This planned update is absolutely horrendous and will 100% kill UGC. They claim it’s going to make the marketplace “more healthy” but forcing all new UGC to be limited is not going to do that at ALL.
For starters, you only get 30% (plus stock fee) when you sell a UGC limited, even when bought in your game. (Tried this myself with my own items. The 40% only works on non-limited UGC) so by forcing all future items to be limiteds, it means there is no possible way whatsoever to earn 70% anymore from your UGC. Then, of course, you only get 10% of every resale too. (Meaning Roblox would now take away 70% from you the first sale, and 40% of every resale)
This means creators in order to make any profit would have to raise the prices of their items significantly, which is something a lot of people (myself included) probably do not want to do. I want my items to be cheap and affortable as a lot of players might not have much robux, so by forcing creators to price up their limiteds more just so they can break even with upload fees etc., could make it much more harder for creators to sell their items and thus actually make a living.
Then you have the fact that ALL already uploaded UGC will be FORCED to go limited, and if you want your items to have more stock, you will be FORCED to pay for them. Most UGC creators/groups, especially smaller UGC groups like myself, simply do not have that amount of robux to spend on restocking stuff. To give you an idea of just how much this would cost me, for example, I currently have a total of 80 hairs onsale in my group (That are all currently non-limited).
It costs 20 robux per 1 stock for hair limiteds, so lets say I wanted to restock all of my hairs with just 500 stock each. That means it would cost me 10k robux just to restock ONE hair. And if I wanted to restock all 80 of my hairs with just 500 stock, that means it would cost me 800k robux. 800k robux, going by devex rates, is about $2.8k USD, and I simply cannot afford to pay close to three thousand dollars just to restock all of my hairs so that people could actually continue to buy them. Yes, I am aware you get the stock fee back when someone buys the hair, but that’s not the point. If those items didn’t sell, then that means I’d lose all that money. This is why forcing limiteds, then forcing people to pay to restock their existing items, is such a horrendous idea. I just don’t want to be forced to make limiteds. I want to have normal, non-limited items that anyone can buy anytime at a cheap price.
Countless UGC creators have also spoken out publicly against these planned changes on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) such as GuestCapone, Lucaduke and i_sininho, just to link but a few. I especially encourage people to read what i_Sin has to say on the subject. I sincerely hope that Roblox realises just how bad of a change this is, and listens to the creators instead of appealing to investors with horrific updates like this.
I personally agree with all of this, I myself hate all of the limited quantity stuff. People will usually take the stock from everyone in a matter of seconds and it will be sold out.
Wasn’t the whole point of the UGC Program to experiment and iterate on a user-created marketplace before the release of Public UGC? ROBLOX pushing such a monumental change at the inception of public UGC completely invalidates all the insight and experience gained in the past 4 years of the program.
If Roblox wants to make changes like this they at least need to thoroughly test it on a small scale first and get feedback from the creators that are knowledgeable with the marketplace and its workings, so they can make smarter changes such as the ones suggested by Blizzei in this post.
Roblox is gonna destroy UGC in one fell swoop. I will not be able to afford UGC anymore or even get a profit based on how expensive limiteds are. Only top creators and devs will be able to afford to do UGC at this point if roblox doesn’t put an end to these horrible ideas.
I just paid 60k robux for a homestore to make 70% on my items and how my items are gonna be forced to become limiteds and sold out items cant be bought in a homestore let alone make any profits from them being limiteds. This is a horrible idea and they are hurting lots of UGC creators doing this. It needs to change.
The changes that are coming to the user generated catalog are shocking to say the least. Many others and myself believe these changes are negative for UGC creators and consumers of user-generated items. Hoping that they reconsider having a fixed quantity because my regular UGC shouldn’t be treated as something that is limited quantity.
This not only feels shameful for Roblox to resort to this, in order to compensate their earnings because millions of users will upload accessories themselves and not buy from other creators anymore, but it’s such a ridiculous thing they’re doing because they realized once Public UGC comes, everything will be screwed up.
The economy doesn’t feel any “Healthy” with these new changes, but rather messy. Roblox realized the mistake of public UGC, and knew once UGC is public, they will lose out on money generated by creators, so they came up with a plan to tax us and new creators to come, even more. This feels like somebody in Roblox’s avatar creation or marketplace department, just thought of a way to maximize their profits, minimize their costs, as well as keeping Roblox’ vision unchanged, to appeal to investors more than they appeal to their community, which should matter a lot more. With a more healthy community, Roblox would also appeal more to investors!
In my personal opinion, this is the worst thing ever to happen to UGC creators who relay on UGC for their lives, pay their rent with UGC money, and bring food to the table. Roblox destroyed not only these people’s dreams of getting somewhere and earning something stable for a few years of their lives, but also took away their food.
With this said, I’m sure nothing will change Roblox’ vision on this, and with a lot of UGC creators complaining, a Roblox staff or employee, will do an “We understand your concerns” message and try to point out some “green flags” of this situation, but obviously nothing will ever compensate those who actively relay on UGC.
I absolutely agree with this, I hope that this is reconciled.
This is not what the community wants, this ruins all the incentives for someone wanting to publish quality items, leaving even lesser margins for the creators themselves.
Hurting both, the buyers and the creators. How is the goal still to empower and foster creativity?!
UGC is one of the main income we get. And taking the items that we have uploaded off-sale just because we could not pay Premium is messed up.
UGC creators only get one benefit which is making non-limiteds. Which is good but if we could get more like:
A different section in the marketplace says items by UGC program. why since the marketplace is gonna be filled with a bunch of random items
Then keep our items on sale even if we lose premium
Then maybe for the people in the UGC program that they don’t need to pay for the premium to upload or maybe give like 10-15 items a month to upload without premium
My question is why implement these changes in the first place? The system was originally fine as it is. Sure, there are more people to go around and it makes it harder to accept everyone. And now that there are more and more creators creating copyright infringing material (which will most likely cause a massive lawsuit against Roblox in the near future), how would things get better now? My prediction is that things are going to get worse. Inevitably, it’s going to lead into a massive lawsuit that’ll damage the company forever, and make creating content on this platform 100x harder.
Not only that, Roblox users already have immense power to copy each other’s material. Including models, textures, classic clothing, etc. This seems like a hasty move to appeal towards their investors, instead of a genuine attempt to make things better for the users.
Please, let’s fight against this. I’d rather not have this platform tainted by greedy bad characters and rash decision making.
I can see so many people suffering financially because they were told UGC could be a job. If we can see this, then Roblox already sees it. They just don’t care. I do think that not only UGC creators, but other creators, players, and developers too, need to come together and push for this to be stopped immediately.
On the other hand, please plan for yourself accordingly. No one should have to deal with this, but it may be something that ends up happening anyways. It’s better to be prepared and have a plan now than to not have one in the future. I genuinely hope they hear us and listen, or they will lose so many wonderful and talented creators.
my thoughts about roblox’s upcoming ugc changes as a current ugc creator:
flexible items seem to be modeling ugc limiteds quite heavily based on what i understand from their vision, so my assumption is that they’re going to be identical except one is a set stock at the start is one that can be added to as time goes on
if this is the case:
the 30% cut on regular items, 10% cut on resales, and banker’s rounding system (if a person’s cut ends in a .5 after taking the %, EVEN.5 rounds down, ODD.5 rounds up) will remain in place. the current prices per stock will remain in place (based on item type, vary from 10 robux → 30 robux per unit). you can make the money back when each unit sells, meaning that HOPEFULLY there’s a tool to automatically add stock to dynamic items as they sell out (either one roblox provides or a user-made one).
you can turn off resellability, meaning that when used in conjunction with an auto-restocker, nothing will change from current items except now you need to wait 30 days to re-add a resale’s unit for free, so all this does is slow down the sale of items, which doesn’t help anyone. the user can’t buy what they want and the creator can’t continue to make money off of their work unless you have a large sum of money sitting around that you can reinvest
this may mean free ugc is actually a thing which is horrifying in all honesty given how we only get 10% of the resales and seeing how fast free ugc currently gets burnt through (thousands of stock in a matter of seconds). It’s worth nothing that you may not get the stock’s fee back, so at least there’s some level of deterrent?
if resales are turned on some items (which inevitably they will), that means items can be resold for close to nothing (there’s no floor afaik), meaning bestselling items (shadowed head for example) will be resold below the cost that they were initially sold at, meaning the creator gets only 10% of the sale (if the item is being resold for 4 robux or lower, the creator doesn’t even get anything). if only resales are used though then the 10% is effectively a permanent rate on those items. not only do the creators of those items get impacted though, but even if i choose not to have resales on, if i have a similar item (for instance, sunglasses), why would anyone buy mine which costs 20 robux vs. another one which costs 5? this change not only hurts the original creator, but also any creators with any similar items, and acknowledging how there’s so many of these popular items like sunglasses and how inevitably at least one of each category will be resellable + only more will flood in as public ugc comes, it’s gonna be a nightmare for ugc creators to be paid fairly for their work
a bit more of a minor concern but afaik we just…… can’t update anything about the item beyond if comments are on once it goes onsale. no name, description, or tag updates. no way to do sales, fix a typo, etc. or perhaps far more vitally, adjust the price to follow demand!
other thoughts about their changes:
premium requirement, 750 upload fee, and paying per unit: in all honesty, these just limit the accessibility of public ugc from actually being public. if they want to limit that, then why are they also instituting all these tools shown off at rdc that also make it more accessible (ai generating textures, being able to make assets in experiences, etc.)? it’s public, but only if you have plenty of robux to spare already (such as game devs, many of whom may already have access to the program/creators who applied and are currently in the program), and at that point why even treat it as if it’s public?
limiting the number of slots: in all honesty, i never had to deal with the slot limit cap, so it’s hard to have a perspective of how hardly this will push against creators. while i doubt many creators would actually need to make more than 30 distinct meshes per month, if someone wants to make a lot of colors for a wider base of users, now they can only do that on a few items per month. if some sort of system was built in that allowed for recolors to be uploaded while it all counts as 1 slot, that may be an interesting approach? i feel like with the limited perspective on this i have though, it limits creators from being able to push all of their ideas out, or limits them to only pushing the most popular ones and keeping users from finding a more niche item they may want. it’s also worth nothing that if you can get friends who aren’t using all of their slots to help you upload items, then this change is effectively useless, assuming they have premium & are id verified, as you can fund all of the fees needed to upload the item
how pre-existing items are being dealt with: we genuinely have no clue, except they’ll eventually be converted into the flexible items. will resale be enabled on them? If so, would it be possible to disable it (or vice versa if its disabled on them)?
these changes don’t really help anyone, and the only way to assume they’re going to work out “okay” at best is to assume that all of the unknowns are the best case scenario. the only way to actually get clarification on any of this was to speak directly with staff at rdc and hope they knew, so for the majority of users who couldn’t be there to find these things out, we’re left in the dark as to how this actually is going to rollout
tl;dr: we aren’t getting communication to answer our questions about how it’s going to roll out. based on our current knowledge, this system is going to require you to have a lot of robux/money lying around in order to be able to begin to or continue to survive in the ecosystem and calling it public isn’t really accurate when there’s so many barriers to even starting
Might be controversial take but Roblox needs to stop accepting UGC creators. Everyone doesn’t need to be one and they certainly need to put more restrictions on who can make them. 2022 - 2023 is by far the worst time line for UGC that we’ve seen so far.
The issues
A giant spark of multiple Roblox Limiteds ripoffs (2023)
Stolen Meshes (mainly 2022)
TOS breaking accessories (2022 & 2023)
UGC items that are related to certain controversial groups (2023ish)
UGC timer scam (2022 - 2023)
UGC hat place baiting (places that promised a UGC item but never did) (2023)
UGC economy exploited by UGC creators themselves (2023)
These are some of the main issues, I can list many more but I think you get the gist here.
I seriously don’t understand the need to enforce scarcity on a virtual platform with virtual items. If every accessory is made a limited asset, would that not then make the catalog completely empty because of how insane the pricing would be to restock. You wouldn’t even be able to outreach or supply more than 100,000 accessories to people because the cost to restock them would be absurdly high and unmanageable in terms of upkeep. Going off of the calculations I’ve seen under this forum post, this will hurt essentially every UGC creator that has been in the program or any NEW creators that want to make a name for themselves in the community. No one has that kind of Robux to consistently recycle into restocks unless you’re some millionaire, which isn’t the case for most of these users.
I was looking to apply to UGC and had already submitted an application even, but now this just looks like an avenue that isn’t profitable in the slightest, and creators will be losing more money than they can hopefully generate with these bottleneck tight restrictions.
Even speaking as a consumer, who would want to have to wait for a hat that they wanted that COULD have been sold for relatively cheap, but now has to be sold at some absurd price for the creator to even make a profit, with a relatively small stock value because anything higher would be impossible to publish without then raising the price. You lose desirability that way and placing real-world restrictions on a virtual market just isn’t feasible or logical.
No other site that sells 3D models, lessons/tutorials regarding game development, or game assets works this way. You pay for the asset and you received the file or content, with it being supplied indefinitely because you can’t run out of something that isn’t tangible in the first place. The only resources that are taken into account when creating the content are the creators time, money, and skill that they had to develop for however many years they spent. Any management on the host site to keep the content up is taken directly as a cut from the product itself due to utilization of said site. So to be met with a cap on how much they can actually upload is extremely ridiculous when you factor in sites like Gumroad and Artstation, that offer the same service.
Another thing I’d like to note is the lack of transparency with these plans regarding UGC becoming public and the plans moving forward. This was all supposedly dropped during the RDC convention that took place, yet was there no deliberation or feedback sought out from the community beforehand, especially if you plan to release these changes within a month? What’s the point of encouraging that you’re a community driven platform if at best we have to go to a devforum that isn’t written by an official ROBLOX staff member, to post our own opinions on these changes.
This is what really gets me. Roblox announced this wide-reaching Marketplace overhaul PRIVATELY. Not at the keynote, not at the Builderman Q&A, not even in the blog post or the DevForum post. In a private panel, where the majority of the community, even ACTIVE members, would have no idea unless a dev leaked the info (which THANKFULLY someone did). It was Roblox’s intention to sit on this bizarre change, conveniently not mention it to the public and most UGC creators who didn’t attend, and then spring this on us in a DevForum post a few months down the line when they’re ready to rollout a change that’ll affect the lives of many that rely on these items for income. Absolutely shameful on Roblox’s part.
