Roblox MUST make major changes to the currrent UGC roadmap

Recently, Roblox announced a significant change in how user-generated content (UGC) is handled in the marketplace. All pre-existing and newly uploaded items will be converted into limiteds through a gradual transition, with some changes (such as the monthly slot cap) scheduled for release as early as next month. However, the current handling of UGC presents a challenge; these changes will significantly and negatively impact UGC creators’ earnings and, consequently, the livelihoods of many people.

I’m Fennecpaw, one of the UGC creators accepted in the early waves of 2020. I have consistently produced items for many years and take great care in the UGC program. Alongside Roblox game development (surpassing over 50 million visits on my experiences), UGC is my passion. Over the years, I have seen significant improvement in my 3D modeling skills, feeling the need to create higher-quality items on the Roblox catalog since my acceptance into the program. I also manage large communities that follow my projects, with “Wandering Spirit” () being one of them.

Alongside the personal improvement of my 3D modeling skills, I have also observed the significant growth of the UGC program over the years. I remember the old server before transitioning to the Guilded server, where there was transparency between Roblox and UGC creators, active DevRel staff members, and quality control. However, with excessive growth and the move to Guilded, all of this has disappeared.

The lack of transparency provides creators with only 20 days before they can upload a set number of items per month and purchase premium before all their items go off sale.

The lack of accessible DevRel staff members means that many creators find themselves struggling alone with problems, such as false positives in the moderation system (those who email appeals have back-and-forth emails with bots for months, which do not lead anywhere). Personally, I have spoken to a few booths at RDC regarding the communication issue, as myself and many other creators are facing significant issues with Avatar Bodies. With such a substantial feature implemented, why is there such a lack of communication with the UGC community?

The lack of quality control due to the automated moderation system allows creators to create duplicates of pre-existing limited items or abusive exploits, as seen with Avatar Bodies in games. The quality control issue will only worsen when UGC becomes public, as Roblox moderators will be forced to take down as many as thousands of items per day due to these issues.

Roblox is continually reallocating resources from UGC creators despite excessive growth, and I can imagine that this issue will only worsen when the program becomes public. I was never against public UGC (many UGC creators are, but I will address that below), but with the current system, public UGC will completely disrupt the economy, and that’s even before the introduction of the future marketplace.

To account for the excessive growth, I have promoted the idea of increasing UGC rates from 30% to 70%. As a game developer, I do not understand why UGC creators receive such a small portion from their item sales. Unlike games, UGC does not use intensive resources such as game servers. Additionally, UGC creators have been requesting proper analytics for years, yet unlike games, we still cannot even count our sales without Chrome addons or unofficial games such as UGC Tracker. The 30% tax for developer products is justifiable, but the 70% tax for UGC is not. There is also a lack of transparency as to why it is this low, unlike developer products. Additionally, random people who sell UGC items in their own games can earn 40% off of our items. Why do we only get 30% of this, while random developers can make more money off of our products? I spoke to one of the Roblox staff members at the booths at RDC, who I will not name, that suggested we make 70% off of putting our own items in our own games. However, there is no point in doing so, as all-in-one games such as _ exist, in which users can join and conveniently try on many items at a time, or scroll through the Roblox catalog. I cannot think of one UGC store that has an active player base and is owned by the UGC creator themselves. Due to oversaturation as well, many of my items do not even break the 750 Robux fee. This makes it so that creators are forced to create more items to eventually make a profit, which with the introduction of the future marketplace, we cannot do anymore.

The future marketplace will make it impossible for both old and new UGC creators to make a living off of UGC. As if public UGC doesn’t have enough issues as is, the idea of making everything limited can potentially destroy the catalog entirely, making it next to impossible for new UGC creators to start out and for old UGC creators to keep making a living from this program.

New UGC creators will not be able to afford the 750 Robux fee + 20 Robux/stock PER item. For a mere 500 stock, it will cost 10,750 Robux. As someone who rarely even recovers the 750 Robux I put into my items, this is ridiculous. This, along with oversaturation from the idea of public UGC, will make it literally impossible to ever recover all your stock fees. This also negatively impacts brands, who will also be forced to pay an excessive amount of Robux for their items to be on the Roblox catalog, which, in turn, also harms the creators who work alongside these brands.

Old UGC creators have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of items and will not be able to afford to restock every single month, forcing them to enable resales and suffer from the lack of a limited price cap (people may give away their items for essentially free), and to only obtain 10% rather than 30% from all resales. I quit creating limited items because I can no longer sell out all of my stock anymore due to oversaturation, they are not profitable during the resell period due to the 90% tax, and the fact that every single one of my limiteds has significantly dropped in value since the initial hype when limiteds first came out. The thought of having this happen to all of my items scares me, especially considering I would have to potentially pay millions of Robux every month to keep them in-stock. I’d be making literal pennies as Roblox users panic sell items for as cheap as possible, with no price cap, and 90% tax.

Both old and new UGC creators will suffer tremendously from this change, as it does not benefit anyone except Roblox, who will shamelessly take millions of dollars from UGC creators restocking items, purchasing premium, paying the 750 Robux fee, and taking 70% of Robux from all sales.

If this change goes through, myself and many other creators will not create any more UGC items on the Roblox platform. Many other UGC creators have told me about future plans to join game development teams or to move off-platform entirely. The simple reason is that it’s just not worth it anymore. For a platform that emphasizes self-expression, it is a surprise to me that Roblox fails to give back to the UGC community.

I propose that Roblox fixes these issues by introducing a middle ground by increasing UGC rates to 70% (so that users may pay off their stock more effectively and to lower the financial impacts of oversaturation) and creating an automated system so that all items will consistently have stock so that we shouldn’t need to rely on the mere 10% from resales. Additionally, resales need a price cap, and there needs to be better transparency, communication, and quality control between Roblox and the UGC community.

We are just as important as developers, and we deserve to be treated as such.

143 Likes

Thank you for speaking out on this, this is very important and I believe the direction Roblox UGC is going to is flawed. Roblox needs to listen to us developers and act asap.

25 Likes

This puts all our concerns perfectly into words, I really hope that someone with authority thoroughly reads through this and realises that it is a change that cannot be good for the marketplace.

23 Likes

I had a friend from Discord who makes UGC and im so worried about it. I am super concerned right now about this and this change is going to be very bad for the avatar marketplace itself.

14 Likes

The crux of the issue is just the 10% from resales. Under that system we are taking a heavy cut in our earnings.

Old scenario … 100 bobux is spent, we get 30. The rest (70) goes to roblox and vanishes.

New senario… 100 bobux is spent… we get 10… roblox gets 40 (vanishes)… and the player gets 50?
Then they spend that 50 (since it’s still in the economy). We get 5… roblox gets 20… player gets 25.
Then they spend that 25 (still in economy). We get 2… roblox gets 10… player gets 13.
Then again, 13 spent. We get 1… roblox gets 5… player gets 6.

In total, we get 18 bobux instead of the 30 we used to get.

BUT if our share is raised to 15%

Then … 100 bobux is spent… we get 15… roblox gets 40 (vanishes)… and the player gets 45?
Then they spend that 45 (since it’s still in the economy). We get 7… roblox gets 18… player gets 20.
Then they spend that 20 (still in economy). We get 3… roblox gets 8… player gets 9.
Then again, 9 spent. We get 1… roblox gets 4… player gets 5.
And then 5 spent, we get 1.

In total, we would get 27… which ends up being lower, but not as much of a disaster as 10%. If we get 20% then we will make a bit more than now.

So if Roblox comes up a bit on resale percent, then there is no issue and it seems great. A more active player economy and trade ecosystem with lower prices without really damaging us.

17 Likes

It really is just so absurd how aggressive they nickle and dime artists that just want to make and sell avatar items.

750 for the upload fee, about 10 bucks worth of robux.
Only 30% of the sale while resellers can just toss our stuff into an experience and get 40% for no effort.

And a 30K minimum for cashing out to get 100 bucks.
For 100 bucks you can buy 10kr, so we have to earn 3 times as much robux in value on top of the scraps of profit we get for our work.

And now with this nonsense of forcing everyone into an artificial scarcity based market, we all have to pay even more if we want to keep our stuff stocked.

For those not aware It costs 20r for every one stock of an item if someone wanted to sell a limited item currently. That quickly becomes 100r if you want a stock of 5, 200r if you want a stock of 10. 2000r if you want a stock of 100.

Now imagine if you wanted an actual meaningful amount of stock like say 2000?

40,000r.

It costs 100 bucks just to buy 10,000r.

2000 still isn’t enough if you have the misfortune of having a popular item in this new system they want to force us into. You’ll have to pay that again, and again, and again, and again if you want to make sure it’s always stocked.

19 Likes

Thank you for voicing your opinion elegantly like this.

As a creator from the January 2021 wave, I’ve seen how harder it is to establish yourself in the newer applicant waves (end of 2021, early 2022 etc.), I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it would be for any new creators in the public UGC marketplace.

The limited-only philosophy of the new marketplace will practically make it impossible for anyone to start off, the stock and upload fees combined would make UGC inacessible not only to those who are starting, but to those who just don’t have enough earnings to keep up with demand. Combined with the 30 day pending period, this would be a deadly combination and would stunt anyone’s growth, provided they don’t have enough of a financial support network.

Additionally, the drop-off of limited items has been correctly showcased in this post, many of my limiteds currently sell for a net profit of ~8k robux, a steep drop from the net profit of ~24k that I’ve been selling for a few months ago. And even then, many items take a much longer time to sell out, some taking a month or two with a stock of 300 - 400. Scaling this up to all of my catalog, I’m unsure if I would ever recover from the consistent restock costs of a few thousand items. Not to mention the issues with restocking manually and optimizing stock cycles.

From the perspective of a consumer, this is a major step back. As creators increase item prices to compete with the growing costs of upholding a stable catalog, buyers will have to deal with item price increases of 2x - 3x, which would promote an unhealthy environment and a race to the bottom as new price-cutting opportunities present themselves to creators.

Communication and feedback is key, I can only hope that Roblox staff read these posts thoroughly and engage in discussion with creators to see what the marketplace could, and ideally should, be like.

13 Likes

As a new UGC Creator this is a huge concern and cause of anxiety for my new found passion. I only recently started being able to live a bit off of the work I’ve done and seeing it possibly being ended like this after finally succeeding is very sad and scary. I’ve been extremely upset about the 30% cut especially when I see people selling my items and getting 40% from no effort. I atleast expected it to be the other way around. 70% would be unrealistic since roblox for some reason always wants atleast 30%, therefore if an items gets sold in a game I think we should get 40%, dev gets 30% and roblox get 30%. But then if its sold on site, I believe the 70% is completely fair. Like you said theres no extreme server costs.
Roblox wants to give whoevers game ‘sells’ the item 40%, but the roblox website is literally the only place you can sell your UGC and its not like roblox needs to do any effort to somehow make people buy ugc items on their website. We build our own community and store front, trough effort and time, yes, on the website, in a group. I don’t think paying 70% of your income away to Roblox because it’s being sold on their platform is fair. At that point you might aswell take that extra 40% from games aswell, as they use much more of the platforms resources than we do.
I calculated how much roblox makes in the end when you track the value of robux from purchased, to devexed.

(This is not including the upload fee.)

Let’s say a user buys 100,000 robux (1000 dollars). The user spends this 100k robux on UGC. The UGC Creator in this scenario gets 30k robux. This 30k can be exchanged for 105 dollars.
Every dollar you make, roblox makes 10x more.

(And maybe even more, if you add the upload fees, and the stock fee.)

I am not unthankful for being able to make any money at all from my passion, but your work giving other people 10x more profit than you, who put all the effort and time into it, is painful and frustrating. I will not continue using this platform if they continue with things like this. I understand that roblox loves their passive income, but they should not forget that they’re working with people. We are not their minions.

4 Likes