As a Roblox developer, money strain is currently too hard on developers or studios just starting out or making “American Middle Class” incomes. More developers earning a “stable” middle class income means more potential for high quality hit games coming out and increased competition.
Depending on the month, studio or individual incomes could often shift from 50% to 200% of a ‘long term average’. It could be argued this is to be expected in the nature of the games industry, but the DevEx tiers should not be the cause of this dramatic swing, the developer’s game should be as much as possible.
The nature of these dramatic increases in tiered DevEx can leave Robux locked inside accounts for another month or more, which is essentially a tax equal to the stock market gains or potentially the debt interest of developers.
Here is a spreadsheet going into the DevEx tiers and comparing them to what matters, comparing Roblox income to the real world. Note that just because there are this many tiers, it does not mean each tier is being used equally
I think there’s too many cashout options anyway. It’s nice how high they go, but the in-between ones that only a few people have ever actually used are sort of pointless and they make the list long. If they just approximately doubled on each row starting from 100k then it would be a bit shorter. Anyone in an in-between income range will just alternate between the two surrounding rates. If they need consistency then this already isn’t the right format for that anyway. Replacing the diverse big number options with diverse small number options would be more practical and helpful, though.
Having 7 different options of earning seven figures a year is a bit excessive.
We should have a minimum bar for DevEx (100k), but no tiering system. If I want to cash out something weird like 1,392,103 R$ in a month, the system should let me cash out exactly that amount I want to cash out (converted to the dollar rate using x0.0035 or whatever the fairer rate will be in the future)
I do wonder if Roblox would look at going below that 100k DevEX, eg 50k or 75k. For those developers who don’t quite earn enough but would value being able to DevEx at a lower rate such as to pay for OBC.
That could be interesting as an incentive for younger developers to keep up the pace, although I think at that point it is less critical to have a payout every month because you are likely not dependent on the income, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s once every few months for a higher amount (seemingly).
For me, DevExing at these rates is not designed for monthly payouts; rather you could DevEx 50k a year and get OBC paid for plus some extra cash.
If you’re making over 100k in a few months, then you should attempt to DevEx at the higher rates if possible but I think it may be better to allow options.
I’m pretty sure the only reason there is a required amount at all is to act as a floodgate to DevEx requests. They would increase exponentially if it was 50k and so would wait times
Knowing the small team behind DevEx; I would want the DevEx team to expand first and hopefully reduce the time for this very important part of the platform.
If the DevEx team could handle 50k+ that would be amazing and would be a great step towards helping younger developers with extra pocket money and to pay for OBC.
It’s a good concern to have but it’s not something that is insurmountable – YouTube does minimum payouts of 100$ a month and they get by fine despite having way more content creators that meet that threshold (most of it is automated, and most of DevEx could be automated too for the people that have been cashing out for 1+ year in a row). If they can’t handle doing that amount of payments per month then obviously they need to improve how they process those and introduce more automation for low-risk developer payments.
Comparing YouTube ad revenue which can’t be considered invalid to robux that can come from many different sources is an apples to oranges comparison. There is no reasonable way to automate the DevEx process the way the requirements are now. I agree that they need to either hire more people or change the way they handle requests, but automation is not the answer.
i.e. do automated checks (compile automatically the income that comes from group/user games, this seems easy to trace and I’d be surprised if they do not already have a tool for this) for low-risk payments, such as developers that have been constantly cashing out for 1+ year. So yes, changing the requirements / level at which those requirements are checked for the non-risky payments.
