Coming Soon: Regional Pricing for Avatar Items

[runlola_run24]

Hi Creators,

Since launching in April, Regional Pricing for Passes has already helped participating experiences grow paying users by 26%. Now, we’re excited to announce a new way for avatar creators to optimize sales worldwide.

Beginning June 9th, we will start rolling out Regional Pricing for all avatar items on Roblox. Country-specific pricing will give users more appropriate pricing that reflects their local economy. More appropriate prices mean more frequent purchases, helping creators earn more.

With Regional Pricing, Roblox will automatically apply region-specific prices to avatar items, which update periodically as the global economy shifts. Region-specific prices are determined using a variety of signals, including a region’s purchasing power, currency exchange rates, and local spending behavior on Marketplace.

At launch, a portion of users worldwide will see country-specific pricing on avatar items. We plan to slowly ramp up to 100% of users throughout the remainder of June. Starting with a limited release allows us to measure the impact and fine tune our regional calculations before launching more widely.

Regional Pricing for avatar items will be enabled automatically for all avatar items at launch. If you would like to opt-out, you can do so beginning today. Here’s how:

1. Go to Creator Hub
2. Navigate to the avatar item you want to opt-out of regional pricing
3. Uncheck the ‘enable regional pricing’ option under the ‘Pricing’ section

However, we want to note that opting your items out of Regional Pricing will make it harder for your items to compete in regions where prices are regionalized.

Thank you.

FAQs

Can I customize the price for each region?

• No. Creators can select the global base price for each item. Roblox then sets region-specific pricing for each item that is opted-in for Regional Pricing automatically.

How do I track payer participation around the world?

• Creators can track key metrics in Creator Hub. For a breakdown of revenue and sales of your items by country, go to Creator Hub > Analytics > Avatar Items.

How are you preventing users from changing locations to take advantage of lower prices?

• Ensuring fairness and preventing misuse are our top priorities for this tool. By using a variety of signals to determine a user’s location, we are mitigating the ability of users to manually update their location to take advantage of lower prices. Until we have high confidence in a user’s location, users will get the default (highest) price. That includes users who access Roblox from a VPN.

What is the maximum price difference for an item once regional pricing is enabled?

• We are continuing to test and refine our prices from region to region to ensure creators are driving the most benefit from regional pricing. With that, we expect prices may differ from 20-60% at launch. Please note prices will be updated periodically as the economic trends shift region by region.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

I still feel like the initial issues with regional pricing have not been properly resolved, some of which I have mentioned in the original post:

Introducing Regional Pricing for Passes

I feel like Roblox should be eating regional costs rather than developers. If Roblox feels safe about countering people exploiting regional prices, then I don’t see why it should be up to the developers. In those countries, buying Robux would already be expensive anyway unless buying Robux itself were changed regionally. I also find it weird that these prices are determined automatically without any way of being altered? But I suppose this is to prevent a developer from “attacking” a particular…

Additionally, it’s worrisome that this will be enabled by default. Is it absolutely certain that this system cannot be exploited? This will hurt all UGC creators if a method is found. At least there will be an option to opt-out, but I don’t think this should be retroactively enabled. I don’t mind if it’s enabled by default when uploading a new UGC item.

[Valkenheim (Valk)]

This is a very promising update for increasing creator revenue- That said, as with most UGC creator facing features, it would be incredibly valuable to see bulk item controls come to features like this. I don’t plan on opting out, but being a larger creator with 6000+ items, being able to make small item level changes faster is a necessity.

[Br_ghtism (Cool Bright)]

We’d be so back if you could extend this to developer products as well

[Wheatly199]

Aren’t people just gonna use a VPN to get the cheapest item costs?

Yeah, this would supposedly lead in roblox falling back to the default price for the user, but roblox is a jank factory and nothing really works as intended, so I feel like some people could just casually spoof their location and not trip the fallback (besides, the price floors are already bad enough)

[TypeDummy (TypeRamadan)]

As it pertains to price floors, will the regional pricing be able to go below the price floor?

What I noticed pre-price floors was that players tend to sway to the cheapest priced item if you want to maximize sales, if you price higher, you will lose sales but barely increase revenue due to Roblox’s 70% fee.

i.e

To earn 5 Robux more for each sale, you will have to change your price from 95 → 112 Robux, which will result in a drastic loss in sales, and even though you’ll earn more for each sale in the totality of it all, you’ll probably lose revenue as well.

Although I see that experiences benefited from this change, the current outdated marketplace algorithm is entirely different from that end and seems to be largely sales drive. One of my fears is that this will result in creators losing revenue unless Roblox finally updates the current Marketplace algorithm.

it’s important to note that I only believe this will occur if global price floors are applied and there is not some kind of regional price floor.

[runlola_run24]

Thank you! We plan to extend regional pricing to developer products later this Summer.

[TimeFrenzied (Casey)]

Why can’t you just apply regional pricing to buying Robux?

[blanka]

Robux in Poland cost almost 50% higher than in the US (while having a way lower minimum wage), and yet on the list Poland is not included with any lower price. We don’t pay in Euro, so I don’t get why are we getting hurt while richer countries have all products less expensive than us.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

That was my main point with my reply on the original topic:

@MightyDantheman

In those countries, buying Robux would already be expensive anyway unless buying Robux itself were changed regionally.

Developers shouldn’t be the ones eating this cost.

[zzak0542 (so_Random)]

No even with VPN they can’t lol

[idelww]

Wonderful update! I see that there’s no way to turn this feature off for a single country.

Are there any plans to enable that in the future and allow creators to disable regional discounts for a few countries?

Also I have over 2k accessories. Are there any plans on automatizing a way to enable/disable this?

[Ron1n_Sim (Ronin)]

This guy brings up a good point, I don’t see a reason why Regional pricing enforcements being thrown to the developers like it’s our fault that the prices set this way. (Included that Roblox limits how low we want our UGC prices to be)

• Make it so no one can exploit regional pricing
• Make Robux Purchases Regional pricing instead of throwing everyone under the bus regarding making this a feature.

[qliz]

Hi! Super excited for this update, I imagine it will be very beneficial for UGC creators!

Can you clarify whether the regional pricing applies to the per-category price floors as a whole (the ones found here), or is it optimized per item, separate from the price floor? I’m imagining it’s the former, but would just like to be sure. Thanks!

[TimeFrenzied (Casey)]

very transparent on those price ceilings eh

[raskolibov (Poyraz)]

The floor price system is confusing. For example, let’s say I list an item — like dynamic heads — at the floor price, which is currently 75 Robux. In countries with regional pricing like Somalia, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Afghanistan, or Cuba, users get 60% off. That means they’d be able to buy it for just 30 Robux.

If that’s the case, then what exactly is the point of a floor price? It can be bypassed through regional pricing, effectively allowing items to be sold well below the intended minimum. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of having a floor price in the first place?

I guess the floor price is just the minimum limit before regional pricing is applied — so with that exception, it can go even lower, which makes sense, I suppose. Otherwise, if you were to remove the floor price entirely, it would mean there’s no limit at all on how low prices can go — which I assume is not the outcome you intended.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

@raskolibov

what exactly is the point of a floor price?

The point of the price floor is to force developers to not undersell their products, because it’s always a race to the bottom (lowest price).

[raskolibov (Poyraz)]

Yea I think I mentioned that in the rest of my message

[ItsZayahh (Zayuh)]

Can you guys’ please not take 70% of the Robux when we sell UGC that’s so unfair…