Group payout delays are unreasonable for any sustainable developers

[Mullets_Gavin (Mullets)]

As a developer, it is impossible to pay out contractors immediately now due to the group payout limitations. I am one of many developers who use groups to payout contractors and usually do one-off commissions or payments. The user has 0 reasons to remain in my group, I just want to pay them and move on.

The payouts are extremely annoying and provide absolutely terrible UX with a message of “User is new to group and not yet eligible for payouts. Please try again later.”

What am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to tell my contractor “haha sorry you have to wait until Roblox unlocks funds to be payable to you haha” No, this is not acceptable. Most recently I commissioned some art and went to go pay the artists, but I was hit with this. I then have to explain to the artist that Roblox is preventing me from paying them out and somehow make this seem like I’m not scamming them. The payout limitation is really stupid and needs to be re-evaluated for developers who religiously contract out work for one-off commissions.

[EncodedLua (Juniper)]

If Roblox expects developers to use their economy instead of USD transfer through Venmo or PayPal, this needs to be addressed. It’s very frustrating to have to deal with a two-week cooldown for payouts.

[Operatik]

Aren’t you supposed to wisely decide a budget initially before commissioning? I suppose that you were supposed to load the funds far before starting to contact the contractors. It is usually better to plan a budget ahead before running this down, but some people choose to run the commission instantly without the funds ready due to interests.

There might be an issue with the funds being pending, because some people are not even prepared to set a budget before starting to contact other developers, it is normally the other way where they ask first and then insert the budget in.

[PeZsmistic]

That is not the problem. Reread OP. Users new to a group cannot receive payments until some time has passed.

[Operatik]

I’ve must have misread then, but anyways, I can perceive this issue.

Anyways, what could go wrong if there was no restriction on this?

[chesse20 (ChesseThe FluffyWasp)]

The restriction was put into place because people keep joining groups solely to get payouts from robux survey sites and websites where you can buy illegitimate(from botted clothing, etc) robux cheaper than roblox sells “legit” robux to you for, so the restriction was put into place ostensibly to make it harder on the people doing that, but now devs also have to deal with the delay unless their contractors join the group a week before they get contracted.

[Dev0mar (Omar)]

The payout delays are extremely inconvenient.

The other day I asked for some of my payment to be sent to a friend (as I owed him for other services) however the group owner wasn’t able to pay them for two weeks after they joined, so the money just sat there as we had to wait for the delay to clear up.

If developers are supposed to rely on Roblox to be a way of financial support, this type of thing cannot happen and should not be happening…

[sanjay2003 (Sanjay)]

I agree but, I don’t see this being changed anytime soon. Contractors should honor the system how it is and work through the delays instead of fighting it.

Typically when you bring someone on, at-least now, you have to consider the delays as part of their contract of when they’ll get paid. I usually hold them in the group for a certain amount of time before their term actually starts to work through the delays.

It’s a major inconvenience but, it was brought with good reason in the fact that people were heavily abusing group funds. It sucks that the desperation of some people make it harder for developers to get further on the platform or help launch other people’s careers but, it’s Roblox. Should be expected by now tbh.

I’d also point out that when you get a paycheck in real life (via a wired transfer in the US), it’s held for a certain amount of time before it’s transferred to you. So, the argument of “financial support on the platform” is a bit irrelevant given that like a bank, you have to work around it. I’d also like to say yet again, I agree with most of the posts here. This sucks. Working around stuff sucks.

Can’t groups who scam get around this for having their member’s wait two weeks?

[unix_system]

I was completely unaware of this change - why was this not announced? It is critical to my need as a user who earns money from this platform that any changes that are made that could, even if staff might not agree, impact on how I or the studio I am in operate.

I just do not understand why I am only learning about this now. I understand that Bots & Spam has a difficult challenge, however there still needs to be documentation work completed about features added onto this platform and they absolutely need to be shared with end users, particularly when money is involved.

I’m not going to argue the merits or cons of this, however I will say that this is going to be a gross inconvenience that will make it more difficult to conduct business on this platform, even if in a small way.

[Mullets_Gavin (Mullets)]

@sanjay2003

I’d also point out that when you get a paycheck in real life (via a wired transfer in the US), it’s held for a certain amount of time before it’s transferred to you. So, the argument of “financial support on the platform” is a bit irrelevant given that like a bank, you have to work around it. I’d also like to say yet again, I agree with most of the posts here. This sucks. Working around stuff sucks.

Roblox isn’t a bank. They pay me for my services, I am not depositing money to hold it on the platform. Any arguments to defend this from a developer standpoint are ridiculous. Instead of defending this decision made by Roblox, you should support the request to change it.

I should never have to work around getting paid for my services I’ve provided to the platform. I should never have to work around paying contractors either and forcing them to wait ~2 weeks to payout. On top of this, DevEx takes a week or more (if you’ve ever DevEx’d, you know what I’m talking about) which then pushes your money received from 1-2 weeks into 3-4 with this atrocious group payout delay wait.

Intentions don’t matter if the developers who create the games on the platform are also subjected to to these policies. No “major inconvenience” should EVER be acceptable for a platform like Roblox which has publicly announced numerous times that they want to foster studios dedicated to creating Roblox games.

[sanjay2003 (Sanjay)]

Robux has some level of monetary value and you have to protect something like that with dumb safeguards. I’m not supporting a decision made by Roblox. I’m actually doing the opposite. However, you have to be realistic. You can’t demand change when the sole reason to why this exists in the first place is to act as a safeguard. The likelihood of them reverse this, given their long history, is incredibly low.

In my head, I rather there be safeguards to what can be earned than to see other groups use pyramid schemes to earn robux and essentially cheat the system. With the old way, you could literally join a group and transfer your entire fund to some random player. If you look at the opposite spectrum of this, where the majority of young people fall (I.e getting their accounts hacked because, surprise, they’re ignorant), it’s pretty easy to see that this becomes an issue.

So with that being said, I will note that for a platform that hates to be known as a “kids” platform, it’s a shame to see them actively treat their developer’s as kids and I am also disappointed in this change like I stated numerous times in the post that you responded to.

I just know that they won’t reverse this simply because, there’s a few ignorant people on this platform that make life harder.

There’s definitely a better way to go about this issue and the way that Roblox did it is incredibly restrictive and furthermore, wrong.

I think in this day and age, solely relying on Roblox as a your only income stream is incredibly risky because of dumb stuff like this and the way that Roblox governs itself around developers is appalling.

Smarter developers use this platform to gain an audience and move somewhere less restricting. Visibility and traction. Then, use that to establish your own freedom.

[M_caw (Macaw)]

I make art and have made Robux off of it. If someone wants to pay me, they can usually just put Robux into their group, and pay me with a 30% tax. With the advent of this change, this quick transaction worth around 17 dollars now takes two weeks to process and there’s no way around this. Seriously? Since when has this been seen as acceptable?

Using this same scenario, the user can simply buy a gamepass/dev product I’ve created for the same amount of Robux with the same tax of 30%. Now I know that for those who earn Robux from group-related transactions (clothing or a game) this situation does not apply, but for those in which they use a group simply as a way to transfer Robux, this method starts to look far superior.

And so, if I have two methods which do literally essentially exactly the same thing, why in the world would you create such a delay when I can do the process in a few days instead of 2 weeks? I get that the intention is to stop money laundering but this is not the solution.

If Roblox wants users to, as previously mentioned, use it’s own currency, Robux, as a legitimate form of monetary transfer, it has to stop making it so unappealing and be almost absolutely useless. There’s one of the main appeals for using services like Paypal- there is a much lower fee and a significantly smaller delay.

To add on to the reasons to use a third party service to transfer money, many innocent groups have been locked for doing ordinary transactions. If you add this onto the delay, group payouts begin to look not only useless but dangerous. Roblox, do you really want people to have this view on group payouts? Can we really not use this feature for it’s intended purpose?

Having to join a group preemptively and stay in there for the majority of a month so that I will be paid, once, is such, such, such terrible UX. At the current moment this is change is just hurting developers.

I believe that Roblox can find an alternative.

Thank you.

[mew903]

Reviving this topic because it’s extremely annoying, having contractors who have completed work but I cannot pay them for X amount of time because they hadn’t joined my group beforehand.

@sanjay2003

With the old way, you could literally join a group and transfer your entire fund to some random player.

I fail to see why this is inherently a bad thing

Edit (March 14, 2022):

Coming back to this, I can’t get over how bad the user experience is here. It gives you NO indication, much less any useful information, regarding how long you’ll need to wait to give the desired user their payout.

This is another band-aid solution to a problem that Roblox obviously doesn’t have the money and/or resources to fix. In the scope of this specific problem, it’s not a huge issue, but there’s a long list of similar fixes for similar problems. These half-solutions only work against the Frankenstein codebase that Roblox is working off of, and investors will find out eventually.

[iGottic]

Contractors shouldn’t be in situations like this. Enough said.

[mew903]

It has now been exactly two weeks and I still cannot send payouts to the users I need to pay. Still no indication on how much longer I’m going to need to wait other than

This is bad. Whoever came up with this should feel bad. I see no way anyone could defend the UX here.