One-time purchase for a tool that makes my life easier for sure, but still not as enough of a requirement that deserves this change. Especially on a platform like Roblox, this will do more harm than good. I made my statement above, that I’m not against creators getting paid more money, but rather how things are being paid.
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Hi Crazydesi & the Roblox marketplace team,
I think it’s great that Roblox is thinking about their plugin developers. More plugin developers earning a livable wage means more committed brain power to creating new plugins and supporting all of us game developers with better productivity tools!
My only hope is Roblox also finds a way to make it rewarding for some to make free plugins targetting newer developers (e.g. a studio onboarding plugin). Since naturally, in a paid model, charging high prices to rich developer teams who depend on the plugins will likely be more profitable.
Side note: if it’s possible, it would be nice to see the Ads Manager robux into ad credit conversion system leveraged for purchasing plugins
NoAlias
Founder @ Novaly.net (we’re hiring | high 5 to low 6 figures USD ^_^)
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Very poor generalization of the topic at hand aswell as a rancid division of developers based on age group.
Being over 18, I can still proudly say that this policy change was only thought out with short-term profits for investors in mind rather than the actual betterment of the platform and its developers. The glaring incomplete regional rollout issues aside, this is a system that only works in the United States.
Any developer or player from countries such as, for example, Brazil or maybe Russia, can attest to just how expensive USD purchases are outside of the US, which in turn would handicap sales from those userbases, and oh boy are they large userbases.
They effectively region-locked paid plugins to the United States at worst and a few extra North American countries at best.
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There were still a lot of solutions they could’ve implemented that would allow us to keep Robux while giving developers more money. I believe this is just a lazy change to “give us what we want”. While this harms more people than what a lot of people think.
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The problem is that having:
- a Robux payments system, and
- a system with a 90% cut as opposed to 70% post-marketplace fee cut
do not mix, because people will instantly just start funneling money through the Creator Store to avoid the tax.
Not to mention, creators are now paid directly in USD through a completely different payments processing pipeline.
I would be interested to hear your ‘easy’ solution to this, because as far as I’m concerned - and I’ve done my research on this because I’ve had to sit through many hours of meetings and sift through a lot of data - the only real way is to envision some new way of converting Robux to USD at some new rate that balances this whole equation out, and which has to integrate into a completely new backend.
That doesn’t sound lazy to me.
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Can somebody tell me if it would be against the rules to make a hub for plugins that people can pay for using Robux?
i.e, a creator hub we own where you can pay for a gamepass and get the plugin’s file.
Off-platform Robux purchases sure sound very TOS-breaking to me. This seems like it would go in the same bucket as black market operation in the eyes of the TOS.
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bro this update is litterally so useless why stop the use of robux? what’s the point of having robux to begin with if we cant even spend it in studio? I litterally only use my robux to help myself in my development and now i cant use them to buy plugins? first the sponsors then the plugins? what next? hats? the same thing that happenned to tix is gonna happen to robux. Thank you roblox for not listening to user feedback and adding updates nobody ask for.
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I do think Roblox should let creators use their earnings as payment, and that’s absolutely a shortcoming of this change. But actually, a lot of people have asked for this change over the years, and the plugin marketplace has kind of dried up in its absence, only serving up the same few extreme-broad-appeal tools that don’t really do anything interesting or specialist because anything more complex than a scale/offset converter isn’t justifiable to develop due to slim or nonexistent returns.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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