I’m glad that these things are being considered and discussed, we all have a common goal to see Roblox grow as a platform, while I don’t agree with some of the messages in the Official response I won’t go into that, because I believe that things will get better over time.
More importantly where else can I get a Specialist and Analytics on any other platforms?
Seriously please sign me up I need this badly
Thank you for the clarification! 
One thing I would love to see in DevEx isn’t just increased rates but better communication. I attempted to contact the DevEx or Roblox in general on more than one occasion and was met with a bot or lack of information every single time. One of these responses actually linked me to the roblox forums, which, do not even exist anymore. The lack of solid responses especially related to dev ex have cost me roughly 460k robux as well as throwing out a entire game. I think that it’s extremely unfair we can’t contact the place which we rely on for a large share of our income.
If your curious how the lack of communication cost me send me a direct message as I feel it may be kind of off topic to this post.
I see roblox frequently topping charts on google play & apple, can this not be negotiated with them at all?
I doubt it. If Roblox got a special exception then everyone wants to get those lower fees.
A few weeks late (since I don’t check this place out that often) but if I remember it correctly Roblox’s playerbase is made up out of almost a majority of mobile/tablet users. 35% if not more. So if you end up making games or have existing ones, definitely cater to that market you could end up doubling your income if you play your cards right if not more.
:^)
Thank you this explains a lot better about the money and where it’s being placed into.
Thanks for the clarification ROBLOX!
It isn’t the prevalence of the target audience - Roblox has millions of daily users and top games see hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of visits a day. The issue is that despite this huge playerbase, there is still not enough funding for proper studios, making Roblox a less viable platform for long term game development companies.
I also think that Roblox should get rid of the OBC membership requirement for DevEx… For anyone that is trying to DevEx, you are paying Roblox money in order for them to give you money… This makes no sense at all. It would be the equivalent of having your boss tell you that you can’t get your paycheck until you give him / her $20 (every time you are getting paid). For those that have Lifetime OBC (which is unavailable today), they would have nothing against the OBC requirement because it doesn’t affect them whatsoever. But for everyone else (especially developers trying to Dev Ex the minimum amount), it adds up over time. So developers earn like 18% of the total revenue and on top of that, we have to pay for OBC each time we cash out.
What will Roblox do to satisfy these developers that provide games on Roblox? Over 50 top Roblox developers went out of their way to post their concerns about the Developer Exchange. The issue isn’t about transparency, it’s about Dev Ex rates (which has no solution addressed whatsoever).
And the list keeps going…
FYI: Those percentage numbers are real. They just aren’t presented very nicely which makes them look non-legit, but they are legit.
(Not responding to the rest of your post, just the claim the numbers are fake)
Funding will always be a problem for startups and cannot be pinpointed to a single cause. It isn’t fair to complain about lack of transparency from Roblox and at the same time propose large changes to the DevEx program.
I think one of the main issues is that it’s hard to quantify exactly how many of those millions of visits are the work of Roblox’s platform and services plus how much revenue would be seen if the game were to be deployed elsewhere. It’s easy to see how much % Roblox takes from the revenue but hard to draw the line on Roblox’s contribution to a single game’s success because it varies wildly on a case by case basis. Furthermore, as previously stated, Roblox is the ultimate locked in ecosystem so it’s not like anyone could actually feasibly port their Roblox game somewhere else.
From this, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that one problem lies in the discrepancy between the games that Roblox overpays and other games that Roblox underpays in terms of development cost. To be clear when I talk about what Roblox pays the games, I am talking about the net gains/losses a game would incur if it were to be released somewhere else instead. Let’s be real: there are some games that Roblox props up and other games that Roblox brings down (financially) which is why this whole thread exists. Again, it’s not easy to really measure these metrics especially without any concrete numbers. I could be wrong because this doesn’t take Roblox’s audience itself into consideration either.
I’m all for supporting developers for their hard work and game studios, it’s just that I think there really isn’t enough information to justify simply increasing DevEx rates by an arbitrary amount.
I mean, maybe not a single cause? But if up to 50% of your profits are going somewhere other than you, I’d say that’s a pretty big cause.
Why not?
Look at Unturned
Roblox definitely has that information though, and they’ve chosen not to release it, soooo…
On the flip side, what are you gaining from the platform as consequence of that cut? What is your target audience or how good is the game’s monetisation? When you say profits, I assume you mean revenue because no matter what, a lot of it will always go towards things like server maintenance/fees and advertising. It’s also incorrect to say that all of those profits are “yours” because that’s the reason Roblox has to take a cut in the first place. Please read the rest of my post as this was the main thing I was trying to explain.
Because the DevEx rates are carefully constructed around Roblox’s existing ecosystem and a lack of information means we cannot do the same.
Unturned was never a Roblox game; it was only a successor to a Roblox game with the same game mechanics by the same creator. Even otherwise, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a very common thing to do at all.
Which is why this thread exists. Roblox as far as I’m aware isn’t really obliged to release this information explicitly either. Regardless, the reality is they haven’t changed the DevEx rates for the past few years and they’re the ones who do have the information necessary to make the decision.
yup. it gets even better when you can buy OBC to DevEx, then get rejected because you really have no idea if you’ll be accepted or not based on past moderation history. somewhat vague conditions, don’t think it’ll be a problem for me personally but imagining that possibility is frustrating.
It’s a very fair point to make that Roblox of course offers a huge platform to bidding developers, but it’s a two way street - without the developers making the games Roblox would have much fewer players. It’s like saying Steam should take a bigger cut because they host the download files and have a store.
Yeah and Minecraft isn’t the same as Minecraft XBox - it’s just the same game mechanics by the same creator?
Unturned was a port of Deadzone from Roblox to Steam, and it’s a massive success story.
Yeah because doing so would involve them giving more money away, reducing their profit margin - not really something that a business wants to do if they can avoid it. And don’t get it wrong, Roblox is a business, somewhere along the line there are people who have the primary goal of making more money.
There are loads of staff who are genuinely passionate and want to make it a success, but that doesn’t change that fact.
Please don’t assume that every move Roblox makes is good, and that everyone in Roblox has the developers’ best interests at heart. A lot of them do, but not all of them.
And how do you know these numbers are legit exactly?
Lead Top Contributors work closely with the Roblox Staff and can verify any information is accurate. You can trust anything they post, especially over conspiracy theories.
This, I was not disagreeing with. I was just saying that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much of a cut Roblox should take that satisfies and works for everyone (beyond the need for just more extra money).
The line itself between Minecraft and Minecraft Java is very thin and technical as both of them are still being updated mostly in parallel and share the exact same brand and fundamental game. The Roblox game Deadzone cannot be compared to Uncursed like the various versions of Minecraft because the two games were made separately with different costs and resource constraints. Just because a game with better quality did better on another marketplace than a Roblox game with worse quality doesn’t mean the Roblox game itself would have been a success as well. As I stated before, the general point still stands regardless.
I was neither supporting nor refuting their decision (if such a decision even existed). Sorry if I came off that way. However, it is still to be considered that less money that Roblox takes has negative consequences as well although they may not be so direct.
The reason why developers want to have an increase in DevEx rates is so they can make developing on Roblox as a full time job and have bigger teams. At the moment nether of these are possible with the current DevEX rates as developers aren’t getting a big enough cut from their games profits.
This is true to an extent. If Roblox suddenly increases the DevEx rates so developers earn 50-60% of their games then their will be a negative impact on Robloxs profits. However if they increase the DevEx rates so that developer earn about 35-40% of their games profits first and then slowly start increasing it over a period of time, then Roblox wont have such a big negative impact. This is due to the fact that developers will start to adapt to the new DevEx rates meaning that their games will start to be better because they can work on their games more often. This should increase the profits from the games meaning that Roblox should earn more money. It obviously ins’t as simple as this as Roblox needs to account in lots more things so that they can increase the DevEx rates.