I’d be interested in hearing about the possibility of turning Roblox development into a part-time job. As of now it seriously still seems impossible.
You either go huge or go home. And not everyone can go insanely huge. Should that discredit someone’s possibility of making it on Roblox?
I think most developers will be ready to have an opinion on this once Roblox releases more statistics about their revenue and where exactly the money goes.
Until then, developers get 25%, and that’s the only relevant thing us.
Is the BC/TBC/OBC earnings included in this? Or are all of these percents just coming off of our games?
Thank you for quick response to our concerns! I just have a few questions regarding the 24% going out to app stores, etc. From what I know, Mobile app stores only take around ~15% of every transaction with a subscription. I am guessing that you guys do have a subscription, As Berezaa already said the difference in Robux given per dollar amount should already account for the percentage taken. Respectfully, how does that add up to 24%? If so then why is 1,000 Robux on PC 10 dollars, and 800 Robux on Mobile/Xbox 10 dollars?
If so, Developers need another way of making money other then DevEx. My team and I have multiple ideas on fair substitutes instead of raising DevEx rates. Thank you again, Goaldan.
Your response of where this money is going is 87 words, instead of doing a better job of articulating it in the future would be helpful if this could be done urgently.
Reinvestment and employment are extremely important parts of the ROBLOX community and developers need to be aware of it and where this money is going. But at the end of the day ROBLOX runs on developers making games. I think if this current system continues its only going to damage the platform itself, with developers leaving to go to platforms which provide them better deals – as at the end of the day lots of the top developers make their living from this platform.
This post provides more transparency around where the money is going but does not solve the main issue.
While I appreciate the quick response, this was exactly what I expected we would get. It uses the same technique of ‘we agree, but…’ instead of raising proper solutions to proper problems. I understand that it is difficult to maintain these things as such a massive company and that it takes time and money, however, it is ridiculous to think that developers can carry on doing what they love on your platform as the situation currently stands. Analytics only help those with an existing player base, and the removal of the Featured Games page for lesser known devs, even though this was the main audience the sort was intended for after the removal of Tix doesn’t help either. Developers have to spend money on a lot of things, even things like creating audio or linking trailers to their games page. Advertising also costs a lot of money and it is very crowded, so some developers may not see any of that money back. These issues are less prominent for already popular developers (which are a much more valuable asset to your company than up-and-coming developers) and I understand that the features are more catered towards them, but even then there are clear problems that should be addressed in full rather than in simple acknowledgment.
I really appreciate the work that is being put into new features for developers but they don’t drown out the heavy topic of how little developers truly see of the money that they make. I highly suggest fully reading and understanding all of the testimonies given because they really give a good overview of the current problems developers are facing. One that really stands out is Crazyman32’s one.
Thank you for your transparency in some statistics. More talk from staff is a step in the right direction for developers. Often times we’ve been left in the dark when it comes to this topic and many other topics, so this is a start! One of the most important things about Roblox is that we need staff to hear us and take our concerns seriously, and that has been lacking lately. I speak for myself and many others when I say that we hope this improves in the future.
We’ve been curious as to how Roblox allocates money to specific departments and services on the platform; however, these numbers are extremely still vague and unclear. I personally would like more specific statistics of the break down of how Roblox spends their 75% cut.
Speaking on the monetization specialist, I appreciate this change. Better monetized games of course mean more income for developers and Roblox, which is awesome, but this doesn’t affect smaller developers. I’d imagine the specialist only has time to focus on larger scale games that have the potential to bring more of a large scale income for Roblox, and smaller developers would be left in the dark. This isn’t a strategy that fixes the issue, and it doesn’t address the other issues we have brought up.
People in the developer community don’t have security in their career. Roblox is consistently losing talented individuals because they don’t see Roblox as a sustainable career or simply are forced to move onto other ventures because they aren’t able to earn enough. It doesn’t change the fact that outside professional studios and professional developers immediately rule out Roblox because of the noncompetitive rates that Roblox provides. We are losing talented people because of this, and nobody wants to take their place.
A goal mentioned at the developer conference last year was to have a game studio on Roblox with 100 members. Larger game studios and teams are discouraged when exchange rates only support smaller teams and solo developers. People don’t want to take the risk without the capital to provide it, and professional studios outside of the platform immediately see the 20% cut and want to take their ventures elsewhere.
Large teams are also able to spend their time on more well thought out projects that push the boundaries of what we see on Roblox. These are games that people hear about outside of Roblox and bring people into the platform as a whole. People don’t want to spend months on a project that they aren’t guaranteed pay for. If they have the chance to lose thousands of dollars and thousands of hard worked hours without compensation, developers will choose one of two things: choose a less risky project which can get out faster, or leave the platform and pursue it somewhere else.
There’s a lot more to this than what “feels good”. All of these things are impacted when it comes to developer exchange, and one monetization expert will not be able to solve all of these problems.
I appreciate that we’re getting more transparency here than we usually do (although that is not much of a bar to cross), but I still feel uneasy about the longterm stresses & stability of being a developer on Roblox.
Is DevRelations staffed well enough? Why do developers have such a difficult time getting their feedback & needs heard, still, while it seems like the team that’s supporting influencers has been able to create systems to ensure they do better on the platform over the last year?
Even outside of our struggles of payment, I can’t help but notice a trend where frequently-requested developer Studio/web features are ignored for some sort of “vision” or other vague ideal that Roblox seems to hold. It feels like what we need to thrive is constantly swept under the rug in order to achieve a very specific goal that, in the end, are usually features that look cool to the outside or serve as something Roblox can boast about on the platform end, but serve very thin uses as far as actual game development goes. Games are the biggest part of Roblox but making games on Roblox feels like working for a phantom that doesn’t know what goes into making them.
Why don’t we ever know what’s coming next? When big, non-optional changes happen, what do we do when we only hear about them a couple weeks in advance? What about features that top developers have been asking for for years- why does so much of it fall through the cracks, leaving frontpage games to rely on hacky coding practices and features Roblox no longer supports properly? How will a financial expert help us thrive on a platform that is, currently, mainly rewarding lootbox unboxing ‘simulator’ games? Why does so much platform feedback, even from top earners, take sometimes 6 months at the least to even be “looked into”?
As Roblox scales up on nearly every front, I can’t help but feel like the people who make the games are being left in the dark.
What this sounds like to me is that Roblox’s business model depends on underpaid evening and weekend developers to function and that there isn’t enough money in the market to support what Roblox wants to do otherwise. I’d suggest that while transparency may help appease this current movement, it will not stop the talent from leeching. What is required is a reallocation of resources. I’m not aware of the fluidity of Roblox expenses but if it does not happen then the existing trend will likely continue and that is just the nature of the market and the destiny of Roblox.
Roblox is in a unique position where it hasn’t attracted developers – It has grown them! I was one of those who started on Roblox 11 years ago as a 11 year old, and as such have a natural affinity for Roblox that I’ll probably never lose. However, the fact of the matter for an increasing number of us is that the numbers don’t add up with Roblox.
So, is Roblox’s destiny written in the stars (market), or is it waiting for you to make the move?
I was under the impression that $10 on any platform gave you 800 R$ if you did not own BC, otherwise 1k R$. Is this still not the case anymore?
I have noticed that recently we are being given more answers to questions and concerns that the community as a whole is bringing up, and I appreciate that a lot. Although I think there are a few instances where this is not the case, Roblox’s transparency about these things provide insight in places I certainly wouldn’t have thought of before.
Thank you for telling us exactly how money is spent, and although it’s a bummer rates can’t currently be increased, I am glad that the money is going back into the platform to improve the experience for everyone. 
I think everyone can appreciate the transparency shown here with the cost breakdown, however the problem is pretty plain and simple in that there just isn’t enough money going to developers. Speaking from my 9 years on the platform - I haven’t made any games that are remotely successful, but I know the amount of effort and resources it takes. I pour my heart and creativity into making games on Roblox as I’m sure many others do, and I really REALLY would like to continue doing this. However, as time goes on and you start having to pay for more things in real life - the reality is that 99% of the time you just don’t make enough to sustain yourself. I feel as though those who move off the platform would rather not, but they are forced to.
Perhaps Roblox could work with developers and users to figure out what resources are the most valuable and which are really not used much in order to figure out where costs can be cut, and more money can be allocated to the Developer Exchange. I really do think this is crucial to the success of Roblox since the developers are the driving force. Thanks for listening to me prattle on, just thought it was about time I voiced my opinion on something 
.
The breakdown of how revenue is being allocated is something that the entire developer community needed to see, so thank you for sharing it! As others have mentioned, a more in-depth analysis would be nice to see.
My biggest fear of the proposed solutions (moneization expert, etc.) is that these solutions will end up catering more to larger studios than the developer community as a whole, which will in turn result in developers leaving the platform. As it stands right now, most teams of developers can only be supported by a front-page game. The issue here is that despite having fanbases and efficient monetization, many games that lack the popularity of the front-page stir and are unable to produce living wages for the developers behind them—and for many of these games, this wouldn’t be the case, were the same game with the same player community and the same monetization strategies being published on other platforms (Discord, Epic…you know the drill).
Now, I know that Roblox provides many great invaluable services to its developer community. I and many others are so, so grateful for these services—but the reality still is this: if developers can pay their bills by creating and publishing games to alternative marketplaces and they can’t do the same with these services, developers will leave. It’s already happening—a quick scroll through Twitter every other day will tell you just as much.
Prove me wrong, but I believe that a DevEx raise is the only real middle-ground. I’m open (and also skeptical) to other solutions to this, but at the end of the day I wholly believe that a DevEx raise is in both the Roblox Corporation and the Roblox community’s best longterm interests. Small developers will be able to support themselves better, the quality of games will see in increase, and instead of the ongoing “developer exodus” that Berezaa described, we may actually see outside developers migrating to Roblox, as Roblox will at last be a viable competitor in the indie platform marketplace.
This has been mentioned a few times throughout the thread and it’s tangentially related to the topic, but a very important way in which roblox can help up-and-coming developers is by improving the capacity of players to discover games:
Take YouTube for example, its really easy to jump from videos you like to another content creator’s and discover new channels. In roblox the main way of getting to know games is through the frontpage (because neither the search bar nor the recommendations work and even if they did, they are so out of the way nobody cares to use them) and ads, which the dev needs to pay for but you need a sizeable amount of robux to even get a few hundred players.
So as a new dev, you just finished your greatest game yet and… nobody ever finds it.
Now we can also argue that is not a problem of players being unable to find new games, but that these new games are not ‘good’ enough which pretty much retroactively feeds to what has already been discussed on this thread: New devs are discouraged, high monetary and skill entry barrier, dwindling veteran pool etc, etc.
Any chance we can at least get the OBC requirement removed or at least brought down to BC? I paid for a full year and just had to drop the last 2 months worth to get OBC so I could cash out.
As an addendum I’d like to say that while having a little more clarity on where the money goes is nice, stating that it’s not feasible to increase the rates because X% amount of Roblox’s share goes to do Y doesnt sound completly fair when at the end of the day Roblox is still taking 75%.
Roblox should see to accommodate the needs of their devs the same way they should accommodate for whatever upkeep costs they have.
So you mention that the developer gets 25%, which is not correct?
I am wondering what Roblox is doing with the extra 5.2% they have left over.
This doesn’t take in the cost of OBC either.
These statistics are for the most inefficient Robux purchases without builder’s club. Purchasing $200 worth of Robux with builder’s club yields about 42.875% going to developers after sales tax. A proper statistic would need to account for the % of Robux earned through builder’s club along with its rate of conversion, the popularity of the different rates of Robux purchases, and the popularity of the different rates of DevEx. I believe this is where they got their 25/75 statistic from, although indirectly (percentages of “what they collect” and what they give to developers should account for these factors).
Wouldn’t robux purchases on the website not have any platform fees like on Apple, Andriod, or Xbox? I understand that you get more robux for your money on the website, but this does not effect developers in a direct way. I guess if your game targets PC users, those PC users would have slightly more spending power, but that’s not necessarily going to translate into higher revenue. I guess its not possible to give a higher payout rate to robux earned from an account playing on PC.
Thought: I wonder what the breakdown is like on PC. How much is direct download Windows, Mac, Windows Store, and Chromebook. Only direct download Windows and Mac would have no platform fees. I assume direct download is by far the most popular, but I assume the Windows Store version is gaining popularity. (Due to people liking the ease of use of app stores.)
