I’ve only seen a few games with 500~ CCU make upwards of 200K - you’re pretty lucky. What’s your RPV? If you don’t mind me asking.
Overall from what I’ve seen, Roblox is a bloated and unprofitable company (lost almost 1B in 2022 alone). If I were in charge I’d work on scaling back employee counts and looking into places to save money. Roblox lost 289 million last quarter, which is simply unacceptable.
So as of now, raising the rates is simply impossible. Before this can happen, we need to see Roblox become a profitable company instead of continuing to lose millions of dollars.
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The only problem is that moderation staff is already lacking in some areas, so firing some staff would likely make things worse.
And the reason they’re unprofitable is because the amount of people using DevEx has grown enough to the point where they simply can’t keep up, with this problem only getting worse as more people join Roblox at a increasingly fast rate expecting to make a career from it.
They’ll most likely raise taxes and lower the DevEx rates just to stay afloat later on, but I could see the entire platform going bankrupt within the next few decades if this keeps up.
Firing staff isn’t going to provide Roblox $289M. According to my source here, about $873M was used on Research and Product development alone. As for more work related costs, SG&A expenses(sales, accounting, advertising, management, and admin salaries) made up $414M of total loss.
I do agree however, that something must be done. Roblox cannot feasibly raise DevEx rates until they’re in the green, so they must either cut costs, or make their platform more monetized.
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I think if they change robux tax from 30% to 5% it will already help a lot of people. I still don’t understand why they keep this tax.
If Roblox reduced this fee, when viewed in isolation of the creator ecosystem, Roblox would still be paying more money to developers than before.
The marketplace fee doesn’t magically displace real value, it’s part of the equation of how much value we get in terms of % from end user input.
Both the marketplace fee and the DevEx rates are similar levers they can push/pull to affect the equation of how much developers receive and how much they pay to developers, but it’s the same equation.
There are non-creator benefits to keeping an overhead for marketplace such as providing sinks for the economy and limiting the amount of malicious financial traffic.
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30 isn’t a lot and 5 is way too low. There’s really no reason to be complaining here, since these cuts are usually larger on other platforms such as the App Store. Raising devex won’t solve problems, but rather create more. You have to realize that most top developers are racking in hundreds of the thousands of robux every day. These people make a living off this platform, even though the rate is “low”.
The main problem is: the people that complain about “problems” such as these lack the ability to create a product that is enticing and will make them money. There are numerous ways to create a good product that your consumer will enjoy. You just need the creativity.
Raising the devex rates will screw up financing internally so let them do it when they are ready too.
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When people talk about the DevEx rate or the cuts that Roblox takes as a part of every sale (the latter is admittedly far more annoying than the former for me), they often fail to take into account just how many Marketplace and DevEx transactions take place every single day, and just how many people make those transactions and how much money is thrown around. From that perspective, changing DevEx rates by even five dollars or giving developers an extra 1% of the cut of every sale could easily hurtle hundreds of millions of fixed costs or investment dollars into the developer share. That’s not a bad thing, but it means that sum of money can’t be used to work on the fixes that developers want for the platform, such as improving moderation, pushing better updates, etc. At the end of the day, we have to recognize that Roblox has a better idea of how to divide its resources than we, people who don’t have extremely in-depth access to their financial breakdowns, do.
Something that I want to point out as well is that it’s extremely misleading to suggest that a certain CCU nets you a certain profit margin, whether that margin is high or low. That sort of thing is extremely complicated and can only ever be talked about honestly on a game-by-game basis. You can’t honestly say “if you get 500 CCU, you will earn $200k/yr,” and you also cannot honestly say the opposite. It depends entirely on things like the game genre, the size, material wealth, and personality of the community surrounding the game, the monetization strategy and the cost of purchases, how much of the profits are reinvested into the game, and even small things like the popularity or even the trustworthiness of the developers. You cannot realistically separate these from one another into definitive metrics for success, independent from everything else.
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They should tax people who earn a lot more than people who are starting out