Introducing Premium Payouts!

No one knows, that’s why it’s suggested that you wait the 3-6 months, experiment with the payout amounts, then make your own determination from there.

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Mhm, agreed. As they grew they should increase the rate to attract higher quality developers (this update promotes the opposite) or at least support the kids who join and develop on this community. The bog standard should be to keep up with inflation although to be fair even with inflation we wouldn’t see a dramatic change.

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Yikes if this is true that’s pretty awful. There’s absolutely no valid reason to give more popular games more money for the same amount of premium playtime. Money for playtime is supposed to be a great equalizer that levels the playing field and allows more games to be viable to develop full-time, increasing competition and improving the quality of games on the platform. That’s not gonna happen if Jailbreak gets 2x the amount of money per playtime that a up-and-coming jail game gets.

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Complete agreement. See edit at bottom of post sourced from the offical wiki page, it’s unfortunately true

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I too was concerned about this in my thread. They really need to clarify this.

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Also, what’s up with this?
image

Why is there two separate categories, one for groups? Why is there not a Premium Payouts category within the group itself? Is the implication here that premium payouts in group games go directly to the owners, or is it just specifically to see how much of your split of a game’s income is from Premium Payouts? And if it’s the latter, how is that decided if for example you get a 10% split of the game’s income? What if payouts are done manually and not automatically? Doesn’t that make this a little obsolete?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to be under Group Payouts, like all other income from groups, considering a group is paying it out to you? Or do the funds never reach the group at all and go directly to the owner?

If the funds don’t go directly to the group, that is not a good feature, considering group games are designed for collaboration. What if the owner didn’t work on the game at all, and the income goes to totally different people?

Clarification here would be fantastic.

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I agree, DevOmar mentioned this in his reply and had a great point:

Let’s take @Coeptus for example, he makes 8.7 cents per sale of Bloxburg.
Most paid access games are <= 100 R$, or <= 35 cents to the developer, one time, then you own it for life.

I don’t think it’s fair at all to exclude paid access games from earning income from this feature. I hope this is addressed soon along with the other points that developers have been making.

I disagree with this statement. Pay to play games DO focus more on player retention and less on monetization. That’s the whole point of making your game pay to play, so you can have less monetization, less pay to win features, and make the income off a one-time purchase of the game itself. Almost any F2P game will have more monetization crammed in than a P2P counterpart. And also, P2P games usually have better player retention, too.

Bloxburg has 15.8 million sales. Yet it’s closing in on 2 billion visits total.
1650000000 / 15800000 = 104.4
On average, each person who buys plays over one hundred times. That’s better player retention than most Roblox games. That’s a staggering amount of player retention if you ask me.

However, this is just my opinion on the matter.

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Excuse me, but by this graph having less Premium Score leads to more Robux?! Unless I’m misunderstanding this, then this is the opposite of what the post is implying.

0.08 Score made 10 R$
3.39 Score made 6 R$

Edit: This is AFTER adding benefits to my game for Premium users. That may or may not have influenced it in some way.

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No, this is exactly what the post implies. See this quote:

There is no linear relationship between in-game premium sales, in-game premium hours, and Robux earned. You could get a higher playtime score and still make less.

It’s in the fine print.

Shouldn’t watching the score decrease also have the same effect in reverse though? Seeing my playtime score drop to almost nothing yet my estimated R$ go up still doesn’t make sense to me. I understand the relationship is not linear, but a decrease should still influence the income negatively right? Unless other factors are involved which are not mentioned.

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Well, the way it works is that there’s a pool of Robux that all premium members are giving to all roblox games.

You are given Robux based on how your game’s score performs relative to other game’s score.

We don’t know the fine details of this system, and we’re currently not sure how the splits are decided.

According to this, that graph can be off, as they need time to analyze everything and determine your amounts. So, I wouldn’t think too much of it. You could go back in a week and 2/18 on that graph might look totally different.

Unfortunately, we don’t know the nitty gritty on how this system works. So we can’t really say. Considering it’s the most recent dot on your graph, it’s most likely that your robux will plummet to nothing or next to nothing once they analyze the data and make their adjustments.

The graph is not intended to be used to determine exactly how much you’ll be making, it takes a month of time before the amounts on the graph become set in stone and they finish their adjustments.

TL;DR, that likely means nothing, and you’re not actually gonna earn more robux for no premium playtime score in your specific scenario.

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I’m genuinely surprised that they think making the platform more top heavy is a good idea. Success compounds, additional income for top games doesn’t encourage those games to invest much of the money back into their product. If platform growth is the goal, Roblox should be tilting the scale in the favor of smaller games so that those developers can keep making games and have more income to invest in their product. This will increase competition between games and prevent stagnation. The community as a whole can grow if Roblox can support a larger range of devs.

I’m hoping that this is happening because the system is new, not because Roblox intentionally want to make the platform more top heavy. They preach transparency, would love to understand what their intentions are behind this update.

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Same

Also the example pic used in the wiki shows the same behavior

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I think people are forgetting the Roblox corporate business model. Roblox gets a cut of every sale. If the most popular games on the marketplace are charging a tiny amount for entry and nothing else, they won’t have a large revenue. Free to play is an entirely different player psychology and business model. Without recurring revenue from multiple sources it is unlikely they could support free platforms and servers.

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Yes, but the 25 Robux entry free for Bloxburg is 1/18th of a $4.99 robux purchase. The player is paying 27 cents to Roblox for that entry fee, 8.7 cents going to Coeptus.

Roblox is making 18.3 cents out of that transaction. They are not losing money for paid access games, they make money.

I don’t think I understand your point. Why shouldn’t a paid access game which costs 25 Robux to enter be allowed to sell premium to their players (netting Roblox an additional $4.99 per sale they make), and give some Robux to the developer for doing so? Currently, a 25 R$ to enter game makes nothing from Premium. They can still prompt them to buy premium, they can still make premium only features within their game, yet they would get nothing all because of that 25 R$ entry fee.

I don’t see how this program would cost Roblox anything additional if it supported paid access games, could you kindly elaborate on what you mean by this, and how it impacts their revenue? Wouldn’t it be the opposite? If Bloxburg had premium only features, and it’s dedicated fanbase was prompted to buy premium, and Coeptus successfully got X amount of people to buy premium everyday, isn’t Roblox gaining in this scenario?

Edit: Perhaps I’m missing something here, if I’m wrong please correct me, I may be wrong, but my current standpoint on this is that it’s a win/win situation for both Roblox and the developer of the game.

Edit 2: Even if Paid Access games made less from this than free to play games, it would still benefit both parties.

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Well I’m probably making this thread off topic considering the post says Pay to Play isn’t available right now. The point I’m making is that over a year a well made Free to Play will always make more money because it is based on impulse buying. If you look at trends in gaming on mobile for example. It has become standard for many companies to release Free to Play for this reason. You only really have 4 models: Free to Play with in game upgrades, Free to Play with advertising, Monthly Subscription, Full Price Game. Anything else is losing money. The Pay to Play developer taking a small fee is happy because he makes a living wage. He would not be happy if the cost of servers and infrastructure were passed on to him.

Edit: I do understand and think Pay to Play is a novel idea and good for the player sometimes. We just live in a different scenario these days. Perhaps Free to Play is a trend that will burn out in a few years.

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Really cool update, hoping to see more of those in the future!

I think this will benefit games with non-aggressive (pro-consumer) microtransactions like Disaster Survival a decent amount, which I’m happy with. Though the incentive is still to maximize playtime by stretching content as far as possible (aka simulators).

Though, Roblox was never really the place for short, high quality experience to begin with. So nothing lost, and generally a move in the right direction.

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This can definitely be beneficial to some of the smaller developers who are struggling with the monetization of their games.

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I love this feature, its awesome

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