Of course, and I am saying they should consider investing more on it instead if they really are to increase the devex rate; considering that there have been alot of issues with the servers and moderations recently even with the 34.8%.
(And please do not take this to another ‘Why do you hate Roblox’ discussion; I am still fine with current, and probably future Roblox)
One problem. Not everyone has a game with hundreds of people on it.
What? What kind of thinking is that? If you have fewer players, there are less players to spend money on your game, and therefore you make less money…? If you want a lot of money on the program, you need a successful game and a successful business. That’s how the real world works too. If you don’t have many players then you don’t make as much money.
Raising the developer exchange rates is not the solution here. The entire system itself needs a reconsideration. The payment itself is quite fair really.
Developers get a massive cut when looked at from another angle:
That said, a portion of the developers posting here (myself included) do not use the developer exchange. You’d think that you would have experience in the DevEx program before posting about why it’s unfair 
DevEx is unsustainable for teams that want to grow big and make big games. This is one of the most fundamental problems when it comes to working on large scale projects on this site. If you’re looking at the rates from the perspective of a solo developer, of course it’s great.
I was going to write a paragraph or two to get my points across, but many of the testimonies in this thread conveys the problem with working in a team better than I ever could.
“Don’t hire too many people” is not a proper counterpoint. There is a huge problem if many top developers can attest to how bad DevEx is for big teams.
Even if we cut down our team by a huge margin as well, only a few of us could get fully sustainable salaries. Please do not assume the worst of anyone by thinking they’re greedy or irresponsible when you don’t know any of their financial situations.
As for the solution? I don’t know, raising the DevEx rates probably won’t do much to change anything, and finding a solution that works for both Roblox and developers is something that is beyond most of us. Communication is key though, and I feel let down by the lack of proper communication between us and Roblox about this beyond some previous instances.
You’d think that the developer exchange would not be sustainable for these people because they are paying full grown ass adults’ salaries?
I do agree with your points. But you have to look at the big picture here. It’s only going to be unsustainable if you are trying to make it be. Hiring a whole team of developers is a death wish.
Well yeah, it wouldn’t be sustainable, there are tons of developers on Roblox who currently rely on this platform for their income. Not everyone can afford to take lower levels of pay after all.
The problem is you need to hire teams of developers in the first place if you want to actually make anything truly ambitious. As it stands right now, it’s better on Roblox to work mostly on your own than in an actual team.
BRUH. Not everybody pays for devs. Most start out solo! Please, logic is involved in this!
I don’t see what your point is? If you don’t have hundreds of players you are not going to make as much money. That’s how it works and that shouldn’t change.
Here we go again…
Honestly, throughout my 4/5 years of developing, I’ve never had a problem with the DevEx rates. DevEx was always a goal and when I finally reached it I honestly can’t say I couldn’t be happier.
While Roblox does a lot of questionable things that we as developers hate (plz public audio roblox), I think that Roblox does a lot of things right. And it’s for these reasons which I am perfectly happy with DevEx rates. For instance Roblox Engine API Reference | Roblox Creator Documentation Roblox has a lot of stuff lol. Ofc there’s going to be those people who say: “[Insert Game Engine Name Here] is 1000 times better than Roblox and yeah I’m using Roblox as a stepping stone and I’m gonna leave this platform” And yet they are still on this platform.
Our last DevEx increase was in 2017.
In the UK, Minimum wage for someone my age in that year was £7.20 per hour. Now it is £9.90 (£11.05 in London).
I’ve always been a fairly small developer who has just about been earning enough to use it as a full time job. By using it as a full time job, I am able to invest over 40 hours a week working on my projects. I work almost completely alone without having anyone assisting with my work outside of a few one-time commissions.
A few months ago I have had to scale my work back on Roblox because getting a minimum wage job serving alcohol has been paying me more money.
Being able to spend less time on my projects is resulting in less frequent and lower quality content updates.
The cost of living is rising at an alarming rate, Roblox will lose many full time smaller developers this way if we are not given a payrise to match inflation.
It is not Roblox’s responsibility to pay you minimum wage. As a developer you a running a business and you are responsible for that business making money. If your game’s aren’t making enough money then that it is not Roblox’s fault. It’s not their responsibility to pay everyone on the platform minimum wage.
No one is saying that roblox should be paying developers some flat rate lol, the main point here is that if dev ex rates were higher and reflected cost of living, it would be a more viable main source of income for more people.
It’s not like there is any expectation of a steady increase in the payout-per-Robux rate, so this comment falls flat. They can’t keep increasing the payout-per-Robux linearly over time since it is a % of gross Robux, not a total amount. DevEx rate tweaks have always been careful, incidental and more like market corrections.
The argument for raising DevEx rates, or at least my argument is, that the cost of living has increased dramatically over the last few years.
I have always been a small solo developer, I love designing my own small Indie games and always have done. I choose to work 40+ hours a week on my creations because I love doing so, not out of greed but out of pure enjoyment. I earn around the same as I did this time 4 years ago however I am no longer able to spend 40+ hours a week on my Roblox work because I have been forced to take up a job serving alcohol to drunk old British men at a local bar in order to keep up paying my rent and my bills. (Minimum wage in the UK has inflated by around 20-25% in the last 5 years)
When Roblox first unveiled DevEx nearly 10 years ago, they said their main reasoning for it was to allow Roblox developers to treat it as more than just a hobby.
I don’t care at all about how much money the big boys make, and I am pretty sure those against DevEx increases mostly cite greedy top tier developers as their reasoning, but I seriously think us smaller developers need some sort of boost. Maybe the first X amount of Robux you cash out in a year could be given a higher rate. Even increasing by 5-10% could be the difference between a small solo developer like me doing what I love doing full time or just as a little weekend hobby.
Roblox still has the same dollar-to-Robux conversions on their Buy Robux page as years ago. There is no inflation to account for on their end and they are not making more dollars on your behalf than years ago if your bottom-line Robux income hasn’t changed much in the same period.
The best way to improve your bottom-line cut sustainably is if Roblox provides you better tools/analytics to improve your game’s retention/monetization metrics and additional revenue streams that are based on other things than Robux transactions.
Roblox has basic scripting and a few quality of life controls. With that being said, quality of life improvements are not an excuse to overtax developers. Roblox takes a 26% for itself, though oddly discounting the 9% it takes for “Platform Investment” and 14% for “Platform Hosting & Support,” which would usually be incorporated as part of Roblox’s income. When included, these bring the cut to Roblox up to 49%.
With that information, the updated chart looks like this:
The company provides the developer with a cut from sales in the region of 26% of the full Robux value, with a whopping 49% fee (bassically 50%).
By contrast, Apple takes its famous 30% fee. Game distribution platform Steam also takes 30% for sales on its platform, with Microsoft and Sony taking 30% for its Xbox and Playstation ecosystems, respectively. Epic and Microsoft take a 12% cut for Windows games.
According to Roblox’s developer pages, it reasons that various fees are taken out of the cost of the Roblox, including a 24% cut for fees to app stores and payment processing, and then its own operating expenses which it breaks up into different segments.
Now Apple’s App Store is 'the good guy’! Wonderful.
And, as usual, developers can develop a full platform like Roblox and earn all the money they want!
There is a major difference between a distributor like Steam and a game platform like Roblox. Steam does not provide servers, infinite datastore space (via DatastoreService) or other networking infrastructure such as optimising matchmaking etc. Comparing these platforms would be like comparing YouTube to file explorer, sure, both can browse video files, yet one actually networks these files out-of-the-box while the other requires manual set-up and expensive costs.
Platform investment is paid back into new features, this money is likely not deemed profit as it gets counted as expenditure aswell. Same with hosting and support. Roblox share likely refers to Roblox’s actual profit-share minus expenditure.
Wrong, a game with 500 ccu can make pretty close to 200k usd a year, half that in the worst case scenario.