Testimony for berezaa / Vesteria Inc (prisman, Polymorphic & sk3let0n)
There is an undeniable disparity between Roblox’s goal to age up their playerbase and the absence of the type of game content that older audiences desire.
So-called “kids games” are just easier to make. Simulators, tycoons, obbies and “social” games have few moving parts, and they don’t require nearly as much of a coordinated effort to pull off. This is why these games have dominated front page. Not because they are what players want, but because it’s what developers on Roblox are best equipped to deliver.
Players, especially teenagers and older players, want nuanced games. Games that are beyond the scope of what a single developer can accomplish, even with the lower overhead of developing on this platform.
The engine and platform tech for these games to be made is already there. The financials are not. As many devs on this thread have testified, a full-time commitment to a Roblox game is expensive. Employees and contractors need to pay for rent, food and the essentials of life. Current devex rates create a financial environment that is unfavorable and unsustainable for teams and studios to naturally form at the rate needed to come anywhere close to meeting the demands of an aging audience.
Older players are leaving Roblox because the suite of games offered isn’t meeting their needs, and veteran Roblox developers are leaving because the financials do not support their continued work on the platform.
Our game, Vesteria, has so far cost over $130,000 to develop. $70,000 of that was paid to our team by Roblox via the Incubator program as living expenses, and $60,000 has been personally invested by me.
This has been a highly successful venture, as Vesteria Alpha has been sold to almost 29,000 players at roughly $8 each. Cha-Ching! That’s about $230,000 of revenue!!
Unfortunately, my team has seen barely more than $50,000 of our earned revenue. We are still in the red and have not broken even yet. While we are releasing our Beta this weekend, the financials of our situation should give pause to anyone considering the current development environment on Roblox.
At last year’s RDC, Mr. David Baszucki stated that Roblox wants to support development teams up to a hundred people. It is my belief, as a developer who has been on Roblox for a decade and an entrepreneur who started a company to develop on this platform, that the current Developer Exchange rates fail to support teams of any size. My team is incredibly lucky that we were supported for five months by the Incubator program, and that we were able to financially support ourselves for the six months that our game was making Roblox six figures but wasn’t making enough to support minimum wage for our team.
It looks like we’re going to make it out of the frying pan. With the current developer exchange rates, most teams won’t.