When did Roblox decide to become the people everyone hates on Twitter who ask for free art for the “exposure”? Sure, exposure is one thing, but removing the pay for good honest work for games that will in the end serve to benefit Roblox is outrageous.
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Seems like a good update/change. Don’t know why people are so upset over it.
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I like how things are evolving regarding sponsored events. However, what I dislike is the fact that developers are being paid in exposure rather than actual money. The only benefits I can sense from exposure is promoting their skill to other companies, since most developers who are accepted for sponsored events are ALREADY known in the community. And if that’s the case, you’re leading away developers from your site, which could be a negative effect toward the Roblox Company. In my case, money is what motivates me to get the job done. If there was no money involved, or any sort of currency of exchange, my work ethic and motivation toward the assignment would drop drastically.
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Having exposure only with no pay for developers is not a great change…
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Please release information or statistics on revenue for games included in events that already fell into these types of opportunities before and after they were a part of the event, and the average pay for a developer to work on their game for this event.
I’m pretty sure that the revenue generated just from BEING in the event makes the pay the developer received to work on the event in the first place negligible. If these statistics were revealed, although it is understandable if not for privacy, there probably would not be such an outcry about “exposure”. I do understand that people would like compensation to work on something, and for good reason, but it’s not like these types of events had any sort of large overhauls to the original games included to fit the themes.
Personally, I would take clout any day of the week because it lasts in the long term and can continuously generate more money if played correctly. I much prefer investment over lump sum, but that’s just my take on it.
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They didn’t pay much anyways with sponsored games, you’d make more from the traffic of players coming in if your game was monetized correctly.
Also, people are comparing it to twitter and artists doing free art.
It’s nothing like that when you’re getting promoted and making money.
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Minus the money part.
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Most of the money made is probably from in-game revenue, not from Roblox’s initial commission. Their use of it early on in getting developers involved in events was smart because Roblox is still growing and needed an initial push but now it is evident that being included in an event can pay for itself if your:
- monetization model is good.
- your actual game is good.
- and you can retain your players somehow.
So now what people should be thinking about is:
- how do I design a game that’ll keep players around.
- how will I get them to spend money in the game.
Forcing developers to actually think about these things should introduce new ideas onto the platform, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
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Well I’ve been a part of MeepCity’s sponsored events many times, however I’ve only been paid a certain portion of what the sponsorship involved. Alexnewtron never provided any information regarding how much the game made in total. In fact, I have no idea how much he makes, nor have I been paid regardless lately. So I have no clue on how much money is made in events alone.
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This is why Roblox needed to release this information. The lack of transparency with how much a developer can make solely of the exposure through their game’s monetization model is necessary in announcing a change like this. I can see showing graphs of revenue before and after event time for specific games (with permission from their owners) would have helped with this update.
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It is wrong for roblox to hide what players are making from past events…
One of my friends told me that he got paid around 7k USD for an event that he hosted which is an insane amount of money to be disregarded by roblox.
This could be me saying though - I’ve never once been included in an event, so im balancing between saying “Yea, this is good because now developers have to work for their money instead of getting paid a hefty amount " and also saying " Well this is crappy because that means the devs before us got X amount of cash, and we are left to fend for ourselves in making in game profits only.”
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As it’s been mentioned a few times… Exposure isn’t payment. Although exposure for developers is good and can end up getting them more known/commissions in the future, that’s not really fair. Events take several months and thousands of hours to develop, just to give them ‘exposure’ and possibly divide up among the whole team a (month?) worth of monitization income isn’t really worth their time when they could spend the same amount of time working to create and release their own game.
If you want these events to continue to grow and get better and better each year, you’re going to require larger developer teams and larger budgets to work with. Cutting out the already low payment is not a good move and in my opinion is going to discourage many from even wanting to enter to work for an event.
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Let me say this. I am mostly against this change.
Up keeping a game like Escape Room at scale is not a cheap thing to do. As a developer who has been part of several events in the past, developing these new missions, especially for a game like Escape Room, is no small task, requiring sometimes several weeks of coding and building to be completed. I can’t speak for other developers obviously, but for an event [i.e. the Halloween Event] we had to design two new missions in our existing game as well as build a new map and overhaul our lobby, and I’m not a builder so I had to contract on a builder for the majority of the design, which has a cost associated.
Furthermore, Escape Room is not a game that is easy to monetize. To be frank, even during the Halloween Event the game made barely made enough to DevEx for a month. I’m all for more games and developers being included in events - it’s a large part of what makes this platform great - but sadly for me, no pay attached to events means I will likely not even end up applying simply because I can’t afford to.
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I think the push from paying upfront, and rather it’s more for exposure is kinda good though. It should stop having the same 15 Popular games, because if a game is popular enough, the exposure does nothing for them anyways. (I.E. You can expect Jailbreak to not want to be bothered because they’re already popular enough. Versus a smaller game, that has been having a hard time getting off the ground, will want to jump in feet first.)
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To be quite honest here, this is such an unethical move. It’s just a nice way to say “yeah we don’t feel like paying you anymore so we’re going to profit off your work.” Sponsors pay you for events and even before this change, we only got a fraction of what Roblox is paid by the sponsor. Now we are getting that fraction taken away for… exposure? All this does is encourage new developers who get the events to focus on monetization over gameplay, so they don’t get left high and dry for days of work. I hope you guys backtrack.
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Exposure from events has helped my game a TON, and I’m certainly not against that all. But there’s no way that exposure can pay for up keep in cases like mine, we simply don’t make enough.
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The event you’re describing that takes several months is not what’s at stake here though. It’s not the original game like Egg Hunt, but the games that get included that are already established.
You know, the ones where you get hit with that JPEG describing the game and what you need to do to get the hat
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As the OP has changed and custom event games are still being paid I no longer have a problem with this. I’ve decided to remove the larger chunk of this post as it is no longer valid. The additional edits below are still accurate however and worth considering for anyone who applies to work on events with a team.
Edit 1: I want to add that no one but the game owner/group owner gets exposure. The rest ends up in the shadow of whoever owns the place. So to say “exposure” means that the majority of the team will go without any compensation.
Edit 2: The fame from events only lasts a month or two, beyond that people don’t really care anymore so you are back to where you started. Consider the fame from an event a temporary boost, if you don’t do anything with it while you got the ball rolling then it isn’t worth anything.
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Actually no, make it 3. I was in 3 events. One was sponsored. The pay for this year’s event was a 1/3rd the amount of the first event so it was very lowered this time. I just dont think they could afford it
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Arguably, certain events. The events that are like “find this item hidden in the server” should not be receiving large payouts, when the place for the event is just a normal popular game.
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