As a clothing designer on Roblox, we already tend to make little to no money. Often times we utilize experiences to help leverage our assets to more eyes. Whether it be Catalog Tester or a Coded Mall experience, we work to get get more sales for our creations. In return for providing a space for more eyes to get onto our product, the experience owners receive a 10% commission. This however, comes out of our cut of the pie, to the developer.
This is honestly, something I hadn’t known for quite a long time. I always assumed it came out of the tax cut. When going to the Making Avatar Clothing page of the Developer site, we see that the creator of UGC items receive 30% no matter if it comes from the catalog or from an in-experience purchase.
[Notably, the developer receives 40%! Pretty crazy to think about getting more than the person who made the item!]
However, the expanded version of this chart, talking about 2D Clothing, shows a different tale of the tape. The developer eats into the creator’s profit, taking 10% of the purchase themselves.
For Hats & Accessories, there is 70% tax on the items. The 40% that goes to the developer comes from the taxed portion.
Yet for T-Shirts, Shirts, & Pants, there is 30% tax on the items, and the 10% comes from the profit portion.
This is out of sync, and it’s why it’s confusing. Talking to people, if I hadn’t seen it in my own pending sales, I wouldn’t have believed it. With the rise of donation type experiences like Starving Artists, PLS DONATE, and clones of these two concepts, more and more money is taken from creators and put in the pockets of developers.
In short,
I believe that to have a more unified understanding of how revenue is shared, commission should always come out of the taxed region, and thus no developer ever has to take money from a creator who are benefitting one another by using each other’s creations in a symbiotic way.
Alternatively...
At the very least, 2D Clothing pages should have this section updated to more accurately reflect to creators what is the profit from an in-experience purchase vs a catalog purchase. As it stands right now, this page is lying by omission, to all users who don’t know to look deeper into understanding the revenue share of their own products.
