Introducing Premium Payouts!

[bizbot19]

I would really like to see a signing bonus for the Premium Upsell Modal. In the current state of this update, I don’t really see any purpose for a Developer to use this feature or to lock their content behind Premium. If a player is going to buy Premium in your game, you should get the first month’s Robux value of that Premium as a bonus for selling them on that product.

Instead you get like 1 Robux for them playing and they are no longer as inclined to spending their money on your gamepasses…

But hey I’ll take my 500 extra Robux a month.

[Luaction]

All games draw from the same pool of roblox so if a game gets twice as many visitors as another game it will also get (roughly) twice as much of a premium payout.
So yes, topgames proportionally get rewarded the most as they also get the most visits as they should be.
It is essentially a modern version of the old 1 tix/visit system.

[vastqud (vast)]

Exactly how I feel. If there isn’t a bonus for signing up in game, I’d rather just sell a premium gamepass than trying to make premium users feel special – i’ll get more money and won’t separate my playerbase.

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeah, this too. Encouraging people with premium to play your game via special perks and the like for those with premium is definitely encouraged, going by the announcement.

[CapnFry]

I love this update, now it helps you make even more robux from your game. And I love the ability to encourage players who play your game to buy premium, I believe this update could be a very good one.

I love how roblox is always seeking for more ways to make anything better for the community. Keep it up Roblox! I can’t wait to see what you have next!

[berezaa (Bereza)]

@kalypso3

Q: Why aren’t paid games eligible for Premium Payouts?

A: We want to encourage free-to-play games, and discourage game design that makes players pay twice. We understand there are valid reasons for making a game paid, but for the initial version, are not allowing those games to be eligible.

So games that dime and nickel the player into paying many times are encouraged? It’s really frustrating to see someone’s idea of how a game should be designed being forced onto everyone on the platform via an arbitrary and useless restriction.

The whole point of many paid access games is to reduce the amount of payments that need to be made for an enjoyable experience. This paid access restriction isn’t in place to promote “good game design”, it exists only to upsell premium to more free users who are unlikely to play paid access games.

[rolbloxguy1876]

A lot of people are praising this update, and I’m no big name developer or anything, but I can see (Along with many others on here) that this isn’t good.

As @Ripull pointed out, there’s no reason for developers to prompt a Premium purchase if we don’t get a cut. Smaller developers are better off prompting some other purchase (LIKE A GAMEPASS!) that will give them tons more money. @tyridge77 develops this point well. Proportionally based means more money will inevitably go to the top games and leave small developers in the dust.

@buildthomas makes a point that I completely agree with; I don’t want to prompt a Premium purchase if Roblox is disproportionally benefited and developers get less than if they were to prompt a gamepass purchase.

I heard something a little while ago about Roblox giving developers the option to create their own subscription services in game. I don’t know if this replaces that, but if/when that comes out, there will not be a single reason (For small developers especially) to encourage having premium.

I’m not afraid to say it, I really do not like this. A way to make it more tolerable would be to make it a linear relationship rather than a proportion based on other games, as @vastqud pointed out.

Smart business move by Roblox, but ultimately doesn’t do much good for the developer. I appreciate trying to expand developer earnings, but this ain’t it.

[GahyGoddess (TryptamineGoddess)]

This is great, Roblox will make more money from premium by giving developers incentive to give players features if they have premium, it’s brilliant I like it.

[Ripull]

More Robux than the what star creators get on commission? I’ll wait to see the data first over a period of time to see if this holds out.

[Nikilis]

@berezaa

So you’re encouraging games that dime and nickel the player into paying many times?

You can literally get paid without making the user pay anything for the game at all.

[9xyz9]

More for developers to earn, but wouldn’t developer encourage premium players to afk inside their game?

I like the idea of premium payouts, but what happens with people if they have lifetime premium? (Like people that bought lifetime builders club)

[bizbot19]

There’s a lot of praise going on over this update because “more money is good”. I’d wait and see how it impacts your earnings over the next few months, because as far as I can see, the potential revenue from this feature for small or medium sized Games is just about enough to buy you dinner at Applebee’s.

I think this is a great direction to go, integrating Premium into all sorts of games rather than forcing a player to pay multiple times across different games (overall a better experience for players, as they get to experience many different games and benefit from one subscription). But right now the numbers really don’t line up for Developers, so I can’t endorse this.

[Alkan]

I’d like to know how much robux Roblox would pay us per player we convert into a premium member. Because my intuition says it will not be easy to get many players to buy membership ingame, and memberships aren’t super expensive so it’s not like roblox could give us a grand amount of money per premium member.
If I’m correct in this, then it might honestly both not be worth my time to push premium on my players and not be worth the way it makes myself appear as a developer.

[ExpertGame_Creations (DeveloperCodes)]

I love this feature, and all the benefits it can bring for an amazing user experience for Premium Members. I believe the percentage given to games should definitely be higher, and games with Paid Access should be eligible for payouts as well.

“Roblox runs on developers.”

[ExecutiveFunds (Executive)]

First we get the amazing and humorous Bloxy Awards trailer, but now. This. Is. Epic.

[Quoteory]

The passive income is nice, I don’t really see anyone using the upsell modal though, if the reward for having premium is too small in your game, I doubt anyone would buy it, and if it’s too big you would likely make more from a gamepass/devproduct

[Vikinglaw]

not really, no

its not the same concept whatsoever

[tyridge77]

@bizbot19

just about enough to buy you dinner at Applebee’s.

As long as you’re ordering off the kids menu

[Vikinglaw]

If it’s going to be worth it for us developers to limit features to Premium we need to know that its more worthwhile to limit it to premium instead of just straight up selling the feature.

I guess the only way to know, considering the lack of information provided; is to test. Would be appreciated if more data was provided. Probably going to be a cranky few months of testing.

On another note, I appreciate the initial free, passive income. Also seems like a decent business decision considering most developers will work with ROBLOX on getting users to purchase premium.

But who does it really benefit…?

[UndoneBuilder]

[EDIT] Roblox has since tripled the original amounts of payouts which has vastly improved this program. It’s now on par with a Dev Ex rate increase if not slightly better. While I’d still love to see Dev Ex increases in the future, this change has mostly settled any concerns I had with the program. I appreciate Roblox and those who worked on this for such a welcome improvement on something I was so skeptical on, and I can’t wait to see where this goes!

With respect where it’s due, this can only be bad for us Developers. I was told on repeated occasion, even directly by Dave himself, that this feature is what Roblox was doing to increase developer pay INSTEAD of increasing Dev Ex rates.

Originally I held off judgement, since I figured the payouts would be high enough to justify this, but seeing the estimates of what is actually being paid out by this program, with all respect to the people who worked hard to implement this, it’s an absolutely pathetic amount.

My game which averages 2k players a day, only projects at best, a 8k Robux payout per month. That is abysmal, when viewed in the light that this is what we’re getting instead of an increase in Dev Ex Prices.

Considering that we only get paid 1 dollar, for every 4 dollars a player spends on that same Robux (And this is best case scenario, it can be as bad as a 1/6 ratio in some cases), NOT counting in the 30% transaction fees in between, I can not help but see this system as only extremely bad for developers, as long as it’s being used as an excuse not to increase Dev Ex rates.

[EDIT] Even if the 8k robux amount is daily (which I cannot tell for sure based on the chart and wording), that would still only be just over 220k robux a month, which for perspective, equates to about half what the games Gamepasses and Dev Products make per day. Which isn’t as absolutely pathetic as 8k robux a month, but it’s still an absurdly low amount.