Creator AMA (Economy) - with Antoni and Enrico [May 22, 2024]

As the ability to create UGC accessories has been enabled for everyone, I must ask if there will ever be any future changes to punishing copyright theft?

As creators cannot realistically be expected to navigate the avatar marketplace page, there will be situations where their ip can be stolen, reuploaded and profited off of without said creator knowing. If this creator does find out, the punishment for a strike that goes through is only a warning on a first offense. This does not reconcile the potential weeks to months of stolen sales from said creator and unless the sales from the stolen ip is returned to the creator, it is a total loss for everyone, but the initial thief. Perhaps a much more severe punishment for discovered theft after a month or more past its initial publish date would help rectify this issue.

7 Likes

I would like to ask about plugin prices.

In this post, I’ve mentioned the potential bad effects of the plugins now being sold by USD instead of Robux, I’ve read the FAQ and everything, and I would still like to ask, is Roblox sure that they couldn’t have found another solution? I think I made some good points in my post and replies talking about other potential solutions that would’ve helped to address the solutions both on the seller and the customer side.

Currently, this change creates a huge imbalance in the market by only caring about the plugin creators, and not the customers (other developers). Roblox advertises itself as a global platform where its creators can come and build regardless of their position and situations in the world, but this change only prioritizes one certain population.

I made a feature request regarding the affiliate fees and how it only benefits experiences last year Link based affiliate commission for marketplace products

to create a summary of this feature request – I’m a content creator who has created videos about my and other creator’s UGC, in accumulation these videos have gathered over 100 million views between 2020-2023

I’ve stopped making these videos because ultimately I was driving unmeasurable amount sales to these items and as the video creator, I had no way to reap any rewards from this.

I would love to hear your thoughts adding a link based affiliate system for the Roblox marketplace (similar to online shopping platforms such as Amazon) where the 40% avatar commission can be received by influencers and creators who are driving sales through their own channels.

9 Likes

Are there any plans to make an official marketplace system for limited items to sell them for real cash? The black market scene on Roblox is massive and has a lot of scams happening left and right. It would be interesting to have an official system in place, considering some Roblox limiteds cost up to or more than $10000.

6 Likes

During the last AMA, i asked if you still had any plans regarding limited items/sales. You replied to me saying “No”. However, during “The Hunt” you guys released a bunch of cool new limiteds. I’m wondering if you are considering doing more of this, and, potentially, making old stuff go limited like you did back in 2022.

8 Likes

When will we be allowed to sell models for Robux/money?

7 Likes

When will dynamic head accessories release? It was announced a while ago but has never been implemented. The inability to implement accessories onto our dynamic heads heavily impacts our creative freedom.

2 Likes

Why is there only 450 Robux subscription on the Roblox app? Because it annoys some UGC creators not to be able to pay for the 1000 or 2000 Robux subscription via Apple/Google Pay.

5 Likes

Is there a chance that there will be a more convient way to linking related UGC items below the item? for example i’m visualizing something like this where you would be able to see the item without having to click a link that’s likely hidden by the description, which isnt as eye appealing

19 Likes

It would be extremely useful for UGC creators to have demographic information about users who favourite and purchase items. It’s no different to the information that experiences give us, and would be important when creating UGC for specific audiences,.

4 Likes

Are there plans to revert the fees associated with free UGC limited stock?
Since UGC has gone public, the fee for making free UGC limiteds has gone up from 10-30 per stock, to 100 per stock, which has resulted in a lot of problems not just for UGC creators, but also game developers and free-to-play players.

When free UGC cost just 10-30 per 1 stock it was not uncommon to see free UGC with stocks of hundreds, if not thousands or more. A lot of game developers used free UGC to bring in players to their game, and not only was it a good way to easily get players in your game, but it was also very beneficial to free-to-play players who may not be able to buy robux to dress up their avatars. UGC creators could also make free limiteds to give away to their followers as a way of showing support to the people who supported them etc.

If you were to go into the game “Flex your UGC limiteds” and look at the recent free UGC items that are being published, you would see that most new items do not have more than 50-100 stock in most cases because of how unaffordable it is to make now. (Add onto the fact that you only get 10% of a resale, and its now impossible to “profit” from making free UGC)

4 Likes

since I was asked to put my questions into individual comemnts

  1. Do you have any plans to help with UGC Discoverability?

Thank you for your time.

1 Like

The malicious DMA/DMCA trend is getting out of control. When can creators feel that their items will not be content deleted unfairly by bad actors? When can we expect to know how Roblox is planning on tackling false DMCA takedowns? (overwriting model with creators mesh / uploading screenshot of creators item that they posted early, sending DMCA claiming it is your work).

Also, when can we expect to have immunity for said assets that do not break any rules? I do not need my solid black 256x texture to be deleted again.

9 Likes

Is there any plans to increase devex rates?

2 Likes
  1. What steps are being taken, if any, to compensate creators that have had their items falsely deleted through abuse of the European DSA form? When an item is deleted, it loses algorithm relevance, and when an item is deleted for more than a week, refunds are processed. It is exceedingly rare for the UGC support team to restore items in under 1 week, so more often than not, refunds will be processed and the creator can lose thousands of dollars. This phenomenon has impacted to top creators several times.
9 Likes

Currently kids are passing around guides on how to troll creators with false DMCA / counter DMCA claims while they upload copies of existing items to the catalog.

Various existing creators are being banned for the false DMCAs… while others are having our IPs taken.

Many of these cases could be EASILY handled by staff using a small amount of common sense in moderation requests (such as a 5 day old account uploading a half dozen copies of existing and best-selling items may not actually hold the IP rights as they so claim … which should be obvious to any staff at roblox when it is pointed out).

Instead we are told to “go get a lawyer and spend a few hundred dollars to sue the alt accounts and fake names”. Essentially roblox is washing their hands of dealing with the issue.

So my question is, what are the plans to address this in the short term?

Roblox should have seen this coming a mile away, and that they don’t even do MINIMUM verification on these things is shocking (such as a counter DMCA sent to me was a fake indian address / name… from 2 new Russian alt accounts with random russian emails… a simple ID verification would at least make it so these kids can’t use infinite throwaway alt accounts to do this with).

14 Likes

Why did you increase free limited prices so obscenely large from 20 per stock to 100? It hurts not only experiences who want to do large events for their communities but also smaller developers and creators of free UGC games. It basically makes it so only the largest creators and companies can afford larger quantities which makes most mid to lower end creators stay away. Why is it raised so high when it doesn’t really give a benefit to the people making free UGC as it doesn’t exactly correlate to increased money or sales to an experience. So why is this change needed why couldn’t it remain 20 per stock? I feel it needs to be changed back to how it was but I want to hear actual reasoning behind this change as no one was notified about it and it hurt lots of games in the free UGC genre with the change last minute with no time to prepare.

8 Likes

Is there an estimated date for when users will be able to purchase audio to use in games yet? As a musician I want to allow users the ability to play my songs whilst they play any game of their choosing, while also having it heard by others.

2 Likes

There are a lot of accessories uploaded that would be better sorted into existing categories, for example the classic head, and faces categories already exist, but are not available for creators to upload to. There are SO MANY face masks in the face/hat accessories category which do not benefit from skin colour changes, and non-animated dynamic heads are uploaded that are falsely tagged with a dynamic icon.

Layered Clothing categories are misused as a way to bypass accessory bounds, and to create handheld items, even though there is existing support for these that could be utilised, and would make the detection of them easier for developers.
(Kara Lye Foil - Roblox) (Erisyphia - Staff - Roblox) (The Pain Bringer - Roblox)

There’s a clear desire from creators, and customers for classic heads, classic faces, makeup, and hand held items.

TLDR:
Are there any plans to enable the creation of classic heads, classic faces, makeup, and handheld items for UGC creators? It seems like economically it would be the right move, considering the ever growing library of face masks, and non-animated dynamic heads on the platform.

6 Likes

Is there an estimate for when the sales count of UGC items will be fixed? Creators relied on it for distributing collaboration splits, and the removal of it has made it difficult to track the total sales of individual items. All new UGC items return a sales count of 0.

2 Likes