That small change is magnified by the exchange rate for me, so yeah a 0.5 raise would defiantly be beneficial
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There would have to be something clearly wrong with ROBLOX’s infrastructure if ROBLOX could not improve DevEx rates when they are already taking a minimum 72% cut.
Please keep in mind ROBLOX already cuts out chunks of income from various sources, a sizeable sum of catalog items have flushed out more money than top earning games have in a year. Same with the fact that ROBLOX taxes are still 30%, which is huge. After the transaction has passed twice, the money would be already 51% gone. Continuing on, not all developers DevEx and there are countless developers who are denied their DevEx. Don’t forget you have to pay for OBC, still. However with all that it should be acknowledged that ROBLOX like other companies has million dollar expenses in countless sectors we would hardly know anything about (servers/company tax/advertising/etc).
Here is a quote from an interview with builderman from 2010 on a relatively unknown ROBLOX:
DB: “[ROBLOX] it’s an interesting area, and you need generally high quality to compete against all of that.” … “high performance, high gameplay quality, high scalability, high intuitiveness – that kind of stuff.”
I would like to use this to say that for at least 9 years ROBLOX has had “high scalability” of the platform as one of its focuses, one of these concerns they should respect is not only the scalability of their system but of the actual market itself. That with an increased market size, ROBLOX would be considering competition and the interests of those who wish to take the platform seriously. With such concerns (don’t underestimate Epic Games Store which is a highly enticing very competitive new developer platform), scalability in as a focus and DevEx rates being so held back makes now the best time to incentivise the people who create experiences on this platform to continue to stay by offering them a great return.
Personally, I would love to continue working on ROBLOX but my life situation is tough and as I come of age, the less viable it becomes; more hanging on strings. These changes are all possible. I wish ROBLOX goes through with them for I would hate to be forced to quit. In time we will be faced with ROBLOX or a traditional job, and you have to grip the reality that if you aren’t financially supported on ROBLOX then attempting to continue will only be a struggle. Let us hope this isn’t caused by draconian cuts on the work of ones own fruits of mental labour.
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Though i’d love improved exchange rates, it would seriously mess up my spreadsheets lol
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Its just the price you have to pay to receive even more pay.
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Yes, Roblox has expenses. I don’t know what their margins are but i’m very sure they are raking in quite a bit of profit. Which is what we want, it allows the platform to grow! The issue is, a very small % is going towards developers because that’s all a top developer needs to be motivated to not go learn how to create games on another platform. Though, Roblox is pushing for larger scale games which will take larger teams. I do see an increase in DevEX within the year, I think they will eventually start sending closer to 50% our way to empower our visions.
Platforms like Google’s Stadia will drive competition in this area as well. It’s simply not going to be possible to keep developers on the lower end forever. We’ve made <24% for quite a while. Roblox has the best intentions: Keep Roblox alive. It has required cash to scale from this point and they will soon need to give developers more to scale their content. The last DevEX increase shot the website up quite a bit, you can see the correlation on Google Trends. But it only worked because the company was ready to deal with the increased load from empowering devs more.
I love the business model of Roblox. It will be even more exciting when it’s more in our favor. I’m 90% certain that Roblox could thrive even when giving us 60% - 70% of the profit. Though, it’s unnecessary right now. Maybe even a bad move. It’s all about timing and positioning.
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Stop changing the games page and how players view games and possibly potentially hurting revenue for games if y’all still going to give us payment from 2016
–edit
They fixed games page, but still raise devex plz
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Roblox takes 80.2% of the profits / The developer gets 19.8% of the profits.
Sell rate is less then 0.0035 because you have to account for the 30% tax.
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I think this hit the nail on the head pretty hard. The current DevEx rates can make it difficult to employ the skilled talent you want sometimes because said talent knows they’re worth more than what the developer (aka Roblox) can pay them.
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Maybe for large studios, but 100,000$ a month could support about 16 programmers (assuming its all programmers of course) with a salary of $72,000 a year (also assuming its stable income), which is definitely good (except bay area of course). I really think if you’re at the point in which you need like say, 30 employees to run a game studio on roblox, you might as well make it outside of roblox. Especially considering working together at that scale already makes it more complicated to do with what team development tools roblox offers (team create is cool, but relying on it by a large team is bad idea)
Another thing for me is I personally don’t want large studios on roblox. It’s a great platform, many kids are learning development on it and giving them a chance to start something, I personally started on roblox as a kid back in 2007, and now i’d say i am decently successful with it. However, making it easier for large studios to work on the platform just makes it even harder for the small folk to have a chance at success, because they have more resources to pump out content.
That being said, money is great. Increasing the devEx rates by a bit would still be nice, though i still think it’d be better invested in roblox employees (as they’re always hiring) to further expand the engine and make it even better to compete against other game engines.
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Yeah I agree and this is the essence of what I’m saying. Even if Roblox’s return rate is good, it needs to be competitive, otherwise entrepreneurs will look elsewhere.
All of us indie developers have an instinct to preserve the Roblox we fell in love with, but I think larger studios are an inevitability. That being said, it’s not like we’ll be forced out. I think indie devs can still find the same magnitude of success, even if the top 50 games become studio games. Plenty of opportunity for smalltime breakouts to gain traction (minecraft, they are billions, etc)
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Thank you for your transparency and response. I was saddened that this thread had lost any traction it had and just got lost. Still waiting for an official or unofficial response on possible plans for DevEx from @Roblox Devrel.
It is crazy to think that $66,000 just got sucked into a vacuum back into Roblox.
Also, theoretically, the $66,000 taken by Roblox ironically went back into you and other interns (obviously not at full amount) while they paid you per/hour to be there to make games as part as your internship.
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Hopeful thinking but these things are decided far above DevRel and the forums and next time rates are changed I imagine it would happen out of the blue.
On the topic of the market fee, I don’t see the point for such a steep one. Any percentage loss would be enough to prevent Robux from freeflowing between accounts willy nilly, as it was designed for.
But, as the others have charted out above, if we also account for the disparity between the going rate for Robux and the DevEx rate, it comes out to the dev earning just 1/5th of the money that’s being put in.
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I wish whoever ran the Video Stars Program and the interactions with the YouTubers worked with Developers. I don’t know how long it took them to achieve the “Star Code” program when purchasing Robux, but nonetheless, they got and done and communicated with the YouTubers.
I heard the communications with the YouTubers and Video Stars Program is very swift and fast, admittedly there are less of them. However, I have an email I sent to DevRel six weeks ago that hasn’t been responded too. DevRel is either understaffed, poorly managed, or both.
I know DevRel isn’t responsible for increasing DevEx rates, but I’ve sent this thread to several DevRel members and it seems they just ignored it. I for one would just like an answer on how likely this may be within the coming year. I would like some transparency and communication. I think that it would be very plausible that they could ask whoever is in charge of DevEx and ask them if this is in the works or has even been considered.
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In response to Grace’s "In response to Developer’s Feedback on Developer Exchange"
To start off, I want to address how this replied completely killed the conversation of raising Devex. We got presented with ““Yeah we’d love to do it, but we can’t! So sorry! And the here is why…”” and in my opinion the why were these very vague answers with scarce numbers that don’t actually help us and are seemed to be rounded and slightly skewed to stop the conversation to make it seem like no way possible DevEx will ever be raised which was completely unfair to the community.
Now to the actual rebuttal breaking it down point-by-point.
They acknowledged that they saw our posts, but they never build off of it, just a “cool thanks for sharing” and they never really go back and fully consider the effect of DevEx on peoples personal lives and businesses. They never address how Roblox Studios are bottlenecked and cant expand, David himself said he’d love to see big 100 people teams, but Roblox doesn’t even seem willing to even take the first step to make this possible.
No one is arguing how payouts are made, in fact, the service is pretty nice. Most DevEx request take around a week and the team behind them are amazing. They respond in fast and mannerly time whenever I have issues.
If you’re growing the player base, you’re still not increasing the DevEx rate… still the same rate, just more people buying Robux which goes back into Roblox…
You guys can’t always share the conversations and rarely conversations ever happen… The last time the VP of DevRel even posted was a year ago prior to her response to us. I personally can’t trust that anything is happening because barely anything in the works gets communicated, and I think a lot of people share that opinion. Yeah, I know, they might not tell us things because NDA or because they fall through, but HOLY COW, even if you want to communicate to DevRel you HARDLY EVER get a response and if you do its WEEKS later.
(More critiques about DevRel communication in this thread)
The specialist I’m assuming is only available to top devs, which defeats the purpose of @theamazeman Middle-Class dev arguments. Also, not to toot my own horn but I think I know how to monetize my own game a lot better than the “specialist”… and I can always get a second opinion from my peers. Also once again the issue isn’t how many robux are in our group funds or accounts, it’s at the rate we exchange it.
As the wise poet Blueface says “You can’t show me how to make a mill’ ‘til you make a mill’”
This is the part of the post that shuts down the conversation. Nobody can point at any flaws in this part. She gave us the numbers… and nobody can say she’s wrong because we don’t have access to see if this is true or not. I personally think these numbers are exaggerated or skewed, or not completely accurate, something just doesn’t add up… We still only get 20% of one robux, it goes through the 30% tax and the exchange rate. These numbers are just so hard to believe, the only thing right about this paragraph is, yes, you guys can do a way better job of articulating the prices/cost in the future.
This is the only part of the post that actually addresses the exchange rate, the rest is just fluff, and the response is “No its not possible because of these percents”.
I haven’t seen much dialog with DevRel and the community recently and from my perspective, it’s been a silent month. This is me trying to forward the dialogue with the community.
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Even if the percentage is tight and they are unable to move right now the growth of the platform will expand the pie and make higher rates possible.
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You gloss over the fact that within the 2 years of the last devex rate raise the platform expanded exponentially and actually reported to be profitable along with gaining millions of dollars in investments.
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Totally true! Of course that comes with increased operations cost but I’ve experienced enough exponential growth in tech businesses to know that revenue grows much faster than expenses.
They gave a vague answer as you say and people accepted it. Otherwise this topic would be much larger. That sucks. It will take much larger / organized approach to get a larger share of the pie.
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From my point of view, the only ones who can push for a change are the very top devs. berezaa seems to be the only one who is trying to do so and while important he is not ranked in either on what I think roblox considers the most important categories: Popular & Top earning.
Top members of this categories see very good returns from their work so they dont have as much incentive to push for a change (which may be a risky and demanding move to the eyes of someone who is already very well allocated)
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The best solution to not making enough is to make games that make more money lol
Back to Studio until the next wave of “we want our R$”! Good points.
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Just a recent thought
Would it be possible for Roblox to multiply the devex cashout rate by 1/0.7 times?
Because 30% is the minimum tax regardless of any purchase on the entire platform. Multiplying it by 1/0.7 would partially remove the minimum tax , without putting recursively taxed robux into account. (So only Robux that’s directly spent on something devexable, right after it has been purchased.)
And because you’re only affecting the rate at cashout, the tax could just reside like usual for premium and non-premium members.
The effects of such a change would only be limited to successful devex attempts.
Such a change would make the baseline cashout of 100k robux to 350 USD into 100k robux to 500 USD.
This change that only resides at the very end of robux’ presence in the market could incentivize developers a lot more.
(Something else I thought of)
I’m not sure how much USD gets spent on average before a single baseline cashout can be done since the purchase rates of Robux very per platform (and perhaps country too), and then there are also cases of Robux being earned from trading hats etc…
The best method I could think for approximating this would be by creating a table of all possible methods of acquiring robux besides: selling clothing, gamepass and developer products.
The table would include duplicates of the same processes but with different amounts of USD spent for every 100k robux acquired. At the end the average of all those methods could be displayed.
This isn’t a great estimation to say at the very least, but I don’t know of any other methods.
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