I just wonder if there’s a way Roblox could get community feedback from developers on this change. If only there was some site they could ask opinions on. Almost like… a Community Panel that could survey opinions for a feature before the decision to release or plan for the feature.
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Thats more of a compromise than a solution, mass majority of the player base is used to buying things the cheapest possible nowadays since that’s what the catalog environments became. Having items go up suddenly by 3x the amount is going to make them not be able to buy as many things as they were able to back then, making it way less sales for the creator
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Everything around this announcement feels like Roblox understands that this is going to hurt creators and players, but continues to push towards it anyways.
Walking away from accessibility after working so hard to lower the costs to develop experiences on the platform, hiding this announcement in a portion of RDC 2023 that wasn’t openly streamed on YouTube, propping up numbers which anyone experienced on the platform know don’t mean much.
Maybe a shareholder starts drooling when they hear “80% of resale transactions are higher than original price”, but anyone who’s invested real time into the Roblox Marketplace knows the two biggest reasons for that number are top devs giving away Limiteds at an original price of 0 robux, and the fact that resellers get a 50% cut off of resold Limiteds, requiring them to double the price to break even.
How can David Baszucki say that Roblox is trying to put as much money in the developer’s hands as possible when creators can expect FIVE CENTS OR LESS for every dollar players spend on resold limiteds?
I think this post by /u/BricksmithBillie over on Reddit highlights a lot of the issues I believe are important to consider here. From the miniscule pay cut, to the lack of freedom to creators, to the fact that this stomps on any excitement people had for the potential of a fanmade egg hunt to follow up on the tradition Roblox abandoned a few years back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/roblox/comments/16fcta8/the_future_of_ugc_is_limited/
Was incredibly excited to get back to UGC and try making some dynamic heads after recently getting out of a bad personal situation IRL. Hard to want to invest my time in a Marketplace destined to fail, knowing I still need to make rent money.
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I’m not a UGC creator (nor really much of a serious developer) so I can only realistically say so much, but here’s my take on the topic;
I’m extremely disappointed that Roblox has chosen to go down this route with the public UGC program. I was very optimistic when it came to the thought that one day everyone could create their own accessories on the platform. The mission of Roblox is to allow everyone to create everything and anything so public UGC was just simply another step towards that ultimate goal.
I’ve always contested the 30% cut as-is, it’s extremely absurd that experience creators can earn more in revenue from an accessory being sold simply because they included the option to purchase it in their experiences. So seeing that Roblox’s “solution” is to go down a route that will ultimately mean creators earn even less is very disappointing to say the least.
100% agree; I think the solution for this would to ensure that the monthly limit is reasonably high, having different limits for groups and individuals (as groups may have more creators publishing accessories), and a system where users (or groups) in good standing can apply for increases in that limit.
In short, I do agree that Roblox should rethink the UGC program especially as it becomes opened up to everyone. Roblox should be valuing a more open market or at least a market that only employs restrictions and barriers when it truly benefits the entire marketplace. I’ve been a strong believer in Roblox’s mission of connecting the world through the power of play, but with the increasing amount of misjudgements Roblox’s management has been taking, I’m starting to think that Roblox seriously needs a net set of hands on the management realm (that includes (as much as we love him) replacing David Baszucki.)
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I really hope I’m wrong about this - but between reading the documents aimed at investors and the documentation aimed at developers I’m seeing a bleak outcome forming.
If the goal over the next two quarters is to overhaul the marketplace to mirror a real-world economy/free market system and push toward immersive experience based sales then this change is looking dire.
The mirror I see feels like individual creators are going to be priced out of production and end up competing to work for well-funded devs or the brand partner cohorts waiting in the wings, who will then profit off the labor of whomever accepts the lowest pay for comparable talent.
This move is potentially a dark path to go down - if it’s the mirror, then it’s the black mirror version. Again, I hope I’m wrong about this.
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I have discussed my side of this here:
For everyone interested in this topic, I’d suggest to give it a read.
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I strongly agree with this, Roblox should reconsider the future features that they have planned for UGC. This will completely ruin the Avatar Marketplace, make creators earn way less than what they already are (it’s also very low currently), and make it way more competitive. You basically won’t make anything at all and this will affect a lot of creators. You got to consider this is also their job that they rely on.
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This is an incredibly insightful post, and one that many from this thread should read. I’ve posted additional thoughts there.
As much as we discuss the creators affected, from the perspective of a consumer, this is a major step back as well. Creators will have to increase item prices across the board to compete with the growing costs of upholding a stable catalog, so buyers will have to deal with item price increases (of up to 2x - 3x even).
With the price floor for hats staying at 50 robux, for instance, this would start a race to the bottom as there would be new opportunities to undercut fellow creators and take advantage of the changes, causing an incredibly unhealthy marketplace situation.
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I’m not sure if this has been said yet (there’s a lot of comments): but in the event that an item’s stock runs out, and resellers are pricing the item above 750R$, there’s not a whole lot stopping general users from uploading a copy of that same item for themselves and paying out the 750R$ upload fee when UGC is public.
This could result in most resellers to max their prices at 750R$, which ruins the resale market for them as well.
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There are no words to describe how abhorrent and willfully ignorant these changes are, let alone how devastating they will be.
As a creator blessed with the opportunity to join the program at the start, it has been continually disheartening to see disappointing decision after decision that benefits absolutely no-one involved. This will really be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, as it not only causes creators to suffer, but players as well. Why implement the dreadful problems and caveats of the real-world market into a platform that is supposed to facilitate fun and creativity, in which many use as an escape from the real world itself? What is there to gain from making every single item limited, forcing creators to hemorrhage what money they have left to replenish artificial stock for potentially hundreds of items that they don’t even know they will break even on, let alone profit from? I joined the UGC Program to share my art and passion, creating items that players can use to express themselves, not to artificially pump imaginary stock into virtual items that should otherwise always be readily available for players to purchase whenever they want without consequence.
This will be the end of livelihoods that depend on UGC. The end of our ability to share the creations we love and freedom of the market. This is a massive misstep in the wrong direction. I will not sit here and stand by as all of the amazing creators and players alike I have met suffer from unnecessary problems introduced by a misguided “vision” of a Metaverse.
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This is honestly disappointing & Demotivating me to apply for UGC.
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Thing is that is exactly what they’re trying to achieve, which is completely illogical since this is entirely digital
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The UGC accessories program was always in ALPHA. ALPHA != stable, so changes like this are to be expected. People should not rely on ALPHA anything as stable income, especially since the program first started unsaturated and that’s not scalable.
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Think you’re the first to mention it, and it’s a pretty good point with a lot to untangle! As explained by this post by /u/BricksmithBillie, Roblox is in a spot where the only way they’ll take down stolen items is if the IP holder says to. In fact, they’ve recently confirmed that in a DevForum post from a couple weeks back.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we start seeing creators simply letting reuploads happen in protest of these changes. Why give Roblox the chance at new high-value items if we’re only being paid a sliver of what they’re worth?
But for anyone who wants to fight reuploads, good luck! We can take a look at what Roblox’s automatic flagging might look like through their “Detection of counterfeit virtual objects” patent. Roblox takes snapshots of your item at different angles, and saves the hash of each screenshot. That might catch direct reuploads, but thieves have gotten a lot smarter over the past year. They’re not renting out billboards to advertise their bootleg Domino Crowns. You’ll find bootlegs which…
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Use nonsense names so they don’t show up in search results
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Position the thumbnail to hide the item
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Dedicate a portion of the texture to adding a fake thumbnail to disguise the item
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Break the item apart into multiple pieces
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Add geometry to make those pieces look like unique hats
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Upload pieces across multiple groups
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Create add-on pieces to wear with pre-existing hats/faces
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Combine multiple stolen assets into one mesh / texture to make it harder to pinpoint the original source
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Target obscure items which less people are likely to callout
So when Roblox says there’s been a 99% drop in reported copies of Roblox-created Limiteds, it’s probably because thieves have gotten smarter. If they’re able to sneak around Roblox’s defenses, where every single item gets reviewed both by the patented automation and human moderators, what are the odds the average UGC creator is going to be able to catch personal reuploads by individual people?
It’s a lot of work for the average player to save a few hundred robux, but for a big spender to save thousands? Sounds like a bargain.
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It’s likely because most of their investors didn’t like the public UGC program or the way it was being used by the players, so they probably told Roblox to add in more paywalls so that they could maximize any profit they would get.
So now it’s no longer a “public” UGC program and nobody aside from richer players will be able to gain a profit from their hard work, which completely defeats the point of it in the first place.
What’s even scummier is that all the items UGC creators have made already will soon be forcefully taken off-sale by Roblox unless they pay for Premium every month for rest of their lives, which is completely insulting to their efforts.
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I would also like to note in terms of the UGC marketplace, I have a bad feeling we are going down an extremely similar pathway to the audio marketplace. While it’s true US DMCA’s safe harbor laws generally protect them from liability of UGC content until the copyright holder reports it, eventually, it will come to a point where that’s much less of a valid reason when the website contains mostly that, and copyright holders will start to take note. Like with the audio marketplace, if you looked on the marketplace, just about any song you picked (excluding official audio) wasn’t legally licensed at all (either it was straight up all rights reserved with no license or did not have proper attributions). To be honest, I’m kind of surprised that even took as long as it did, especially with notorious music rights holders, I would’ve expected the lawsuit and settlement to happen back in 2017-2019 when Roblox was getting popular, not after they were already quite popular. They did introduce a very simple automatic copyright flagging system in 2018, but this only flagged extremely popular songs. Now, it isn’t that bad yet, perhaps if you open the marketplace, you’ll usually see about 1-3 unlicensed UGC assets, rather than almost all of them being unlicensed on the page. But this will only continue to grow, especially when Roblox decides to make announcements in their favor and have a nonexistent review process.
If we look at the audio marketplace now, it’s both still ‘To Made Public’, and they’ve introduced an extremely strict content detection system. This system currently flags just about any audio that is in a database of licensed music they’re using, which includes virtually any license. This means registered Creative Commons songs are often being flagged, and their current response is they just can’t validate licenses yet.
I’m pretty positive if this path continues and right holders complain, eventually, a similar copyright detection system will be implemented for the Avatar Marketplace, probably also being extremely overly strict with no way to resolve the issue until waiting for new features that’ll come out in ‘a few years’. I really don’t want that to happen yet again, the audios are frustrating enough.
I’m also hopeful the ‘Improved tooling to report and manage IP’, which was only the useful UGC feature I got from that announcement, will include a much more minor scale of this across the website, to help curb stolen assets for the creators on this platform it’s self, kind of like how YouTube has with the Copyright Match Tool as a good example. Content would be scanned on the website. If it was flagged as a match, it would be sent to the creator, who would choose whether to file a DMCA or not and could do so easily within a couple of clicks.
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Legally speaking Roblox wasn’t found liable nor not liable for the copyrighted content that was on the audio marketplace. The case was settled before it could go to court. For all we know maybe Roblox could have won the case, maybe it could have lost, but since it never went to trial, we’ll never know. I think Roblox just didn’t want to sour relations with music publishers by attempting to fight the case (even if they could have won) and instead just pay a fine and then strike agreements with them that would allow their audio to (legally) be on the platform.
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-has to pay monthly for a subscription that does not guarantee earnings, but the possibility of earnings
-has to pay for stock
-has to do all the marketing work
-system values richer people and those who joined earlier
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Of course, they weren’t found directly liable in a court of law, which is what happens in many instances of lawsuits. But, that was directly a loss across the platform and for us, which is what I’m far more concerned about here on the DevForum.
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This new Roblox function makes the marketplace well… look like idk theres just thousands of ugcs everywhere and some are even free. I think that if this continues bots will invade Roblox games to get these ugcs and no player will get a chance to get that LIMITED CROWN!!! ugc they been working for. I see this as a Roblox L but I still appreciate all the work they make to get there players happy
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