DevEx: Important understanding of the difference in the 24.5% pie chart figure and the 17 cents per dollar SEC filing
Hello, I am a developer and this is not an official Roblox notice or anything like that, this is a post correcting propaganda claiming Roblox is lying to developers.
A viral video that is going around and hurting the Roblox brand due to it’s misconceptions and viral spread amongst old-guard (especially indie) video game developer communities is trashing Roblox for a number of things. However this post is going to focus on developer devex cuts, and the discrepancy noted in the title.
This is time stamped at 9:34
“while on paper Roblox developers get that 24.5% of the games sales, in reality, it’s even lower. If we look at Roblox’s published records, we can read that for every 1 dollar Roblox earns in bookings, only 17 cents make it back out of the ecosystem to developers.”
This is nefarious, as it implies Roblox developers are being lied to about how much the Robux they can exchange will earn them. Reality check: The developer exchange is constant, we always make 350$ per 100k Robux exchanged.
To add to this video’s misleading tone, the previous minute of the video explains exactly why there is this gap, but with no connection to the egregious claim “while on paper”. 8:26 - 8:51
“In making the minimum withdraw amount so high Roblox is just increasing the chances you won’t hit that cap, and so will just plow the money [he means Robux] back into Roblox. Whether that’s buying games or cosmetics or saving up to advertise your next game. Lots of Roblox developers even use their Robux to pay other Roblox developers to work on their game, and if they’re not smart about how they pay those developers, Roblox will take a cut of that paycheck too.”
All of the above is correct, and this means the video creator understands why not all Robux earned make it out into $, but nevertheless he still uses the line “while on paper”.
It’s flat out insulting as 9:56, this video claims that not even Roblox veterans understand the Roblox economy, “what % of the pie their taking home”. Again, the devex rate is flat, we know exactly how much $ we are going to get as long as we keep the amount of Robux to exchange.
What explains the discrepancy then? At 9:03
“Roblox buys Robux from users [He means developers] at a very different rate than it sells them [to players] so with drawing [exchanging] 100,000 Robux doesn’t get you $1000, it gets you $350. Think about it, if your assets in Roblox become substantially devalued, only in the moment you take them out of the platform, why not keep them on the platform incase you need them one day. And so tons of Roblox don’t ever make it off the platform, instead they go round and round with Roblox taking cut after cut.”
Now all of this is true, the next sentence though, is when he says the infamous “while on paper” line, explained previously in the thread.
This difference is due to Robux-earning developers that never cashout (in no particular order):
- Purchase catalog items (either fullly sunk into Roblox owned items or passed onto the UGC creator via the UGC fee)
- Purchase gamepasses / dev products with (30% fee passed on to a new developer)
- Robux that is paid to onsite commissions without a group (30% loss). With a group there is no Robux lost as it was already applied when coming into group funds.
- Earned Robux that goes back into advertising (games, groups, clothing)
- Robux left inside accounts that quit, take long breaks, or keep in account for other reasons.
Understood from a LawFirm perspective (Time stamp relevant):
