Developers both big and small have made their voices clear here: this is a change people are skeptical-at-best about. I’ve made my opinion known already, I’m not in support of this at all.
Seeing people who have less than 100 players active in a game at once is one thing, but seeing the creator of a 1000+ CCU game expressing their concerns is proof that there needs to be at least some changes before this goes online.
Not everyone who buys Robux or gets Premium is going to be playing Roblox each and every single day, so when it comes to those who don’t, this change is an active downgrade across the board. The old system didn’t have this issue whatsoever. While it had other issues that definitely needed addressed, this new system harms more than it helps.
I’ve decided to write down a list of potential alternate solutions, some minor and some major, that would prove to be infinitely better than this second-to-worst case scenario. The worst obviously being to remove payouts altogether.
Solution 1. just improve upon EBP and scrap this.
I shouldn’t have to explain that replacing a payout model that rewards people based on flexible playtime with a system that rewards people via fixed playtime isn’t gonna benefit everyone. But here goes nothing:
Say that someone’s a big roleplay game nut, but they don’t play Roblox very often. On the days they do however, they play for like 2 hours each session MINIMUM in one or two games. Which sounds more fair: Those two experiences receiving a combined total of like R$40 from the 4/5 days they play, or they get near-maximum payouts because they were the only games played by them?
This scenario may sound a little outlandish to some, but this is practically what I did from around 2015 - 2017. This isn’t a hypothetical, this is a legitimately real scenario that can and will happen with any sort of genre. Not everyone’s gonna be on Roblox every day, so having this act as some sort of reverse Builders Club payout is actively gonna make developers lose Robux no matter their size.
I get why you’re doing this. One of the reasons listed for why you’re removing EBP is due to bad actors making experiences that encouraged people to AFK. While this new system does prevent that far more than the old one, it also has the crushing caveat of actively dissuading people from wanting to make longer games. At least, not without adding a bunch of microtransactions. And some of us don’t want to resort to that.
Obviously there’s no truly clean solution to this issue (to those people saying to ‘just ban the afk bots abusing EBP’, do you even know how they’d do that? I don’t!), and there will have to be some sort of sacrifices made. But there’s far better solutions than this. If something’s broken, you should at least try to fix it before throwing it away.
An idea that I think could probably work: add a max playtime cap per game like the current system, but keep it engagement-based like the old one. You deal with the idle problem far more, and it’d most likely hurt developers less than this as they’d earn more than 5 Robux from people who don’t play Roblox religiously. It’d probably even HELP developers as the payouts would be more evenly distributed and not hogged by one or two experiences.
But if you just HAVE to make this new model work for whatever reason (perhaps down to sunk cost fallacy or to simply save costs compared to the old system), here’s another idea:
Solution 2. Replace the 3 experiences a day limit with a weekly cap.
While on paper this 3-per-day model isn’t necessarily bad, it ignores the fact that most Roblox players won’t immediately be jumping for smaller experiences when they start playing for the day. They’ll be gunning for the top experiences. The Grow a Gardens, the 99 Nights in the Forests, the Welcome to Bloxburgs, games such as those. If they even bother to check the smaller experiences at all, chances are they’ve gone past the limit.
Many people have suggested that you increase the daily limit. I know that this probably isn’t feasible. Assuming that there’s 30 days in a month, this system is based on a R$450/month limit, the same as the lowest tier of Premium. This would make it basically impossible to have it done in any other way per-day. But it does open up a really good opportunity if you changed to a per-week model.
Here’s my idea: You can keep the daily 5 Robux per experience, but if someone joins enough experiences to equal giving 100/105 Robux in a week, then any experiences they join after that shouldn’t give anything more until the next week. That way, experiences both big and small actually have a chance to get payouts. It could be a little messy due to the fact there’s usually slightly more than 4 weeks in a month, but either way it would give small and big developers more equal footing.
Solution 3. Have the daily Robux change based on how much money’s spent.
Obviously something like this would need to have a cap (someone spending $500 on Robux shouldn’t have $250 worth of Robux to spread, that’s just absurd), but it could mitigate at least some damage dealt by this system. I don’t like it myself, but it’d be an improvement nonetheless, so I’m bringing it up here. You could also have more money spent increase the amount of experiences eligible per day, but that’d be even harder to explain.
All these solutions I listed, while having their own downsides, I feel would be drastically better than this current system. I strongly suggest that you revise Creator Rewards so that they’ll be more fair on developers both big and small. Because so far it looks like it’ll either improve things for just the biggest developers, or make things worse for everyone.
Thank you for reading.