I’m making my own UGC system, which unlike Rōblox’s, allows anyone to upload their own hats and accessories, as well as custom packages. Right now, it is far from done.
Players which intend to market their own items will first upload meshes on the Rōblox website. Once done, they’ll enter a game I’ve made to officially create the UGC item. All purchases will have a percentage of their earnings deducted, in addition to the 30% pan-transaction tax. As for how I’ll give each creator their fair share: some sort of automated group-payout system.
To make my ‘catalogue’ viable, I’d like to have these custom items to be accessible in as many experiences as possible. That is; you can wear what you bought in other games. For this reason, I’m seeking developers who’ve worked on popular hangout spots to add the custom UGC system in. No charge will be required on your end, and the codebase is entirely open-source. The only requirement is that players be briefly teleported to my game so as to load the items they purchased. If you’re interested, feel free to get in touch with me. Thank you in advance!
In the meantime, enjoy this UI window I’ve worked on for the game:
Very neat, but there are quite a few places where your plan has some holes.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you’re allowed to pay out players for playing your game. This would certainly be more of a grey area, as these players are (in theory) doing work for the money…but I’ve had enough trouble getting payed out/paying out people for commission work myself and this would be a huge red flag in moderation if hundreds of people were getting payed out marginal amounts every few seconds.
How would this be moderated? I know we bash Roblox and their questionable moderation, but if this gets as big as you hope it will I imagine it would present quite a challenge to moderate. Anyone could upload inappropriate or stolen/copied assets, the latter of which especially you would have little chance of catching in the grand scheme of things. On top of this, most of the items uploaded would probably be very low quality and I imagine your catalogue would somewhat resemble the current clothing catalogue, even if a fee is required to upload the assets.
The scale that would be required for you to pull this off would be immense. I doubt many players would care to purchase an item uploaded to your catalogue of questionable quality, just to be able to use it in a couple games, even a couple hundred games, owing to the fact that all these different people play so many different games. And there’s really not much of a reason for someone to purchase from you instead of regular UGC creators on the Roblox catalogue barring, perhaps, a couple interesting and well-made items from a few talented creators.
I don’t see Roblox accepting some third-party (or maybe second-party?) recreation of their already implemented system, for all the reasons listed above and more*, which would put a damper on your venture if it did manage to get off the ground.
Anyways, if you do have a plan to overcome these obstacles and the countless others that you will no doubt encounter on this endeavor, then I applaud your forward-thinking and look forward to seeing what you create. If not, I suggest you take a moment to consider before putting more time into this.
.*Roblox, like many a mega-corp, like their money. Your plan probably wouldn’t help their bottom line, seeing as you’re basically taking most of the tax out of UGC and pocketing a small fee yourself.
Here’s my cursory answer for each of those concerns:
Nova (and probably other hotels) pay some of their employees. Players will be paid for their purchases, not for their playtime.
If Rōblox can’t manage to moderate their meshes, that’s kind of on them. I’d argue that someone could take King Julian’s tail and strap it onto their front hip, but I anticipate that either that item will be mass-reported to me (if it becomes popular enough) or I’ll have to build manual moderation in eventually; imagine seeing condo attire in a Vibe Station.
#UGCConcepts are a big market, and it sucks that very few competent 3D modellers go noticed.
Items will have a customisable price, which is then paid for by buyers using developer products owned by the group. There is a diverse range of players all over the community, and that includes some niches you’ve probably never heard of. Rōblox’s data stores are scalable, but if I can manage to allocate thousands of people robux via group payouts in a single cycle, that’d be great.
I don’t know the UGC programme inside and out, so I’ll assume creators still pay the 30% tax. Rōblox only take down games that seem to pose a risk to child safety, and not usually to their bottom-line. Item (2) expounds on the greatest of these dangers.
I’ve probably heard of people who were banned for usuing group payouts to sell limiteds, but entrepreneurship is a risk at the end of the day.
Roblox’s end goal is to get full a UGC catalog. This means moving away from Roblox making all the assets and having the players upload them. They’re still in the testing phase of the UGC catalog and keep adding more and more UGC creators to the list.
They are still going to require people to submit a form for it to be able to actually upload UGC, but that would make it so that the catalog is actually getting good / useful UGC versus just being flooded and filled with spam.
Is there any information I can look at to validate this claim? This could put my entire project at stake, so I’d like to see what Rōblox say they propose to do.
I’ve been going to RDC since 2017, they’ve been saying it for awhile. I believe it was during one of the builderman talks during RDC 2019 when they announced the UGC catalog and their dream for the platform.
