I’ve had a busy day, it should be fixed now.
1 Like
I really think this should be a thing as its causing so many limitations and frustration.
I was planning on adding a donation system where you could donate any amount of robux for supporting the game, so i had everything ready and everything was working including the developer product on the testing game.
I copied and pasted every single script and gui to the main place and arena place, after that an issue appeared and i figured out that developer products dont work via third party sales, so i had created a menu all for nothing!
I decided i wanted to make it work with gamepasses instead, so i had made a new game to store the gamepasses on and after a while, i couldn’t set gamepasses on sale anymore for some weird reason.
Apparantly there was a limit to how many gamepasses you can put on sale on a place, so i had created a total of 7 games with 15 gamepasses each.
It took me 6 hours just to create every single gamepass and game, once that was done i had to put the ID’s in the modulescript i made! It took me another hour to do so. (Total of 100+ gamepasses)
The reason why i had to do all of this, is because there is no way to convert a profile game to a group game so that the earnings get sent to the group instead.
Im not even earning the full 100% from this donation system as there is always a 10% commission for third party sales, 10% of every single purchase made in the game gets sent straight to the game’s owner his pocket.
11 Likes
The fact that this still isn’t a feature, half way through 2021 is just plain disappointing on Roblox’s end.
The lack of this feature has crippled and stunted the growth of myself as a developer on Roblox, as all of my earnings go to my account, and to get necessary amounts into my group for distribution requires me to go through the 30% marketplace fee. That’s 30% of a potential hired developers pay that isn’t getting to them, for no good reason…
Because of this, I’ve never hired anyone outside of volunteer work because I don’t wanna deal with it, and I don’t wanna lose a significant portion of my income to the aether because 14 year old me wasn’t clairvoyant enough to put his games in a group in case one of them blew up on a whim.
Please, please someone at Roblox, I’m BEGGING you, I literally NEED this to grow any further as a developer and studio.
24 Likes
We’d like to have this feature as well. We currently have 3 games in the group but we want to keep only the popular one so the group can serve the right audience. If Roblox can allow transferring games from one group to another that will be perfect.
9 Likes
I have an active game from 2008 on my profile that I cannot move to a group. I am unable to pay my non-premium moderators and I am unwilling to hire because it is a massive waste of robux to pay them with all of the fees that would be involved. I collect a huge amount of robux in premium payouts and can do nothing with it towards the development and maintenance of my game.
12 Likes
I was told by @Seranok last RDC that he was working on this feature and it would possibly roll out early this year.
We’re already halfway through the year and we haven’t even had a single piece of information about this.
I am still desperately waiting for this to become a thing and feel betrayed because we get absolutely no information about whats going on behind the scenes on this.
I would have expected this to get announced on the roadmap but even that didn’t happen!
I dont think this will ever become a thing and we’re just left in the dust here unless we start receiving monthly updates about whats going on with this behind the scenes.
13 Likes
Hi rickje139 and others,
Thanks for reminding us about this. We were overly ambitious in terms of what we could achieve and have pushed back some of our roadmap items like this. but have been negligent about communicating those changes to you. I’ll see what I can do about getting this feature to happen sooner rather than later - no promises but just want you to know we hear you and want to get this fixed as soon as we can.
Thanks,
Seranok
75 Likes
Are there any updates about this yet?
Will this be in the roadmap for 2022?
32 Likes
Really sucks having to throw away 30% when paying my developers just because I accidently didn’t make my game under a group, I don’t know why this hasn’t been added already
40 Likes
Supporting this. I’ve seen many people talk about this feature helping to pay developers within this thread, and I’m in a situation where I would benefit as well.
Currently, I work for someone who owns a game on their profile- we’ve discussed moving it to the group so I can receive a percentage and further invest in the game’s development. But due to the lack of transferability, this has been impossible.
Up to this point developing has been mainly for hobby- sure, I make money, but it would be so much more convenient and beneficial for me if I could receive a percentage instead of a flat rate per update.
I love working on this platform, but I want to turn it into more than just a hobby. I understand that roblox was intended as an introduction to game development, but over time that directive has changed to the point that large, extremely profitable games are being made.
This feature request will not just help me (and many others), but will help advance a significant portion of individually owned games on the platform forward- allowing roblox to grow more than ever.
7 Likes
As I’ve experienced this myself, this should 100% exist.
I currently work on @Emaytee’s games, which were made as nothing but just a fun project, when it started increasing in players we wanted to transfer the games to a group although this was not possible without re-uploading both games on a group.
Re-uploading a game does this:
- Having to migrate player’s data (saying you use Roblox datastore)
- Demotion in Discovery (Algorithm)
- Decreased Players
- Visits
- And way more statistics (that we value!)
Metrics
Developers for a game owned by a user cannot view any helpful metrics! And have to ask the game owner, which is tedious (considering timezone differences + when they’re available). Thankfully they’ve stated that it’ll be looked over, although it doesn’t change the fact we are penalised.
I talked about it here:
Pay
Furthermore, in order to pay developers Robux, the game owner must pay 30% tax! Which I don’t consider acceptable, or you have the game owner DevEx => pay to developers.
Although many I’d assume prefer Robux:
- They have the choice to DevEx whenever
- They’re able to spend Robux without having to buy any
Issues from myself
Lastly, issues not listed from myself (These I encounter frequently):
-
Animations have to be uploaded by the game owner and won’t even show in studio, unlike group games. (Frustrating to work with.)
-
Not able to open past versions, only the game owner can.
-
Not being able to “Save As” to a user-owned game. (Stuck to doing all updates on the current place.)
Conclusion
If this existed, it would be a life changer, being able to see statistics such as average playing time, overall revenue and filtered devices gives the developers a better rundown of what they’re doing right and wrong. Being able to pay out developers Robux without the 30% tax motivates those to create more content, and for some makes them financially free. Being able to have fixed percentages, without the hassle of relying on the game owner (to pay you, or to pay you right) is such a help.
I feel massively penalised for the difference between developing a game in a group vs developing a game owned by a user.
Excluding contracts:
Not being able to have fixed percentages (overall revenue from the game) gives developers a risk that the game owner may pay wrongly or not at all. Since you get a notification when your percentage changes (in a group), this would largely help as the developer would still be getting paid their percentage, and if anything goes wrong, at least the developer was paid during the period.
(Example: Screwed right at the end of the month when they should be paid 20% of monthly revenue, and the game owner refuses.)
Edit 14/10/2022:
Recently Korblox & Headless Hangout was flagged for inaccurate data for the experience guidelines, which as the developer couldn’t submit or even see why. This is horrible, luckily enough, the owner was online while on holiday although if this was not the case, the entire game would have gone to ruins.
By having the game in a group, not just the owner would be able to view/submit (which is a problem). All these points above just support the overall view that developing a user-owned game is the most tedious thing I’ve experienced, and we should have the option to transfer.
Edit 05/12/2022:
I was able to create/manage badges in the past, and now I’m not?! This is super horrible for me to rely on the owner to create/manage badges.
13 Likes
I know this thread is over 5 years old - and although I hate "bumping" threads - the age of this thread, along with the amount of support it has received, only proves how we need to continue pushing for this feature.
This feature is one that I've been waiting for, and expecting, since you were initially allowed to create games under groups. I wasn't on the DevForum at the time, so I would've had no clue about Seranok's initial offer to transferring game ownership to groups through here. Apparently I wasn't the only one, because as far as I can see there was only a whopping 15 games that were requested for transfer through that offer thread after around 7 months of being open [only counting replies to the thread directly]. To scale, the ROBLOX Forums were discontinued nearly TWO YEARS AFTER that offer was opened and closed.
Beginning
I want to bring up the message @Seranok posted from the convert your game to a group game thread after he closed the offer;
Perhaps at the time, “I decided to end this offer because it only provides value to a handful of developers and I would rather spend my time on features which benefit all developers,” would have made sense. It was an offer that only a dozen or so people claimed in the span of 7 months. The benefits of owning a game under a group were fairly unknown still, and the visibility of this offer was very limited. I genuinely can’t blame anyone from thinking this way at the time, but fast forward 6 years and I think circumstances have changed.
It’s now 2022, and things are a lot different. DevForum was still an acceptance-based forum, meaning as far as I know, even the knowledge of this offer existing was only extended to a “handful of developers” in the first place. Many developers are also hesitant to jump into a brand new feature head first, nevermind a low key & makeshift solution involving the ownership of their beloved games. Recognising the drastic changes in ROBLOX game development from the past 6 years - a large majourity of the games were solo run, and didn’t see a benefit in switching to a group at the time.
The mainstream acknowledgement of the benefits to using group funds wasn’t fully recognised until years later. Looking at the ROBLOX Fandom Wiki, which I think is a good benchmark for mainstream knowledge - the first time the ‘Group’ wiki page acknowledged group funds being distributed to members wasn’t until October of 2018. This feature came at the beginning of a transition stage for ROBLOX where games weren’t being run by one singular developer, but development teams. A majourity of the mainstream appreciation for this feature came long after anyone had a chance to benefit from the offer.
There has been no leeway for games that were solo ran that expanded into being run by a team of people. Call me dramatic, but the fact we aren’t able to transfer games to groups can be severely damaging a project’s potential for growth once it is able to provide for itself. Without being able to share revenue, or pay commission to other developers/artists for their work properly, either cuts into the project’s profits all together, or deters developers from expanding/outsourcing work at all.
Imbalance
ROBLOX’s 30% fee, and the way it can so easily stack to become a 50%+ fee, is a whole other topic entirely - however I still believe it is important & relevant to bring up. Not to state the obvious, but there’s of course a 30% fee/tax to transactions before they go to the creator. It’s also common knowledge that the only methods of transferring revenue from account to account involves another 30% fee/tax on top of the already reduced amount they received initially resulting in a 50%+ cut going into the void. “Well, duh” - but it’s important to note the underlying issue and pre-context.
Group funds were ultimately introduced to prevent this fee stack, and although this broadly solved the issue and reduced the amount of tax taken before it reached a respective developer - it also immediately imbalanced both games that were created in the past, as well as the weight of the irreversible option of creating your game through your profile or a group.
There is LITTLE TO NO downside for creating a game under a group over creating it under your profile. By inherent benefit, I mean you are [sometimes unknowingly] opting into either having a 30% fee on transferrable income, or having a 50%+ fee on transferrable income without a chance to revert that decision. It is no coincidence that almost all of the new large games, including solo developed, are owned under a group, while games like Work At A Pizza Place that have been around for ages, are not.
When a big platform introduces a new feature that has an inherent benefit and improvement over the prior, it is generally good practice to either balance the two features, or remove the old one entirely. When it comes to irreversible options like the one we are talking about, you should expect everyone to be offered a chance to revert/upgrade to the better feature. Without doing this, you are just nerfing every single game created in the initial 10 years of the platform as well as games created without the prior realisation of said differences.
The truth is that we need to stop treating these as two separate “features” and start considering the group funds/game ownership feature as merely an UPDATE to how you are able to manage games. You can’t pretend they aren’t related, and you can’t pretend that there isn’t only ONE wise choice between the two. Even though you technically have the option to choose either, for new developers who don’t know their way around the platform, it is unbelievably difficult for them to find out that they can even create games under groups - nevermind realising they are at an inherent disadvantage if they don’t do so.
I’d compare it to the new Creator Dashboard that offers more advanced statistics - if this was only available to games created after the feature’s implementation, or by opting into it when initially creating the place… that wouldn’t make any sense and would be a clear disadvantage.
Current Compromise
Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the current options developers have to “migrate their game” to a group, and how they either don’t work or can harm/reset a game’s progress. I’d also like to say that this problem only affects games that already have a playerbase - afterall this isn’t a matter of you losing your game, but your game losing it’s momentum and reputation.
You can theoretically copy your game and make it function exactly the same through a new experience under a group. This will bring you back to Game Marketing 101. The best solution to transferring a playerbase to the new experience is by simply updating your old game to automatically redirect players to the new one immediately when they join. Yes, this will populate your new experience with anyone who tries to play your old one, but will instantly make the old experience appear to be completely unpopulated. Eventually you’d want to fully migrate the game so you’d remove/private the old game after some time passes.
This only works in theory but will be a very slow and harmful transition for your game’s growth. All of your stats are gone and any algorithm advantages your old game might’ve had are now useless. Anyone who played your game will no longer see the new version in their favourites/recently played (which is 90% of where I look for games to play). Most casual players will assume the game died or was privated and won’t bother looking into it. People will now see your game and assume it’s a fake copy.
This “option” is not an option at all.
Proposals
Finally, it's time to give my two cents and brainstorm possible solutions to this problem.
The obvious and possibly the quickest solution would simply be a way for developers to migrate their games to a group. This doesn’t have to be a thing that everyone can do inherently. You can even come up with a game eligibility metric to prevent overflow, and/or make it a more streamlined manual process where developers can email/apply to request for ROBLOX to do it themselves. Since the benefits of group owned games primarily benefits already-successful games, I see no problem in making it more exclusive to the games that would actually benefit from the switch [at first].
The true issue at hand isn’t necessarily that we all just want a game under our group, the problem is simply the imbalance between the two. The solution doesn’t even need to be migrating at all. You can address all of the advantages groups have and individually apply/balance them to player owned games. When you consider this, the possibility for a feasible solution is way better.
If you allow the possibility for developers to transfer game revenue to other individuals without the fee, then a majourity of the imbalance is already gone. A rough example of this would be giving an option for revenue to go to an “Experience Fund”, directly to a group, or directly to your account (which would be default). From there you can take revenue that you want out, or transfer your revenue to a group [of which you have a proper permission for] without the fee. That way you can utilise the group fund mechanic without your experience having to be under that group. This also prevents the feature from being widely exploited and keeps it strictly to game revenue.
Ultimately, I don’t care if any new features regarding this issue require eligibility at first. Whether anyone can just click a button and switch between the two options, or whether you have to pay R$10,000 and apply for a migration manually in hopes of getting approved (extreme example, cut me some slack) - anything is better than nothing, and we currently have nothing.
Everything is always easier said than done, and I won’t pretend I know anything about what implementing any of these features might entail. All I want is for there to be more transparency and communication regarding progress to solving these issues. It’s easy to look at this thread and think this is a niche problem that a small amount of people encounter. Instead, I believe this is a problem that many people encounter, but gave up on the hope of it being fixed. These things should be addressed.
PS: I know a lot of these points have likely already been mentioned in the thread, but I decided if this request needed a revival then I might as well just start from scratch. I didn’t intend for this message to be a 200 page book at first, so pardon me if it’s all over the place.
21 Likes
I must bump this to say this is a feature I personally need. A game I started on my profile over 6 years ago now has a lot of devs and we could really do with moving it to our group. To allow my devs to earn we have to have all our gamepasses on a seperate place on the group which users are prompted to purchase on the main game on my profile. It also makes developing in TC’s, and the recent audio privacy changes, a lot more difficult for them. We also use data stores for some of our paid products, and just moving the game to a new group game would result in a loss of our visits, favourites, ratings, and those data stores which users have paid for and would have to rebuy.
2 Likes
I have been unable to move my games to my group for over 12 years. For 6 of those years I have been developing a modern game with thousands of daily active users and I have been entirely unable to pay anyone with platform currency as a result.
2 Likes
It’s not a good solution. This would quite literally just bring up new security issues, which causes more problems than good, which, in turn, leads to more people complaining. you just can’t win.
If you want to move your game, you should plan it out from the beginning.
What kind of security issues? No one’s saying it should take just a single click. It could be done through a request, just like DevEx is being processed now.
Why do you expect everyone to own game studios with all the analytics and plans since the beginning? Many people never expected their games to get a big playerbase, especially given the fact most of them were a bit younger when they were starting. Why do you not want to let them take advantage of their success just because they’d never imagined their game could be successful?
6 Likes
That’s a bold statement to make when most of us have said that we made these games years ago, and now we have developers in our team who we need to pay. I never predicted to have so many developers helping me on the game I own, nobody could’ve told me 6 years ago I would have developers helping me, and that I therefore should have it on a group.
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I think a better approach to this would be being able to transfer data. Right now I think you cannot do this. Then, you could download the place file of the game, and reupload it to your group.
1 Like
There is the thought of loosing our favourites, visits, rating etc, and having to move our players to a different game, but you are right, in our case, transferring data would mostly fix the problems we face.
2 Likes
There is also an issue that nobody has mentioned yet. If you agree to pay a contributor certain amount, while accepting to cover the tax yourself, you have to add around 43% to the net amount, while setting t-shirt or game pass price. That means for you to pay someone 100,000 robux, you have to shell out 142,857 and not simply 130,000.
This is because the tax is being counted based on the gross amount.
This, and also that I do not consider buying t-shirts or game passes a serious payment option anyway, has been THE reason for abandoning the Crazy Stairs in favour of the sequel.