This post focuses on Player Serving Applications (i.e. runtime applications that generate revenue selling to players) instead of Developer Serving Applications (such as buyable studio plugins). I’m making this post to highlight how investment into PSAs can bring about investment into the Creator Store and indirectly increase the number and quality of DSAs.
What are Player Serving Applications (PSAs)?
PSAs are applications which sell products directly to players on behalf of a user (i.e. a game owner), and in return receive a small percentage of the revenue earned.
Outside of Roblox this might look like a ticketing-application; the application handles movie bookings for its cinema chains (its users) and in return for its free services takes a small cut of every booking.
In Roblox this might look like:
- A pet catalog (where the application builds a dedicated pet system and designs the pets, while the game owner is responsible for selling them)
- A clothing catalog selling outfits
- An admin system selling commands
- A gear marketplace selling tools
Why we need PSAs
With existing and future-proposed forms of monetisation (such as selling your application for x amount of Robux) there is no viable way to compete with games.
Roblox games have almost unlimited earning potential. Factors help such as:
- Varied revenue sources (passes, products, subscriptions, premium payouts, etc)
- Games are generating revenue from players. It’s easier to scale income this way considering there are 297 million more players than developers as of 2024.
The top teams, developers and investors are focused exclusively on game development because it makes financial sense. More income means more money that can be spent on larger teams, higher salaries, marketing, etc.
PSAs have a viable business model because they wouldn’t just earn income for every game owner that uses their application, they earn income according to how many people play that game too. This alone would enable successful applications to scale up to 6 and 7+ figure incomes, in turn directing talent from games to the Creator Store.
Benefits
We all benefit from higher quality applications. Large and well-funded teams mean:
- Improved safety (more eyes to monitor, reliable long-term maintenance, etc)
- More refined features and better documentation
We all benefit from more applications:
- Less time spent re-inventing the wheel for every small feature. Instead focus can be dedicated towards other important aspects of our games.
- More publicly available source code to learn from
- Greater competition between teams to drive innovation
The creation of PSAs indirectly promotes the creation and contribution of DSAs:
- As PSAs grow they will come to depend on libraries and community resources. It’s in their best interest to improve these resources, and they have the financial means to do so.
- One example I can relate for example is TopbarPlus. I enjoy working on the project, but the main reason it continues to receive updates 4 years on (despite no income and requiring hundreds of hours of work) is because of its dependency in HD Admin.
What’s needed
Thanks to many great advancements towards a more safe and reliable Creator Store, Roblox is now nearing a position where it could begin to implement changes to make PSAs possible. These are:
1. Provide application-specific permissions
See Creator Marketplace: Improving Model Safety - #28 by ForeverHD
2. Open up monetization outside the origin experience
Allow key monetization features such as developer products and subscriptions to be sold outside the experience they were created in.
3. Introduce customizable shares
Provide a setting for developer products, subscriptions, etc to customize the % given to the experience where the product is sold (just like with UGC). For example, a PSA could setup a product that rewards the game owner 90% of the sale, while they keep 10%. This also reduces friction as the game owner no longer needs to setup additional products for every application they add into their game.
I truly believe these tools will help replicate the success of games into the Creator Store. Not to mention take steps towards David’s vision of an ecosystem where developers are creating the tools for other developers.