Does this fix the bug where games on groups don’t get commissions (eg selling a 100 robux hat, 0% gets paid to the group or group owner) because that bug has been around for literally years
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A 40% affiliate commission seems fairly high, but I’m sure Roblox has thought carefully about this and decided on a figure they thought was fairest for all parties.
If you look at it from an average game developer’s view:
- Players have the option to wear UGC in thousands of games for free, self-advertising as some people call it with no expense to yourself.
- The UGC program is highly selective and a small majority have the ability to create Catalog UGC meaning that your revenue is substantially higher than many other revenue streams on Roblox.
- Incentivizing the option for developers to sell UGC in games will undoubtedly increase your sales and overall revenue.
- You have the option to configure the ability to sell UGC, so if you believe the system is too favorable to game developers, only sell it in the Avatar Shop and your places.
Changes and adjustments are likely to be made to this Affiliate System overtime as more people give feedback on this post.
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Cool! I am not a designer, but it is nice seeing that. I also realize why the feetest hat is a thing.
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Also the 40% is coming out of Roblox’s share, you still get your 30% regardless, so complaining about money developers are getting from Roblox seems a bit selfish.
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I understand, but also realize that there are many many other talented modelers out there who aren’t in the UGC program and therefore can’t create items… which isn’t fair to them as they should be able to have the equal opportunity to make as much money as those IN the program do in a day.
I guess the 10% difference encourages users not in UGC to sell UGC items in their games, kind of equaling it out? Also I kind of understand 40% for devs and 30% for UGC creators because they’re essentially advertising your product
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no worries, UGC program is eventually becoming public, and everyone will have the ability to make their own items
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now this… this is good.
Roblox is finally being way more lenient with clothing designers. They all deserve a coffee on me.
Very nice job!
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you know this means your items will get way more sales because it will be sold all over roblox now?
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I may be a little hot under the collar at the moment, but I’ll do my best to say what I want to say without taking too many digs. This honestly feels like a little bit of a kick in the teeth to a lot of us, but we’ll cope with it as often is necessary when changes are made without consulting the communities they impact. This change is pretty much completely directed at the UGC program, and as a UGC creator I feel like it might be nice to lay out my perspective of the program as it may differ from Roblox’s corporate view, or the views of the non-ugc-roblox community. I’ll be partially addressing both of those groups.
As a relatively new UGC creator I was only introduced to the rules and specifications of the program a little over 2 months ago. The 70% tax rate was one of the few things I raised an eyebrow at. Presumably hat sales are driving a massive robux-purchase return for roblox that I believe might actually be greater than the overall return for robux spent on gamepasses and developer products. I also suspect the program in its current form is cheaper for Roblox to operate than having to host and moderate game assets. If this is true, it really begs the question why the tax was ever so high in the first place, which might be explained as a precaution to make sure roblox wasn’t losing boatloads of money in the first place, but then why hasn’t it been raised?. We now know that an extra 40% to users is sustainable. It makes it feel like we’re not receiving anything close to market value for our efforts, and with that it creates a feeling of our work not being valued at a company level, not a market level. We know the market is large, and the only thing keeping it from accessing it to the same extent developers are allowed to access their market is Roblox. It’s fair to mention that an argument could be made that if Roblox wanted to maximize profits they could just cut out UGC again all together and create internal content, thus lowering the value of the work, but with the current scale of the program UGC can produce upwards of 500 unique hats a week at maximum, fresh content, served up each week for massive earnings.
Maybe a 70% tax could somehow make some sense in the context of an exclusive market, and that obviously profits will be more spread out when the program goes public and taxes may adjust to match that. I have my own concerns about a public UGC program, but either way the paranoia of potentially losing income I live off of to people who either straight up steal my items or even just recycle my ideas makes it feel all the more important that earnings are fair now. Especially since we already established moderation likely won’t be looking for copies. I think it’s fair to say the best roblox has to offer currently in terms of skill are either already in the program, or will be in it by the end of the year. At current program size it doesn’t make sense to still be restricting earnings based on exclusivity, especially with the expected growth over coming months.
Of course to some it may seem like we should shut up and be happy we’re making money, after all some creators are doing more than ok from this program. That mindset is pretty commonly used to devalue artists’ work, and take advantage of them for being artists first, business people second. We will cope with anything, which can be unfortunate, but truthfully I believe we have more value in this market than we are being compensated for. This change makes it almost seem as if Roblox is redirecting that value towards another community that they deem more worthy, essentially offering large games an insane benefit for minutes of work. Sure all ships rise, but that’s really a fair concept when you’re the one building all the boats.
Many of us would be happy with a 40/40 split, and you probably wouldn’t have heard complaints if it was around 30/30, but honestly I kind of feel like that’s likely not even a fair breakdown. I’m all for incentive to drive sales in games, but the incentive probably shouldn’t be more than 60% of the creators base earnings. Roblox has a sort of eco-system between it’s avatar shop, games, and external media. All of those components are important to the platform’s success, but it often feels like both the Roblox Business, and Roblox Community heavily undervalue cosmetic items and their creators.
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A game creator should not earn more for selling my ugc item than I earn from the sale. I would say more but I think others in this thread have summed up this problem better than I could.
P.S. This is coming from someone who is a game dev first and a UGC creator second.
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Im a bit confused on whats going on…
did the commision from all third party sales increase from 10% to 40%?
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This is amazing!!! Developers definitely have more of an incentive than ever now to try to sell catalog items on their games. I do wish that the 40% included clothing and bundles, but this will still help nonetheless.
Question though, when is this expected to go live?
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Hell yeah!
Nice update and it’s a fairer compromise to advertising someone else’s clothing or UGC items within a place.
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Really excited for this change, It will be very helpful for clothing designers who sell UGC items too in their homestore/mall for a bit more income.
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Great idea, this gives me a big reason to sell clothing items in my games, but how do we know that bad actors won’t take advantage of this system by buying an item in their own game in order to get the affiliate commision back?
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After reading the replies on this thread it is clear that ugc creators are all in consesus that although this update has good intention the cut should be even between developers and ugc creators, especially as creating quality ugc assets requires more knowledge, skill, and time to create than clothes do (to a good standard).
As for people saying developers earned this through making amazing games you’re failing to remember the majority of roblox games are low effort moneygrab simulators. We don’t care that much if our hats are advertised in games not on the front page as we already get free advertising every time someone wears our hats in-game.
I will be supporting the movement in the UGC community to make all of our items sold exclusively in the avatar shop and our individual places until the people behind this change see reason and adjust the cut if a majority of UGC creators take this stance.
Furthermore, I think it would be great if there was an option for creators to link whitelisted games to give us the option to pick who can sell our work.
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Ok so let’s say you run a car lot as a business. You have a salesman named Joe who’s very good at selling your cars. It’s great having Joe, and you’re happy to see him get commission on his sales. You have a car on the lot worth 100,000$, but you know after taxes you’ll probably only end up with 30,000$ profit (wow that’s a large loss). Joe sells this car for you, and because he’s provided that benefit to you, you’re happy to see him get a commission. Suddenly you recieve a letter from the IRS (tax people) saying that they’ve got this extra 40,000$ from the sale that’s essentially loose money. “Wow” you think because you’ve been making 30,000$ on 100,000$ cars for awhile now, and you find out you’ve been overpaying your taxes, and that you could have been making 70,000$ on those cars the whole time. One caveat, the IRS says “Yeah, but you can’t actually have it, it has to go to whoever made the sale, oh and you’ll still receive only 30,000$ on all the cars you sell unless you do them in person.” Why is Joe receiving 40,000$ for selling my car from my business, while the owner, and operator of the business receives 30,000$. The answer is someone at the IRS in this scenario appears to have decided for the business that the salesman is actually providing more value to society than the business owner. The kick is, this scenario ends with Joe having the leverage to straight up just buy the business at that point to. This would incentivize the owner to fire all of his salesmen and just do all of his sales himself, not hire more salesmen. It could even end up with the business completely closing, and then no one has anything to sell.
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If you want it spelt out for you look at demojet’s reply to your post.
Further points:
- You’re right people have made low effort items in the past but those aren’t the ones people will sell in-game
- Yes developing a good game takes more effort, but if it’s a good game you won’t be focusing soley on selling other user’s hats.
The process involves modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, and in some cases sculpting which involves retopologizing. I suggest you read up on these processes as they can take a great deal longer than you seemingly realise.
This is almost exclusively from original creators in the first few months who did not have to go through the application process and is no longer the case, if you want to change this you push for other changes that do not affect new creators who are making magnitudes less.
To me this whole section and below it just comes off as patronizing and sounds a lot like
“i’ve decided i work harder than you, and therefor deserve your money”
I’m not saying developers shouldn’t benefit and if you really think we’re in “the same boat” then you would agree that we should at least get an even cut.
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I agree, roblox should give us both 30% cuts, (or better yet 35%). That way we are treated equally rather than roblox driving a wedge further between the two communities.
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I’d have to disagree.
Yes, you work hard on your games, so don’t “discredit” our content either. It’s our accessories and we should be making as much or more on it than someone who really had nothing to do with the creation of it. If you’re making money off of my hats, shouldn’t I be getting some of games revenue? No. Because we’re separate entities all bringing Roblox together. People are continuing to play your games because they have the option to buy our items. I mean, people could buy robux to buy our hats in your games and then feel inclined spend money in the games they bought it in because they have extra robux or are reminded of their current balance.
Yes, we have the option to not make it possible to sell in games but why should we cut off an area of revenue for us? It doesn’t make sense. I’ve never been asked by a game to use my content and sell it within a game. And reaching out to each individual game for a collaboration when the amount of creators grows each day is idealistic and unrealistic. Game devs don’t want to do extra work for less money. Both would be losing because my items would only end up in a few games, not all.
To discredit our work as “not as much time as your games” is ridiculous. To assume we don’t work as hard as you or that you’re more valuable than I am is offensive. We all contribute to Roblox. I have hundreds of items which I’ve spent hundreds of hours on too. Stuff adds up.
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