Hi Creators,
In the first half of 2025, we will launch new features to make publishing and selling avatars and avatar items easier, and to make discovering new looks and customizing avatars more seamless. We will provide updates with more details for each of these initiatives closer to launch.
Updates to Publishing Advances to Make Creation Accessible
We are updating publishing advances to more accurately reflect creator earnings for each category. Practically, this means creators will see publishing advances in most categories go down. A publishing advance is a refundable upfront fee paid to publish an item on Marketplace that is then recouped as the item is sold. Roblox does not take a platform fee until the publishing advance has been recouped.
Publishing advances are meant to incentivize creators to publish items that have a strong chance of recoupment. Our goal is that most creators are able to recoup their publishing advance. To that end, we will begin updating the publishing advance for each category more regularly to reflect that. You can view the updated publishing advances for each category here and in the table below.
Making Creation Easier
We are also planning to launch the following improvements to creating and publishing in Marketplace :
1. Physically Based Rendering for Accessories (mid-2025)
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PBR will allow for creating high-fidelity accessories, including hairstyles, with additional reflective effects and more realistic shading. Currently, PBR is available for clothing and bodies, but has never been available for accessories.
2. Scheduling Publication in Advance (mid-2025)
- We will give creators the ability to schedule what time and date avatar items will go on sale. This includes both Limiteds and non-Limiteds. Creators will also be able to put multiple items on sale simultaneously at a given time and will no longer have to manually / synchronously place items on sale.
3. Group-created Bodies & Heads (mid-2025)
- Soon, Groups will be able to upload and publish bodies & heads. We know that 70% of all avatar items are created through Groups today. Groups allow creators to collaborate with each other and their teams to create, publish, and sell avatars and avatar items. Groups are also an important vehicle to help creators build a professional presence outside of their personal accounts.
4. Skin Color and Scale for Bodies (mid-2025)
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Ability to add a skin color and scale values that persist on Body bundles. Currently, skin color and body scale/size cannot be saved to bodies resulting in gray skin-toned and sometimes oddly-sized bodies. This change will allow capturing much more of creators’ artistic intent in the bodies they create.
5. New Categories for shoes (mid-2025)
- We are creating a new category for avatar shoes. We recognize that this limitation has been frustrating, and we’re excited to share that we will be launching the shoes category in the coming months. As with the other categories, shoes will be subject to a publishing advance. We will have more details to share soon.
Connecting You to Your Ideal Audience
We also want to empower you to better understand the performance of your items, identify trends, gain insight into audience preferences, and optimize your content strategies. Starting next month, we will begin rolling out improvements to the analytics page for avatar creators. Analytics will make it easier to understand what is selling and to whom so you can better tailor your offerings.
These improvements will include the following item-level metrics for all your avatar creations:
- Demographic information of buyers, including age, gender, location, and platform
- Sales location breakdown
- Percentage of Publishing Advance recouped
Initially, historical data for these new metrics will be available for the past 90 days. Later this year, we will be expanding this to include longer timeframes up to lifetime data for all avatar items and metrics.
We also want to make it easier for users to discover and personalize avatars that they love. Making it easier for users to discover and buy items will help creators build their audience and earn more.
1. Creator Names on Marketplace (early-2025)
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We will be displaying the creator’s name under every Marketplace item on mobile and computer, allowing users to easily attribute items to their original creators to help creators grow their audience and build stronger connections with the community. Creator Names are currently shown only on the web.
2. Post Avatars to Your Profile (mid-2025)
- We will be adding a feature to let all users post avatars to their profiles to share creative and compelling looks they’ve created with the community.
3. Favorites (mid-2025)
- We will be allowing users to save and access their favorite items so that they can more easily come back to try-on or purchase them. Users will be able to save avatar items as well as entire avatars.
Helping Users Customize Their Avatars
We believe that improved avatar customization & easier shopping will grow the avatar economy and help creators earn more. To that end, we will be making a few improvements to how users style their avatars in the coming months.
1. Improved Avatar Customization Tools (mid-2025)
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We are doing a complete overhaul of our avatar customization tools. The goal of these changes are to make avatar styling much easier for most users. We plan to begin testing this feature with users in early 2025 before rolling it out more broadly a few months later.
2. Try-On & Purchase Multiple Items (mid-2025)
- We will be allowing users to try-on and purchase multiple unowned items at once just like a physical world dressing room - bringing the Marketplace experience one step closer to shopping in the physical world.
We will provide updates with more details for each of these initiatives when they are ready to launch.
Please note that this is a list of upcoming launches that we have high confidence will ship in the coming months. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive list of all features the Marketplace team is working on.
We will have more projects to share in the next creator roadmap update in the coming months.
Thank you!
