A large portion of the Roblox playerbase is now unable to purchase helpful development tools because they are underage or live in a region that doesn’t support these payment methods. If you guys are really going to go forward with such a decision, you should have ironed these problems out before release instead of leaving millions of your users in the dark.
I hate to be someone who dogs on the ridiculous choices that Roblox constantly makes, but I have to question the thought process behind the people in charge of these frankly stupid decisions. I’d imagine this hardly benefits the creators of these plugins either; I don’t think many people want to go through the hassle of setting everything up compared to before when, as long as you had the Robux, you clicked two buttons and you’re done.
I didn’t say “an easy solution”.
Sure, just give me a couple of hours or a day or two to do some research as I do not really want to give out an answer without proper information.
I mean… you still had to go through an onboarding process for DevEx. The only change, I suppose, is that now you’re doing it before you publish rather than after. It’s still just a dropdown on the actual Configure Asset page.
Yall have no conception of how much professional tooling can cost.
From what I can tell, average pay for a game developer is around $40 an hour. For a professional developer spending 8 hours a day in Roblox Studio, a one-time fee of $30 is a completely normal amount of money for a tool that may significantly improve or speed up their workflow.
Fair enough, but if that’s the case, it’s probably a good idea to chill out a little bit and reserve the use of that ‘lazy’ language unless there’s some substantial evidence that there’s actually laziness in the process.
Either way, I don’t think there’s much more to be said here, so I’m happy to drop this.
The “maximiz[ing] the revenue share” here is minimizing the revenue that could be made overall. Isn’t most of Roblox under 18, and thus, wouldn’t creators, and by extension Roblox, be missing out on most of the Roblox market?
And, “accurately representing the value” of assets isn’t a strong argument when we can convert USD to robux and vice versa. That can be based on the fees, Roblox gift cards, etc. There are options. As a creator, I want more people to have access to my product, even if that means I get a little less money out of it.
Can’t Roblox use those rates to automatically set a robux price for an asset. It seems like a deliberate choice not doing that. Why?
If this means a system for creators under 18 to pay for something, via payment by a parent account, that’s not what I want to see. Everyone, no matter their age, should be able to pay via robux or USD. In fact, while I’m on the subject, Roblox has Parental Controls for under 13 users. Those settings should be open to everyone. That includes monthly spending limits, additional private server settings, and spend notifications.
If the idea is to have more “opportunities to deliver more earnings to the creator community”, wouldn’t letting people pay in robux allow more earnings to be possible overall? As I mentioned before, most of Roblox is under 18, is it not?
While this “allows developers [from Roblox and other communities to] easily understand costs”, that comes at a cost to their overall revenue and the Roblox userbase in general. The reasons behind this I have gone over already in other responses to quotes.
If the idea here is to make the process of purchasing things “as frictionless as possible”, wouldn’t that extend to Plug-Ins? And thus, isn’t it fair to say that now purchasing Plug-Ins has quite the friction? If Roblox allowed people to use Robux as an option, that would make it equally as “frictionless” as the mentioned cases.
That would make the process have less “friction”, as stated in another part of the post. So, that’d be awesome to see.
I’m sure the task of making everything have the ability to be paid for in robux and USD would be a nightmare, but doesn’t that difference create some confusion? If I pay for one thing in one place, but not all, I assume at least one person would want to keep paying in the same way. That goes for USD and robux.
Additionally, my idea of Roblox having a system that automatically converts USD to robux, and vice versa, would make supporting USD platform-wide easier. It’d just be a function() a currency is passed through, right?
There is a sea of replies in the threads on this subject; maybe my questions have been answered adequately, maybe not. I’ll be sure to read through them. 
Eh you’re kinda right tbh. Got kinda lashed out. Probably wasn’t a good idea to call the engineers working on this change “lazy”. However, I still stand by my point on the other stuff.
I think you underestimate the value some plugins have. I won’t speak for anyone else, so I’ll speak for myself with Nexus Unit Testing. You don’t need a plugin to easily run automated tests you write, nor do you need to write tests, but it really pays for itself. The up-front cost (which in this case is free if you get the source code) and time to write tests covers itself many times over later one when you are re-testing or testing rare conditions. It especially pays for itself when it points out a problem with your data saving code that would lead to data loss during an outage. It has easily helped enable tens of thousands of dollars in revenue for just me.
Not all plugins should be paid. For now, there is probably going to be a mix of deserved and garbage plugins up for a while until the actually worth-it ones rise to the top. Paid plugins will give people an incentive to make better plugins, as well as compete with others at a better price. Just give it time, and realize free plugins are not going away.
Thank you! I appreciate the quick update, can confirm uploading free assets (plugins, etc.) is working fine.
This depends on what your market is. Most creators have not thought about this question. If your target audience is more specialist, then likely not, as these people trend older. If you were trying to sell a scale/offset converter to kids though? Yeah, absolutely.
So really, you can’t answer this question without defining your audience.
The old system misrepresented value hugely, I’m not quite sure why you see it differently. The discrepancy between retail Robux rate and DevEx + marketplace fee combined rate is 8x - that is to say, if I earned 10 USD, you will have paid 80 USD. We saw this in practice when I adjusted my own prices. So yes, it misrepresented value by a factor of eight.
You guys hated that when they tried to push it for UGC.
I agree that earnings should be accepted as payment.
Yes.
This is actually not true both theoretically and experimentally. See:
The friction is upfront when you connect your card, just the same as if you were purchasing Robux in the first place. You’re only seeing it because you’re interacting with the system for the first time, and haven’t interacted with the other onboarding for years.
It wouldn’t really change that much, it’s a visual change. You’re still going through the same backend.
It’s a little more infrastructure than that most likely, and it’s also important that Roblox ensures that function is carefully tuned to not destabilise the entire Roblox economy. So I think it’s understandable that they chose their scope for this first release and left this out of it, though I think it’s time for them to look into implementing earnings as payment.
I think I can one-up you on that. That is $2,000/year for a whole 3D modeling software suite. At work, we’re going through some pain with a testing tool called Karate. It is just a runtime + autocomplete for running automated tests; it doesn’t even write it’s own user interface. It is $640/year just to be able to run individual test and show up in IntelliJ’s test viewer. Proper tooling is very expensive, and Roblox had no means to this until today. To make anything reasonable, we had to go off-platform.
not a bad feature, imo it should also have a robux feature tagged alongside it with maybe a 10-15% increase over the usd amount to encourage more usd sells (like a discount). i have good hopes with how this turns out in the future
well its impossible for me to buy plugins now
I was saving up for a certain InCommand but now all that goes to waste
Yeah, but you not being a beneficiary of the change doesn’t mean there are no beneficiaries of the change. I sympathise with your anger, and I do think that it’s wrong that you can’t get paid things anymore. I want to help fix that, but we can’t start by making those sorts of assertions.
Does the use of Robux still work with those that have a price, or does it get rid of the option as a whole?
I completely understand your point. I didn’t quite understand what you meant above but I think I do now.
In fact, I think I can say the same thing for one of Elttob’s plugins: InCommand. I think it’s up for sale for 20$ now. And I think it’s worth it.
Like InCommand, some plugins are really worth their price, the thing I’m worried about is a lot of people’s ability to buy them is fading away due to the economical and different problematic scenarios I’ve mentioned above.
I think we are on 2 different problems: You want to get the full price of your plugin (understandably), while I want developers to be able to purchase plugins regardless of their financial status or at least have an easier time buying them.
I do not believe this platform is like UE or Unity where there are professional studios and companies working here, this platform is mostly made out of young developers who mostly do not have access to USD.
The important part here is that we need to be able to find a solution to both of these problems. A potential solution I think that may work is Regional Pricing, but I need more re-search and info on to create more solutions so I’ll leave it as that.
From my knowledge, many Roblox developers aren’t making $40 an hour—especially developers under 18.
Roblox’s developer community is not up to industry standards, we should stop the comparison.
Your point here comes down to a philosophical question: what is the purpose of the Creator Store? Is it to satisfy as many consumers as possible, or to enable as many creators as possible?
The way you answer that question changes what the priority is, and you can’t maximise both. Not under capitalism, anyway.
(but I don’t think that debating capitalism is something that would cause an actionable change on Roblox’s behalf, given that Roblox do not currently hold any world superpower status.)
Does that mean we should be closed off to even aspiring to help out our fellow creators so that they can’t ever achieve anything close to a living for themselves? Because the industry isn’t special; it’s merely paying what people need to live.
The way a lot of the folks here are responding largely reaffirms my belief that not a lot of people here have studied the negative impact that the plugin store had on developers who made plugins. People spend hours, days, weeks and even months on some of the things you use so that you can save time on your issues.
If your concern is paying for stuff, please just use free plugins, or just use studio, you have all that you need to make a game even without plugins, they’re simply meant to save you time.
Ideally this will lead us to higher quality plugins going forward, and because plugin devs don’t need to contend with certain brutal taxes, in some cases it may result in prices going down on some things.
Respect the people who do their best to make your life easier.