Roblox released that regional price update which broke pretty much every single donation game in the platform
Everything is well explained in other topics, but this happens basically because now you can sell any gamepass to a friend for a different price than average public. However, games can’t detect how much robux a player actually spent in a gamepass and that’s been an awful issue since the beginning of donation games, so even if your friend paid 1 robux the game can only detect the price for everyone else.
The thing is that I found a simple solution with multiple benefits for donation games, however it may be the least wanted thing for developers… I’m talking about using developer products to donate other players. They’re essentially not gamepasses so they’re immune to the regional prices update. Even if regional prices were added to them in the future, the ProcessReceipt API does tell you how much the player spent. Besides that, they have more benefits because how they work:
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They can’t be exploited to fake donations like with gamepasses because of the api I already mentioned. With gamepasses you only can detect when the player closed the purchase window, but even if the player already bought the gamepass, if they change the price quickly before closing the window that’s the price that the game will register. At this point this has been solved by many donation games even if it’s annoying to deal with it, but there are still some vulnerabilities that sometimes make issues.
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They can be purchased multiple times without having to delete anything from the inventory. Pretty obvious why; developer products are intended for temporal or instant and stackable benefits, and gamepasses are a one time purchase.
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For some reason you can sell unlimited amount of them in one single game. Roblox lets you to sell no more than 50 gamepasses per game, but considering the purpose of developer products there’s no limit with them which makes sense. Basically players wouldn’t be in need of creating multiple games if they want to have more than 50 items to sell.
So far all of this sounds amazing and inviting, but there’s one more big thing involved, which is probably the biggest benefit for players but worst problem for the developers of donation games as I mentioned before. I’m not so sure, but I believe that developer products weren’t sellable in games that didn’t own them until this update. However, for some reason developer products completely ignore game commission. This means that if they’re selled in a different game than the owning one, the game owner will not get 10% of the price unlike it happens with gamepasses. Instead, this 10% is also given to the player that created the developer product, which means that no matter how good is the solution for all this regional prices thing, putting it in your own game would mean to sacrifice the main income resouce.
There is one game that already implemented this in the donation system, but I’m not sure if any other games would do it too since the main way to profit from a donation game is through game commissions.
Anyways, thanks for reading. Hope it was useful.