UGC Revenue Increase's update is flawed

[Blizzei]

As not many people know, there was an update silently put in place where depending on the price of your UGC item the revenue share increases.
As someone that has been making UGC accessories and bundles for a few years now, I feel as though the way this was implemented was poorly managed and needs to be adjusted.

How does it currently work?

Fortunately this is documented which i will link here
However, If you don’t want to read everything here is an image from the documentation that demonstrates how it works

The more the item’s price the higher the revenue share, and in order to get 70% of the revenue share you must make the price TEN TIMES the price floor

The UGC economy doesn’t work well with this update

In order for an item to succeed it has to almost always be at the base price floor anyway in order to get sales. Check the best selling past day for example, you will see just about everything will be at the price floor. Catalog

Theoretically, if a creator were to suddenly set a price of an item on the front page to even 2 times the amount to get 50% instead of 30% it would make them lose most of their sales due to the item being more expensive than everything else to get.
If someone were to set something new onsale for that price its not going to even get picked up by the algorithm due to nobody buying the item in the first place.

In other words, any creator that were to try to push for a higher percent with this system will harm their item.

Only a minority of creators, mostly rule breakers benefit from this

You may be wondering, what do you mean this only benefits rule breakers??

UGC LIMITEDS…

Those people that make limiteds that are only domino crown, valk helms, dominus reskins? Yeah this actually benefits them instead and let me show you something really quick.

I have labeled each item recently created that is a limited and is NOT a free limited from an engagement farm game. I’ve labled each roblox limited reskin as “R” and each copyrighted content item as “C”
As you may know, roblox did do a purge on dominus items a few weeks ago terminating multiple users from DMCA’s. UGC limiteds are one of the only things that warrant raising the price of an item due to it being ‘limited’.

THIS WOULD MEAN, this dominus right here is getting 62% revenue instead of 30% and it’s getting sales because well, its a dominus this is exactly what this revenue share split benefits; ironically the types of items roblox is literally against??

WHAT should change?

Luckily I have several solutions that would help everyone all around, you are free to suggest other things as well however I’m going to share my suggestions

Making the revenue split just 50% all around as base price

While I understand making it 70% to creators would be amazing in an ideal world, I understand that is a massive cut towards roblox. I introduce a 50% split instead for both non-limiteds and limiteds. This would mean the revenue split would just generally be more fair,

Making the % Split system significantly more sensitive

May sound controversial but I feel as though if the system was more sensitive towards non-limited items it could benefit non-limited creators. For example if a hat’s price floor is 100 robux and someone were to set it to 110 robux, it could raise it to 50%.

While it would limit the amount of people that would buy the item due to it being a little more expensive, it’s not enough of a change where it would make just about everyone turn their nose over an item being a tiny bit more pricey than a similar item, it would encourage creators to raise their prices to get that 20% boost or even more if they were aiming for 70% revenue

Be free to give other suggestions

Due to this being a silent major change, I want to hear other peoples thoughts about this

[Seebass404 (Seebass4)]

Roblox did eventually give us what we wanted, which was higher revenue splits for UGC items, but as you stated, clearly and obviously not in a way that benefits anyone who does it legitimately. Making it just 50% split between Roblox and Creator is definitely the right direction. What still bugs me, is the experience creator still earns more than the UGC creator, and even if you make your items more expensive, it doesn’t benefit you at all, you still get the 30% as normal if they buy them in a game.

[idelww]

I think the best case scenario would be 50% creators, 30% roblox and 20% developers/affiliates.

Also I think Roblox should not only get the fees right but also fix their moderation related to 1:1 copies & copyrighted material.

These items shouldn’t pass validation to begin with instead of terming users months after
We need proactive moderation & copy prevention(for both UGC and roblox-made items)

[SpookyMeril (Meril)]

If they can give 70% to higher priced items, surely they can just give it to everyone. Almost nobody is going to benefit from pricing their items higher in the long run, I tried pricing one of my items just 10 robux higher than the pricefloor once and even that pretty much killed sales on it.

When the UGC program was first introduced it was 30% because of the exposure they got, which made sense - but they haven’t scaled that with the size of the program at all. Given that UGC is public now and the exposure is much less, it’s harder to get noticed and all of the fees ontop of that - It’s only fair we should get more than 30%. 70% would be nice but I’d be happier with even just 50%. I would be making thousands more if that were the case.

Game developers don’t have to spend thousands every time they click publish on their games, but they still get 70% of their gamepass sales (in most cases). I don’t see why they can’t increase it, even if only slightly.

[Blizzei]

@Seebass404

Making it just 50% split between Roblox and Creator is definitely the right direction.

I think so too, It’s basically the middle ground in this situation and just seems overall more fair if it were to just be done like that, perhaps with the option to go to 70% with a higher price for limiteds if they so badly want to push people to do more limiteds

[Zlosu (ZisMe)]

I believe this update only once again highlighted the unfair advantage of creators that don’t play by the rules. Those same creators were already making a lot from using all manner of Roblox ip. Now they get a whopping boost of income from just uploading limited knock-offs on the site, potentially as much as creators who sell their accessories in-games.

I think making it a 50/50 cut for all creators is the best approach to aid every creator. I’d also like to see much more severe moderation be enforced on anyone who uses Roblox ip. More than just a strike, but a long term ban to really sink in the message. I know this can’t be enforced the same for 3rd party ip’s which is why I think anything Roblox related should be dealt with more seriously, especially in this retro-ish era where knock-offs flourish.

[nameswapped3 (daniel)]

All of the shenanigans could be avoided if they just increase the % UGC creators earn and leave it at that. Trying to do it this way will not work in today’s economy.

[Wheatly199]

This update feels like they just wanted to add a price floor to the price floor (which sucks cause a lot of items are automatically overvalued by it)

Increasing the price will simply drop sales and I feel like roblox is gonna try to just pull up the price floor, giving half to the creator regardless of pricing would be pretty helpful instead

[Oppressed_II]

This is what they said was their reason as to why they don’t give us higher cuts. But in my opinion if they can afford to give game owners who use our items to make money higher cuts then us the creator of said item. Where is the fairness?

I believe we at the minimum should receive a 50% cut regardless,

On Catalog:

• 50% to Roblox
• 50% to UGC Creator

Sold In Experience:

• 45% to creator of item
• 25% to game owner
• 30% to Roblox.

To me that seems like a fair split, we make Roblox money, we pay to upload these items and we pay to publish them they get enough from us from that. It’s not right to earn less than 50% on items we created and then had to pay to upload and publish, which most items even if they are good take months to years to make the money back on or don’t get algorithm exposure at all.

[nameswapped3 (daniel)]

The fact the game owner makes more than the UGC creator currently is genuinely baffling.

[Blizzei]

Update, I actually did try increasing the price for one of my best sellers so you guys don’t have to!

tldr: don’t do it, it sucks

I don’t usually put analytics of my own items for things like this however I’ve decided to do this just to see the impact of sales during a weekend while sales of the item were actually higher than the week prior.

taken on july 4th, as you can see it got 3k sales in a span of 7 days at this point

This is the same item 2 days later after changing the price to get 37% revenue share instead

The circle is the day where i put the price up after analytic stats came up, and the stats after the circle get significantly lower after two days Bear in mind this is horrible because this was on a weekend on top of it. Imagine what would happen if i kept its price for longer?

[biscuitify]

In similar interest I also tried this on a few items of mine with varying daily sales and while some did better than others it overall ended very unfavourably for said items.

Most interestingly was when I tried this on some pretty awful looking evil shadow head dynamic thing that has been picking up a bit recently, which initially did see a huge jump in revenue following me raising the price to R$199, going from averaging 2-3k to 10-15k though very volatile, however after around a week of this the item began to get very heavily dropped from the algorithm before I lowered the price back down to see the damage, ending up with it making 700 or so at the end when put back to original price.

Another interesting attempt with this was with some faceless cheeks dynamic head I own which has been pretty consistently doing 4-8k a day for probably around 8 months at this point which I again raised in price to R$199 however only for around 3 hours as it had become very clear how badly this was performing (validly as many of these exist but thats partially why I wanted to experiment with it), interestingly the head ended up being almost entirely dropped from the algorithm following this with revenue since being around 1k a day, I don’t know whether to blame that entirely on pricing it up since this was only for 3 hours and items do get dropped from the algorithm sometimes but it was at the very least an odd coincidence.

Of course in my cases this was done on fairly small items and most faced little to no distinguishable difference so take these examples with a grain of salt but as it stands items priced like this do not seem to have much chance of staying in the algorithm.