Create and Manage Subscriptions within your Experience

Wew, devs only get a 23.33% cut of the purchase thanks to conversion rates and the 30% cut taken by Roblox, and we have to deal with refunds possibly acting as ticking timebombs that could come out of nowhere and delete our funds. Great feature, love you Roblox.

22 Likes

Great addition! Finally we are able to implement subscription based systems alot easier. However… I would prefer being able to choose if the subscription is going to be paid in robux or local currency. And I also don’t like that developers only get robux based on the web price, in my opinion you should get the exact amount of robux you would need in order to exchange the robux into the amount of USD the user had to pay. Or simply pay the developer in USD directly

5 Likes

Nope, you read this right. Plus they didn’t mention what would happen if group owner doesn’t have any Robux, could they get banned? and what matter even worst

Since ‘Earnings are subject to 30 day holds and are added to your Robux balance after the full term of the subscription has been delivered. If a user requests a refund or does a chargeback for the subscription charge within the month-long hold period, the hold is canceled and you do not receive the payout for that transaction.’

This technically means That user could hold their subscription for good amount of days like 20 or more, and then refunded, and they would get money back

Roblox please correctly if I am wrong about this statement, cause i honestly want this to be wrong

6 Likes

It is beyond disingenuous to suggest you get 70% of the price of the subscription because you cash out 1 robux for $0.0035, so actually you get $2.44 from a $9.99 subscription or 24% which is just embarrassingly low.

Do better, much better.

9 Likes

While I am not the type of person to typically defend Roblox, in this case, we are getting a better deal.

If you wanted to charge a player $4.99 with Robux, you’d set the price at R$400 (that’s the purchase rate). After 70% marketplace fee, a developer would get R$280 ($0.98).

However, with this subscription system, you charge the player $4.99 and the Robux you get, after 70% marketplace fee, is R$349 ($1.22). And even better, if they are on PC, it’ll grow to R$424 ($1.48) after 3 months. Compared to Robux pricing, that’s a potential gain of $0.50 per $4.99 subscription.

So, yes, while the actual problem of % given to developers is low, this is still advantageous for us.

I still, however, would prefer the option to set prices in Robux, even knowing I could get less from it. Something about having the entire ecosystem under one generalized platform currency just makes more sense.

Edit: Of course, the more logical solution would be to just make everything Robux-only and, since they are showing with this change that they CAN pay more, increase the DevEx rate from $0.0035 to $0.0045. But that’s not going to happen, so I’m going to still consider this subscription USD → R$ conversion rate a tiny victory.

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you can literally just script it :upside_down_face: . the only downside is that the player has to resubscribe manually when the subscriptions ends.

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Why do you need this? Have you not doxxed enough of your developers already?

7 Likes

Probably because of legal reasons, you are exchanging real money now. Not Robux.

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As much as I like getting new tools as a developer, I truly cannot get behind this.

Private servers are paid monthly with Robux, why can’t that be used here? They automatically cancel if a user is unable to afford it, with this it seems you could forget about it and lose money unknowingly like with other subscription services out there.

When setting up a subscription, you need to specify a product type, which doesn’t make much sense to me. The “durable” option is the whole point of a game pass and the “currency” option is what developer products are for. It’s also implied that you will be able to change the subscription period at some point, as it is included when setting one up.

Subscription models are easy ways to get steady revenue from unsuspecting users, implementing such a system on Roblox of all places is not a great idea for dozens of different reasons.

13 Likes

Cool idea, though I think making the pricing method (real-world currency VS Robux) an optional thing would probably be better in the long run. I’m sure some users (and their guardians) would prefer to have subscriptions only last as long as there remains Robux on their account.

5 Likes

I have little to no use for this with the enforced “Real World Money” purchase method. I’d have way more uses if this was able to use Robux instead. Keep USD/Local Currency as an option, but, if I want to charge 10 Robux for a Subscription, it should be an option. Some users will find that much more convenient, and be way more willing to spend a monthly Robux amount vs yet another fee drawing from their bank/credit.

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It’s already enough of a concern with children sneaking credit cards to buy Robux. Now parents are gonna have to look out for additional monthly subscriptions alongside Premium :skull:

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We aren’t dealing with real-world money - at its core, this is still a transaction where Roblox receives currency and we receive Robux.

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I would rather a user’s subscription just stop due to not having enough Robux, vs potentially causing them real financial issues because they forgot about it. I feel it’s the more ethical approach as a developer.

14 Likes

It is certainly an interesting decision to block all edits except for the image for subscriptions, while it makes sense why name and price should not be editable, not even the description may be edited after creation. I regularly add more features to my in-game subscriptions and therefore cannot make use of the description field as it would become outdated after a few updates.

Also, as many have mentioned on this thread, the decision to make subscriptions purchasable with USD is a poor one. Many Roblox players have an abundance of Robux available to them yet not necessarily an abundance of USD in their bank card to spend on in-experience subscriptions.

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Why does it matter what platform the subscription is purchased on? Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t see any explanation for this.


VIP servers also renew automatically, but they use robux. This explanation isn’t very insightful. Personally, I think the local currency choice was a poor decision.

On another note, if you’re going to force these pre-built subscription prices to be in USD, then include on the UI how much robux it will be equivalent to.


This is pointless given that you’re receiving robux for the subscriptions at the end of the day. You don’t need an ID for other development items, so why here?

5 Likes

Its extremely stupid to have subscriptions not purchasable for Robux, this inherently destroys the Robux flywheel and ecosystem and adds on extra unnecessary steps for a players user experience. VIP servers already take robux monthly, so I don’t see why its an issue to have subscriptions purchasable for Robux either.


This is unacceptable and refunds shouldn’t be accepted after the subscription has ended, we aren’t a VPN service, we don’t have money-back guarantees. If this is to stay, we should be able to know if a player refunds their purchase so we can permanently ban them.

Great idea on paper, terrible execution. Won’t be using this until robux is added as an option.

16 Likes

Why does it matter what platform the subscription is purchased on? Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t see any explanation for this.

It’s fairly common that mobile app stores (both Apple Store and Google Play) charge a fee. Perhaps cutting it down to 15% on Desktop after 3 months is Roblox’s attempt to share saved profits.

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I think this pricing strategy is extremely confusing and only serves the purpose of obfuscating Roblox’s unfair cut. I think it is also unjustifiable that Roblox charges a (first 30 and then 15%) “platform fee” on web subscriptions. As many of you know, the 30% platform fee on mobile originates from Apple and Google taking that 30% cut from all payments on their devices.

However, on web purchases, no such fee exists. A 5% fee would make sense, since there usually are fees involved with payment processing services, but 15%? And why is the first 3 months 30%, if not just a sleazy tactic to force developers into predatory subscription models that try to get vulnerable kids to sign up to a subscription without realizing that is is recurring?

This feels bad.

8 Likes

A very interesting spin - I am looking forward to how developers decide on pricing subscriptions.
I love the idea of increasing creator earnings after the first three months of the subscription term.

2 Likes