New Commission 'Rules' For In-Game UGC Sales Are Detrimental To Public Groups

[Abcreator]

As a Roblox developer it is currently too hard to make good-use of UGC sales commissions if your group is public.

The new 'rules' for awarding the commission is as follows:

If the player is the owner of the game:
No commission

Else, if the player is a member of the group if the game is a group-game:
No commission

Else:
Award commission

This was obviously done to combat people who were taking advantage of the commission for their own purchases however it hurts much more developers than these few users.

There is a glaring issue with this policy and that is that public groups that allow everyone on Roblox to join are damaged greatly by this policy. Simply being a member of the group is enough to disable the commission. As a result, as a developer I am encouraged to not allow fans to join my Roblox group which breaks one of the main-purposes of a Roblox group being to house developers and fans to a project.

If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to keep my groups public while also not worrying about missing out on commissions from players.

[IncredibleTeamAidan]

So what you’re saying is keep all groups invite only? BRUHHHHH ROBLOX STOP BREAKING STUFF!

[OutlookG (Outlook)]

I am genuinely astounded this made it through QA without asking for feedback from developers.

[cpguy5089]

At least this is going to significantly cut down on those absolutely horrendous “pls donate” games where the “dev” gets paid big bucks solely on the immense amount of commission payments

Everyone else looking to abuse the commission payments to get their money back already knows to just do it between accounts (X buys items on Y’s game, Y buys items in return on X’s game)

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Classic example of Roblox ignoring devs and making a terrible decision without providing any warning.

I can’t believe this is still happening, I thought Roblox promised to do better!

[Abcreator]

@cpguy5089

At least this is going to significantly cut down on those absolutely horrendous “pls donate” games where the “dev” gets paid big bucks solely on the immense amount of commission payments

This couldn’t be further from the case, as long as you don’t allow people to join your group, you’ll still recieve the commission

[AbstractAlex]

Wait WHAT? Where is the official announcement for this?

[Abcreator]

There was none, this was silently added and noticed by a few community members.

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Roblox can’t try to slip such big changes without first notifying developers. This is seriously harmful to any group game that relies on commissions. Thanks for bringing this up.

[givenothingback (AlexA)]

Hey all,
Last week, we made a change to commission payouts that was intended to target groups abusing commission payouts to get “discounts” on Marketplace content. Because it was meant to target abuse, it was unannanounced. What we didn’t intend was that this change also affected legitimate groups that are being used both for development and as a fan space. We DO want creators to monetize through commission payouts, so huge thanks for flagging this issue. We have rolled back the change as of yesterday.