considering and seriously doubting anyone of a novice nature would be able to supply payroll. The revenue of the game at that point of time would be split. Keeping in mind that the game itself still needs **some** of its revenue in order to keep afloat in its own development to cover the cost of Roblox's steep transactions (such as audio), or even reaching out to off platform artists to better increase the quality where that quality is unable to be reproduced within the team itself.I think this is a grave issue, there must be a better way to either handle this, or articulate this without flaming a post with nothing but monetization and payment questions that causes the entire post to lose its meaning. Roblox should rectify the situation by posting Guidelines to better help developers post adequate recruitment posts. Where does Roblox stand in the matter and what do they think the economy of team developers should be? At his point if individual devs aren’t being scammed in a dev team, than individual devs are scamming dev teams.
It’s not meant to be this way, it just happened to end up this way. Let’s focus more on the important questions. Like is this a cool idea? Is this something great that you’d want to be a part of? Often times the finished product of a game is nothing like you set it out to be. It’s better.