Hi Creators,
Today, we are rolling out price optimization to eligible experiences on Roblox.
As we announced at RDC, price optimization uses advanced testing to analyze user behavior and transactions within your experience. This feature will recommend optimal prices for your in-experience items and game passes, helping you maximize revenue without sacrificing user engagement.
Eligibility
Because our price testing models require large enough samples of data to be accurate and useful, our eligibility criteria will be based on an experience’s volume of transactions. Currently, an experience must have at least 100,000 transactions in the last 30 days. If we update eligibility requirements, we’ll let you know. We realize this is a high bar and so we are also working on a new price recommendation feature that will work for a wider audience, and hope to have more to share in the near future.
If your experience is eligible, you will see a Price Optimization tab under Monetization in the left hand navigation in the Creator Hub. To find how many transactions your experience has had, add the total number of product sales over a 30-day period. For more information, see Pass Analytics and Developer Product Analytics.
How to Use Price Optimization
Make Sure Prices Are Dynamically Updated
For price optimization tests to be conducted, you must dynamically update all displayed prices within an experience through the MarketplaceService API. You can do this by using GetProductInfo() or GetDeveloperProductsAsync() on the client to retrieve and display current prices. The API should be called from the client for every user. During the test, dynamic prices fetched by the client will remain the same for the duration of the test (two weeks). For further instructions on how to properly script product prices, see Selling Passes and Selling Developer Products.
The dynamic price check tool lets you identify which of your prices are dynamically updated. To do this, it updates all products for sale with a mock price to identify which of your product prices are hard-coded and which are scripted with the MarketplaceService API inside your experience. If a product price updates to the mock Robux price, that price has been scripted. If it remains the same, it’s been hard-coded or the price is not fetched using a client script. The price will need to be dynamically updated in order for a pricing test to work.
To use the dynamic price check tool:
- On the Price Optimization page, click Dynamic Price Check.
- In Add test accounts, enter up to five Roblox usernames to check prices with. Only these users are able to see the fake Robux prices.
- Select a fake Robux price. All of the scripted product prices update to reflect this fake price.
- Click Enable. After a few minutes, you’re able to enter your experience to identify which prices are hard-coded.
Run Price Optimization Test and Apply New Prices
Once you’ve updated your prices to be dynamic, you can start the price optimization process:
- Go to Creations and select an experience.
- Go to Monetization products > Price Optimization.
- Select the developer products and passes you want to include in the price test. For best results, include all products.
- Click Start Test. After two weeks, you will receive an e-mail notification that the test is complete. The Price Optimization page updates with the optimized product prices, the recommended price percentage change, and the estimated long-term revenue impact of applying the new product prices. Please note that the prices generated from these tests are suggestions for potential pricing. You should consider and set your own prices as you see fit.
- If you want to use the optimized prices, click Review & Apply prices to apply the results of the price optimization test.
- (Optional) Click Start price review to run a price review period.
- (Optional) Renew your recommendations with a new test every 60-90 days.
Resources
For more details and a walkthrough on how to get started with price optimization, check out our documentation and video tutorial:
FAQs
Why doesn’t price optimization work for all experiences?
- Price optimization does A/B testing on your in-experience items and game passes to identify the price for each that will be most attractive to the highest number of your users. These tests need a fairly large sample size to be accurate. Because these recommendations are only derived from studying your own user base, experiences must have at least 100,000 transactions in the previous 30 days to be eligible. We are working on a new feature that will work for more experiences, and hope to have more to share in the near future.
How much will a developer’s earnings increase as a result of optimizing their prices?
- Early testing has shown that developers may see a noticeable increase in earnings after taking our pricing recommendations. We hope to be able to share more concrete learnings after we roll out price optimization capabilities to all eligible creators.
If developers are earning more, does that mean that users have to spend more to get the same items?
- Not at all. Our testing shows that most creators inadvertently price their in-experience items too high. What we’re doing is running pricing tests on a small subset of an experience’s users to understand the most compelling price to the largest audience. In many cases, this will mean a reduction in prices.
I want to get price recommendations that are region specific. Can price optimization help with that?
- At this time, the recommendations from a price optimization test are global and not regional. That is, you will get the same recommendation for all regions, regardless of that regions’ local economy and purchasing power. We are getting ready to test a new feature that will provide regional recommendations for each of your products, and hope to have more to share in early 2025 on when that will be available.
Can I make changes to my pricing while a price optimization test is running?
- You can’t make changes to products involved in the price optimization test while the test is in progress.
Can I take only some of the recommended changes or do I have to take all of them?
- After running a price optimization test, creators can manually apply the optimized prices to all of the involved products, or to none of them. If you would like to update some, rather than all, of the prices, you will need to do so manually. Please note that our revenue projections are based on changing all prices rather than some.
What is a price review test and why do I need to do this?
- After your price optimization test concludes, you will be asked if you would like to set up a price review test to monitor your new prices. Instructions for how to set up a price review period are here. The goal of this test is to ensure that, over a four week period, your new prices continue to outperform your original prices in the longer term. We do this by creating a small test group (2%) during a price review test. If your new prices start to underperform your original prices, we will automatically revert your products back to the original pricing.
just going to give the already popular games an even higher boost on the algorithm. I get the sample data needs to be of size for the results to be generalized, but 100,000 purchases a month sounds absurd to me. What if a popular game has a few super expensive passes, which ultimately result in a lower sales count but more revenue than games with 100K+ sales/month?
. If you’re unsure of your prices and are looking for a short term bump, this is a good tool but otherwise I recommend waiting until regional prices are a thing.