𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬
- Introduction to Roblox Monetization
- Gamepass Products
- Developer Products
- Premium Payouts
- Types of Players
- How to Price Items
- Monetization Integration
- Future of Monetization on Roblox
- Conclusion
Introduction to Roblox Monetization
Section I
Almost every planned and fully developed game attempts to monetize in one way or another. Traditionally there are 3 ways to do so on Roblox, Gamepasses, Dev products, and Premium Payouts. The three will be explained in detail later on. The monetization of Roblox games usually goes like this:
Hopefully, the chart summarizes it well. If it didn’t here is a detailed explanation:
Detailed Information About the Chart
- Pathway One
A User purchases Robux, that user goes on to play your game, they end up purchasing a product un your game and you get taxed 30% off of the sale by Roblox, the Robux gets added to your account after a few days (Alternatively your group) you exchange that Robux into real-world money using the developer exchange program.
- Pathway Two
A Premium Roblox Subscriber plays your game. Roblox gives you Robux as a reward. The Robux is added to your account and you use the Developer Exchange to exchange it into real-world money.
The Current rate to purchase Robux is 1 USD to 100 Robux. ( Roughly ) Roblox takes 30% off any purchase as a marketplace fee.
The Developer Exchange is a program that allows developers to exchange Robux into Real World currencies. The program’s requirements include:
- Roblox Premium Subscription;
- Minimum of 100,000 earned Robux in your account;
- Have a verified email address;
- Valid DevEx portal account;
- 13 years of age or older; and
- Community member in good standing, having complied with Roblox’s Terms of Use.
The Current Rate of Robux to USD is 100,000 Robux to 350 USD.
Gamepass Products
Section II
Game passes are one of the most popular ways to monetize your game in Roblox. As I have previously mentioned most Roblox games utilize the amazing feature which is gamepasses. A Gamepass is a one-time purchasable item for which you receive something in-game for.
How do gamepasses work? When you purchase a Gamepass the Gamepass will now be in your inventory. (Please Note I am NOT a scripter) If the developers set up the Gamepass correctly by looking in your inventory for the item, you will receive whatever you bought.
Some good examples of gamepasses are;
- Exclusive Items
Exclusive items are items in which you cannot gain other than through a game pass. When the player has a sense of exclusiveness they are way more likely to purchase a product. Some Examples include Weapons, Pets, and other Misc tools.
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Group Ranks
This mainly applies to Military Groups, Café Games, and other “Service” type games. Using a service like Clanlabs or a custom service is a good way to allow players to purchase a higher rank in your group. These are pretty popular as many users want to “Outrank” others as it’s a natural human tendency for power.
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Exclusive Levels
An exclusive level is when a player has to buy a Gamepass to access something in the game. This could be in many forms, some games use Titles such as VIP, or Premium. You should never block players from playing your game by having a pay wall that they cant go around.
Of course these wont apply for all games but they are generally the most popular that work. We will discuss how to implement the monetization later.
Here are some Bad examples of gamepasses;
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Economic Purchase
I would not recommend selling XP, or coins for example. The reason for this is you want the user to make reoccurring payments for those items. Gamepasses where made as a one time purchase. I recommend using Dev Products for this.
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Boosters
This could be economic booster, player speed, player jump or anything this is suppose to allow the user to have X1.1%< of a statistic to make the game “easier”. I would not recommend this because this could be a great opportunity for a recurring purchase which I will explain in the future.
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Donation Gamepass
There are some exception to this recommendation. If the game is a showcase, learning experience, developer skill test or any misc. a game like that it’s ok. It is very rare that users will purchase donations. And it’s not that I don’t want you to get donations, it’s more that you’re wasting a Gamepass spot on your store. A player is way more likely to purchase an item that gives them something for 1000 robux over just a Gamepass that doesn’t get them anything.
Gamepasses should be optimized since you only have 15 slots for them. One technique I have seen used to expand the amount of gamepasses you have is to have a “Extra Gamepasses” Game which you use third party purchases in your game to connect to your game. Usually 15 is a good amount for your game.
We will go into pricing your gamepasses later in the “How to Price Items” Section.
Developer Products
Section III
Developer Products, which I will be referring to as Dev Products are my favorite way to monetize a game. Dev Products are one time purchases which give the user instant satisfaction. You do not want a dev product which does not instantly satisfy the player. For example here are some examples of Good dev Products:
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Instant Boost
I classify this as anything the player buys right away to help achieve something. For example the player is low on health or stamina and they can purchase it to get the upper hand. The player is more likely to purchase when under pressure.
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Economic Purchases
I recommend these if you have any type of economy in your game like XP, EXP, Coins, Cash, Money or any other types of in game economy. Selling these in increments is smart, I would recommend selling them in awkward order for example, don’t sell 100 > 1000 > 10000 because the player will have perfect amounts. It’s better to do 100 > 2000 > 7600 > 10200 to increase the likelihood the player needs to pay more. You could also charge more for the 2000, over the 1000 but still have it discounted a little to be better buying 2000 over 100 x 20. I would also encourage discounting a little the higher you go up, like V-bucks in fortnite they say how good a deal is. And like in fortnite outlining your Best Seller encourages players to buy that item even if it is not your real best seller.
Those are just some popular options but let your creativity thrive when creating them, I do recommend not doing these:
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Overpricing Dev Products
I see this all the times in games, unless the user is purchasing currency I dont want to see a 1000 robux dev product for an item which will only give the player 1 minute of satisfaction.
But there is also many smart ways to create dev products:
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Recurring purchases
Anytime you can you should almost always create a re occurring purchase. In fact we will talk about this later but the player is more likely to buy again if its the same product because they see it as reliable. A perfect example is the Liberty County Emergency Response (Police Roleplay) When you are arrested there is a bail out option for the little amount of >15. This is genius, as users are constantly going to jail. This is a great way to get a player to be a First Purchaser which as we will say later is the hardest part of monetizing your game. If they sell that item 2 Million times they can exchange the earnings for more then 40,000 USD.
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Making you Dev Products instant Satisfaction
If your Dev Product does not satisfy the player within the first minute, you most likely failed. When the person builds up to buy the product and they get instant satisfaction they are more likely to spend again within the next hour due to Dopamine effects.
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Adding to the Experience instead of blocking it.
A Purchase should never block to the user from playing your game, just add to the experience. When you block the player from playing they will leave, and unless thats your goal its not something you want usually.
Premium Payouts
Section IV
Premium Payouts are the only way to currently make money even when you don’t have products for sale.
Premium Payouts rewards you for making awesome experiences on Roblox that Premium subscribers love. If a Premium subscriber is visiting your experiences, you’re earning a Premium payout, even if the user isn’t spending Robux on your games. These payouts are on top of what you earn from selling items in your experience.
Premium Payouts are calculated per experience based on your Premium engagement score. The
Premium engagement score shows how popular your experience is among Premium subscribers as compared to other experiences. So if Premium subscribers are visiting your experience more than any others, your Premium Payout will be higher! You can see what your Premium engagement score and Premium Payouts are in the Premium Payouts chart in Developer Statistics.
To increase your Premium Payouts, you can encourage your visitors to buy Premium by building exclusive levels, items, and benefits for Premium subscribers and using the Premium Upsell modal to allow them to purchase Premium in your game. To benefit from Premium Payouts, your experience must be free to access.
Those are from the roblox Website, for more info visit, Roblox
Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to profit off of premium payouts.
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Premium Engagement
A good way to keep your premium engagement up is to have exclusive premium only items in your game. Another way is making part of the game exclusive to premium players. As stated before players enjoy the satisfaction which comes with Exclusiveness.
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Promoting Premium
I dont commonly see people do this in their game but roblox has a way for players to purchase premium in your game and if they do you can collect premium payouts on that player
Types of Players
Section V
This is one of maybe even the most important part of this post to understand. I will be using a lot of information from this Great Source. A very much needed to @peraldon. I will be directly quoting from his post.
What even is a Player? In game design, players are classified into different groups depending on what mapping is used (for example, players are made up of Achievers, Killers, Explorers etc). This classification is defined by how the player plays your game. When it comes to monetisation, however, we don’t really care about that. We want to focus on how the player spends their money.
As such, there are 3 different types of player. It is very important to design a monetisation system around these, ensuring that you are maximally targeting each group. Note that these player types are relevant to F2P a lot more than P2P, with no additional monetisation.
First Purchase User
This user has purchased a single item within your game. The first purchase is always the most difficult to convince a player to take, so once a player becomes a First Purchaser, consider this a big win. Generally, the first purchase is not going to be worth a lot of money, and the player will often make their purchase to either congratulate themselves on achieving something within the game or - a lot less frequently - buy something as a ‘thanks’ to the game developers.
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Once players have made their first purchase, they’re also now more invested in your game and generally will end up playing it more. If dealt with correctly, you can ensure this increased level of engagement causes them to move over to the next category of players. We know that 95% of people who purchase Robux purchase it more than once (from 2018’s RDC talk), so this is definitely viable.
Repeat Purchase User
Once that first purchase has happened, it becomes a lot easier for the player to quantify purchasing more things within your game. Generally, this includes the player being comfortable with spending more money at a time as well.
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At this point, players will still generally look to purchase items as a form of self-congratulating on achieving something, but as their engagement within the game increases, a number of players will start making repeat purchases to allow them to progress through the game quicker. This is especially true in competitive games.
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If you manage to retain a Repeat Purchase User for long enough and provide them with intelligent monetisation design, you may convert them to the next and final category of player.
Whales
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Pick a random game that’s been monetised. There is pretty much complete certainty that at least 75% of that game’s revenue is generated by only 1-5% of its player base. These players are called Whales - a reference to their massive monetisation potential! With such a large amount of revenue generated by these players, a game generally lives or dies depending on how many Whales it can retain.
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It requires a lot of work and time to convert a player into a Whale. First, you have to convince them to make that first purchase, so they become First Purchase Users. Then you need to continually provide them with a plethora of different monetisation options for them to become Repeat Purchase Users, and continue to do so in an intelligent manner so that they generate a relatively large amount of revenue for your game. Whales are pretty much the only player group who are comfortable with purchasing expensive items and are generally your most engaged players.
Once Again I am not smart enough to define all those terms and probably not qualified to explain it as well as @peraldon did. Again make sure to check out his post!
I have many ways for achieving these 3 types of buyers.
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First Purchaser
The first purchase is the most difficult to get. This is why should have a good entry point item. An entry point item is an item which is cheap enough to get the player to make a first purchase. That first leads to many other purchases that are more expensive. Dont push for the expensive products right away. Overtime they should be introduced.
An interesting fact about the first purchase is how users are way more likely to purchase a product after hitting an achievement. For example after the player reaches a level you can offer them a little something as a "reward’ which is a low price, then every time they hit a milestone keep giving them a offer but make the price go up each time. It will ease them into spending a lot and help make them into a repeating purchaser.
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Repeating Purchaser
As I just talked about its good to start small when offering the user a item. Start with something for lets say, 100 robux, then when you offer them something at 300 they are more likely to purchase since they have a sense of trust. If you really want active purchasers try making weekly or maybe even daily deals. This might be hard for roblox developers though. Make sure users have access to a store and make them visit the store to collect free items or challenges.
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Whale
Whales are hard to create, first they have to have the disposable income to spend on your game. Second, they have gained trust with your game. My suggestion is the more time a player is on your game then the more they will be enticed to become a whale. So make sure to keep updating even if it doesn’t really add much, just some things on the map will up your player count and time played because it’s a “Update”.
How to Price Items
Section VI
Pricing Items can be a tough task at times. And with the thirty percent market tax that roblox adds its even more challenging. Like I talked about in section V its good to have an entry point Item I have a simple way of categorizing products:
- Entry Point Item
- Gameplay Item
- Whale Item
The Entry level item is what gets a player to make that first entry into your shop the first item they buy to win over you trust. In many games I see this around 50-400 robux. 400 being the highest logical price an entry level item. Once they make the first purchase they are way more likely to make more purchases. The Gameplay items are much broader usually from 400 - 6000 robux. These are items which the normal user can purchase to add to the game. Anywhere past 6k is usually a whale item which is meant for the very low majority. A whale item can also be an item which almost has little purpose like a rank that means nothing or a rainbow nametag.
If you have increments of an item for example, A Bad Gun > A Medium Gun > A better Gun, its smart to use the model we talked about earlier where each one is more expensive then the next but take it a bit farther. I would price it like this; A Bad Gun (450) > A Medium Gun (1000) > A better Gun (2200), For every gun I multiplied by two and added 100 for each and the last one I added 200.
In addition to all the previous information stated, looking at your competitors’ prices might be a good idea as well, As long as we are assuming they are using a good sales model. If at any point you can see an item is not being purchased adjust it, or for a limited time put it on sale to drive up popularity then put it back to the normal price.
Monetization Integration
Section VII
Making your products Seamless integrations into your game is very important. Integrating a product is all about the three fundamentals as I call them, Theme, Marketing, Selling. If you can master these you’ll be good to go.
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Theme
Theme is the environment which the product contributes too. For example if you product is a balloon but your game is a dystopian apocalypses society of course your not going to fit the theme. Perhaps if your game was a disco or party it would fit.Themes are important because they help contribute to the players total experiment. For example look at these gamepasses.
They all fit a specific theme and they are all Star Wars. Even the Boombox is changed from the regular Golden one to fit the Sci-Fi theme. They all follow a single format and some are even labelled. Now view this next image as an example of bad theme.
Its hard to even see the theme of the game. The theme of the game should be represented by the gamepasses.
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Marketing
How you market a Gamepass is very important. What I recommend for marketing a product is choose one or two aspects of that product and run with it. Dont have huge overwhelming features. Make sure its understandable and straight forward. Definitely do not make the item sound to good where its not even true. The player will loose trust in you and your game if you do that. Take a look at this image.
Look how they outlined the important parts the player is getting, the rank, not the gear or weapons. Now they could have shown it different with the items you get and labeled it something it else.More importantly in marketing you want to know you audience and if you can target different products to the different parts of your game. For example if your game is a facility game and there are ranks try selling the rank really focus onto the people that are low ranks. You would be surprised how many games advertise me a product I already have. It shows how even scripting a product promotion system can be a good investment.
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Selling
Selling is what is the last part of the users experience that makes them purchase. For example, if the user keeps getting killed in a PVP game, and they finally feel the urge to buy a weapon. Theoretically you would need to find out what this is and replicate it to as many users as possible. The trigger point for purchasing a product. Many games just have the product there and they are done. Really make sure the player knows its there and why the “Need” it. If im playing a café game and I want to serve someone but you can only serve someone at a specific rank then when I go to serve someone is when you pop the advertisement for the product. In one game the they try to sell you a rank right when you join, this is an instant turn off, the player doesn’t even have to be in the group for the pop up to happen.
Future of Monetization
Section VIII
The Future looks bright for us developer as many features are being updated and added. For Example a possible game subscription service. Something I would love to see is a way to monetize with advertisements in-game but I cant think of a reliable way to do so.
- Subscription Service
Hopefully one day we will have a subscription service. You could use them for many different things. The idea of a Battle Pass is genius. Its a reoccurring payment that players feel like they are earning.
Conclusion
Section IX
Thank you for reading this post. Feedback and support would be greatly appreciated. I have spent 12 hours total on this page to compose this.
Post Word Count: 3868
Post By: @SleekyYT
