As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to use gift cards in their intended-form, to gift them to whoever you wish to! Roblox recently sent this message to all non-US accounts:
“We also wanted to let you know that as part of the change in our redemption process you will only be able to redeem a gift card that is denominated in the same currency as the country where your Roblox account is registered.”
How such a crucial piece of information was brushed-off as a ‘PS’ to a message not all users even received still baffles me.
This is absolutely devastating to international creators like myself who may receive / send gift-cards to my US / international friends. This also voids any “Robux giveaways” that YouTubers may decide to do as only their fans in the same currency as them may redeem the gift-card. This also encourages users to break the rules such as to mis-use the group payout system to gift Robux to users they would have given a gift-card to, yet no longer can.
On top of this, Robux gift-cards are also widely used by companies to pay some commission-based contractors, many of which may be international and therefore not in the same currency!
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I could more freely give and receive gift-cards from users. This update deeply impacts my financial status on the Roblox platform and has unfortunately made me question if this is my time to quit.
I completely didn’t even realise this initially, about the whole payment for work. I’ve only been paid in gift cards once, but the majority of people that I communicate with on the DevForum are mostly in the US.
It’s also a bit annoying that gift cards are worth less now, before buying a £10 gift card from ASDA would give you 3 months of Premium. Now, it’ll be 2 months.
As a QA tester which generally receives a low-pay (as QA is undervalued quite a bit on Roblox) my pay is heavily based on gift-cards that are sent from US/UK-based companies, my account is registered in the Euro-zone and as a result, my entire income is voided by this update unless I VPN to a different location and create a US / UK account which is obviously less than ideal.
This also has the chance to affect those who move countries, as it states ‘registered’ rather than ‘currently in’
Roblox needs to provide better avenues for paying developers, particularly those under the age on 18, who can’t use PayPal due to terms of service restrictions. Paying someone through Robux is a minimum of 30% tax as it is anyways, unless it’s group payouts which takes 14 days.
Although then again, with the 18+ restrictions, you have to be over that age even to gain access to development tools for certain consoles.
The emergence of this change is getting closer by the day and I’m personally worried this will go into full-effect destroying most of my income with many users possibly even confused (especially US users which did not receive this message)
What’s worse is the fact there’s not even a DevForum announcement behind it. The majority of people just do not know that this is happening, and this is partly due to it being communicated using the Messaging system. Nobody looks at the News tab on the Messaging page, it’s a bad way to communicate.
To be honest, I could potentially see a few reasons why you would want to stop this.
For starters, a £10 gift card gives you $15 of credit (3 months of Premium 450 with 3 cents spare), meanwhile after it gets switched over, it will give you £10 of credit (2 months of Premium 450, with 82p spare).
The two reasons below are probably far-fetched, as a warning.
Another reason would be to prevent fraud. Even though I haven’t heard of any examples of people using Roblox gift cards to commit fraud, Roblox may want to prevent it by region locking, albeit this does nothing to be honest. Online scammers often ask victims to get a Google Play gift card or a Target gift card, and Roblox could be concerned that Roblox gift cards are a target in the future. By region locking gift cards, scammers are less likely to commit fraud using Roblox gift cards.
The last thing that I can think of is social engineering, but again this is probably far-fetched. If someone gets locked out of an account, you can contact Roblox support, and I believe you can use a gift card code you’ve used in the past to verify that it is you. Shady developers (or other people), could give someone a payment via Roblox gift card, but they could then take the code and potentially steal an account due to social engineering.
Even though I’m annoyed, I’m fine with getting less for my money, but the region locking should not be happening at all. It’s not fair that cards might be region locked just because of a few bad actors.
I think you are jumping the gun a bit here with you reasoning, the most likely reason for the region-locking is that Roblox doesn’t want to handle the future exchange-rates for currencies that often fluctuate. If it were to prevent scammers, it would be a terrible solution since you could simply create an account via a VPN and the currency would then be set to the USD or similar.
The bigger issue is that it affects YouTubers and other content creators who may do giveaways to fans or employers who may pay those they commissioned via gift-cards. This is a silent update (that I just heard from someone WAS NOT SENT TO ALL ACCOUNTS, even international accounts). This is a major failure on DevRels’ communication and outright disgraceful for me to see as a developer.
A scammer wouldn’t be redeeming it though, they’d probably be keeping the gift card code and selling it.
What scammer would want to actually keep a Roblox gift card (unless they’re a kid)?
Either way, I would just take the two region locking reasons as farfetched.
The fact that it wasn’t shown to everyone is ridiculous though. Does Roblox actually give a **** (public category so I can’t swear lol) about respecting the community?
It’s very easy to find a buyer in a specific region, so I’d argue it would be much easier in this case.
It’s still outright unacceptable that I had to flag this for anyone to even notice the issue, no communication from DevRel and I even heard that some internal Roblox programs are freaking out over this update because not even they were told by Roblox DevRel that this would be coming into effect and are only now noticing the issue at hand and how they’ll have to deal with payment in the future. All we needed was a simple announcement post, didn’t even need to be re-written, it could have been a copy + paste from the Roblox message in #updates:announcements, I’m not asking for much.
Just wish to bump this since we only have 2 days until the rollout and there’s been no postponement or ammendment to cater for all users redeeming gift-cards. This is not a minor inconvenience for users in a different currency, but unutter disrespect to devs and fans of YouTubers who may redeem their gift cards globally and now reach an error with the new system. Gift-cards are “gift-cards”, don’t restrain me from redeeming one because it’s in a different currency, what about if my friend is in a different region to me, I can’t give them a gift, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a gift-card? Literally no other major international gift card does this to my knowledge.
As confirmed by KreekCraft on Twitter, this only applies to physical cards and not digital ones. It still is bad regardless of that fact as most people purchase physical cards anyways; especially newer YouTubers that don’t know this restriction.
This makes it even more confusing to newer players, many people (such as non-Roblox dedicated YTbers, etc) are likely to buy physical gift cards rather than digital ones (as physical ones look better for the camera), when the uninformed YouTuber tries to give out the gift-card, most of their fans are met with an error, the YouTuber continues to be uninformed and continues leaving out most of their fan-base from giveaways. I will continue to argue that all gift cards should be redeemable globally since that reduces confusion and makes the process cleaner for those who are uninformed, and just before someone says it, a warning on the physical gift card or redemption page will probably not suffice, people generally don’t read these things, they see “Roblox” and pick it up, no need to read the disclaimers.
This is also a critical flaw in Roblox’s communication as this updated message was not sent to most accounts, including mine and is still in a place no-one reasonably uses (the “news” section of inbox), this is still a critical issue and I will not stop being agitated over this issue until Roblox makes a clear announcement in a place that most people will actually see it (and allow everyone to see it, because again, I don’t have the message). There also appears to be no reason for this update and if there were, it most definently is not being communicated to us, causing this outrage.
I 100% agree with that. I am someone who would do the same as well and I do think that it would still be a problem. As I said, it is pretty bad regardless of it being confirmed.
I can definitely agree that this is something that is gonna cause more issues than it is going to help. I didn’t even know this happened before finding out on Twitter. I understand having gift cards automatically convert into your local currency, but having them completely void is just awful. As a Canadian, not being able to use cards purchased in the US would be absolutely awful.
Roblox definitely needs to revert this change and use a better method of converting the card’s currency into your local currency (if need be) instead of outright having them restricted. This type of restriction is unfair and makes no sense to do unless you want to restrict people from being able to purchase gift cards. They are labelled as gift cards for a reason.
I don’t even understand how this is going to benefit the company (or at least its revenue from users), or how restricting the redemption of physical cards improves security.
Also, off topic, but I don’t know what the deal is with some people only being able to buy the most expensive Premium plan and others only being able to buy the cheapest level of Premium, even from the website on computers. (It seems existing subscriptions haven’t been impacted).
It’s sad that Roblox will talk with Youtubers when they whine about anything and yet they will stay silent when developers bring up this concern. Transparency at Roblox is lacking.
