[VERY URGENT & GAME BREAKING] Regional Pricing Problem

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#1

regional pricing is a great feature, but the way it was rolled out has caused serious, game-breaking issues — not just for PLS DONATE, but for an entire category of donation-based games on Roblox.

i say this with full respect, but the rollout felt super rushed and lacked proper consideration for experiences that rely heavily on gamepasses. PLS DONATE, Clip It, Starving Artists, and other donation games are all being impacted.

PLS DONATE is entirely built around gamepasses & spending robux, so when regional pricing changes the actual amount spent — but the game can only see the full base price — it completely breaks our donation logic, global effects, robux leaderboards, and the overall integrity of our game.

I appreciate that the dynamic price check tool issue was fixed — but that only solved part of the problem. we still have no way to get the true robux amount spent on a gamepass from the server, and no way to detect if regional pricing is enabled on a gamepass.

we tried adding a client-side price check, but that’s not a real solution. it’s easily bypassed, especially by exploiters. we’ve had to disable core parts in our game just to prevent abuse, and it’s already taking a toll on our player count & revenue

we weren’t warned, we weren’t given solutions to prepare — and now we’re stuck dealing with the consequences of a system we can’t control. our leaderboards literally represent real robux spent, not some arbitrary estimate. without accurate data, our game doesn’t function as intended.

i understand the intent behind regional pricing and the broader benefits it brings, but i genuinely don’t think the team behind this realizes how badly it’s affecting games like ours. this isn’t just a small inconvenience — it’s messing and ruining our game, hurting our player count & revenue.

we need:

  • ability to know the actual robux amount spent from the server

until then, this will continue to hurt our experience and others like it. please treat this with urgency — because right now, it’s breaking some of the most community-driven games on the platform and it causes us huge losses.

Expected behavior

if everything was working correctly, the game would be able to receive the actual robux amount spent on each gamepass purchase regardless of regional pricing from the server. this would allow us to accurately trigger donation-related features, update leaderboards, and maintain the integrity of player stats and effects.

A private message is associated with this bug report

32 Likes
Introducing Regional Pricing for Passes
Not receiving purchase confirmation until player press "OK" in the prompt that is After the purchase
I found a fix for the donation games regional price issue
#3

Wasn’t this fixed? @archang3l289

1 Like
#4

the fix: Donation game with developer products - Roblox

just make the donations work with developer products
the only issue is that those skip the game commission, so the product owner gets 70% and the game owner gets 0%

#5

Yes, one million times - YES. As a loyal developer on the Roblox platform for 17 years it seems absurd to me that this entire time Roblox has not figured out how to return the Robux spent on a purchased game pass in the receipt API. We have to find our own methods to try estimating the cost which is the source of this problem.

If a user purchases a game pass the game server should accurately know how much they purchased it for using the receipt data.

As a developer who has begun using regional pricing and is very excited about the feature - I have to say that the worst thing Roblox could do in this situation is keep the feature enabled and continue to harm developers & players. Regional pricing should be disabled platform-wide until Roblox can properly solve their marketplace receipts oversight.

9 Likes
#6

I agree, we need a reliable & secure method of determining what game passes are sold for. The fact it is impossible to confirm financial transactions in a similar method to Developer Products is incredibly frustrating. Allowing clients to control the only in-engine method of confirming these purchases is a security flaw, and has resulted in the confusion of many developers in the past, especially those that are new to the ecosystem.

We currently have to use an external Roblox APIs to determine if game passes are regionally priced (some aspects of this API requires a Cookie to access, which is not well-supported behavior), and then manually disable their sale on our experience. Combine this with our existing price check, and we now have to make 2 external APIs to confirm if such actions are valid.

6 Likes
#7

It is mitigated (which I am very grateful for), but there is currently no method to determine the price that a game pass was sold for on the server-side. The posted solution by Roblox requires the following code:

local gamePassId = 1234567890
local MarketplaceService = game:GetService(“MarketplaceService”)
local product = MarketplaceService:GetProductInfo(productId, Enum.InfoType.GamePass)
local priceInRobux = product.PriceInRobux

To be ran on the client side, which is vulnerable to exploits. Meaning it cannot be trusted as a reliable source of information.

6 Likes
#8

You would think Roblox would have integrated something into Lua(u) when they released this feature, so it wouldn’t break donation games.

#9

Extremely frustrating problem and speaks to the larger issue of not being able to see the price for which something was purchased. Despite years of asking for a solution, I’ve yet to see any acknowledgment from Roblox. Even after implementing countless safeguards, bad actors continue to find workarounds. At this point, it feels like a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. Please address this problem.

#10

I’m honestly pissed off for you, I have no idea how Roblox a company worth billions of dollars is performing this badly and failing its developers like this. How before releasing major updates such as this there isn’t a proper process of thinking it through and how it may impact the platform. It’s a rushed update after a rushed update, a disappointment after a disappointment. It’s like they’re trying to drive developers away on purpose. It’s crazy

#11

For any staff reading this, I know you are most likely occupied with other obligations, but please understand the urgency for us that rely on these features for our games. For my game, players were able to earn a percentage of in game currency when purchasing another player’s gamepass. Now due to this new addition of regional pricing and the inability to verify how much a player spent purchasing a gamepass, it leads to an inflation of this in game currency, which ultimately really hurts the game. I have since disabled this feature for the sake of preserving the games economy. Oh, and of course it also leads to players being seen as “donating” much more than they actually have. I hope you read our concerns and expedite a solution for us (which I would assume is creating a receipt callback for gamepasses) :worried:

5 Likes
#12

@Ro_JJam could you pass this post along?

I assume this will be addressed quickly given it’s urgency, but at-ing might help. Thanks and hope this is solved soon.

I’m not knowledgeable on the regional pricing, looks complicated at a glance, so apologies if this is already fixed. Saw this post in passing.

1 Like
#13

The regional pricing should’ve been applied to the process of buying robux instead, it wouldn’t make developers lose, it would be easier to validate since they could base it off the currency the user paid using, and stuff like this won’t happen.

#14

It’s good the dynamic price check was fixed, but you still can’t get the real amount spent. Hopefully, Roblox fixes this soon.

#15

No:

The fix they released yesterday basically prevents gamepasses from being purchased when the Dynamic Price Check tool is active. Now, the tool is only meant to let users preview how the updated pricing appears on buttons and prompts — without actually allowing them to buy the item.

However, this doesn’t truly fix the problem. Regional pricing can still be enabled, and while users can no longer buy a gamepass worth millions of Robux for just one, like before the initial patch, they can still purchase high-priced gamepasses for up to 30% less than the actual price. Developers have no way of knowing if the user received a discount — they appear to have paid the full, original price. This creates a major issue for PLS DONATE, as it compromises the accuracy of statistics and leaderboards.

2 Likes
#16

The lengths developers had to go to — even before this update — just to verify that a gamepass purchase was legitimate were already extreme. It required complex code and multiple calls to Roblox’s API, all to make sure a purchase wasn’t spoofed before awarding in-game stats. Developers have worked hard to maintain the integrity of their games’ data, yet it’s clear that the engineers behind these systems are unaware of these ongoing struggles.

This problem has become so widespread that some developers were offering to sell “patches” to prevent these exploits — for thousands of dollars. Yes, thousands — just to get accurate pricing information that Roblox should be providing through engine methods already.

The latest update has completely broken the security of the purchase validation systems that many developers spent months building and refining. There are dozens of possible solutions — some as simple as limiting Regional Pricing to only work within the experience the gamepasses are tied to (although even that could be bypassed), and others that require more time but would offer long-term benefits. For example, including the actual purchase price as a parameter in the MarketplaceService.PromptGamePassPurchaseFinished event. But Roblox either refuses to make meaningful changes here, or simply doesn’t prioritize it. Developers have been asking for this kind of transparency in purchase data for years, and it should not be this difficult.

The core issues are:

  1. Engineers don’t understand how hard it is to verify that a purchase actually happened and determine how much was paid, due to how limited the current engine’s purchase confirmation functions are.
  2. There are not enough resources being allocated to fixing this. The core engine methods for validating purchases haven’t been updated in years, all while engineers push out new platform features that seriously affect pricing (like Regional Pricing) without considering how certain games will be affected. If this were taken seriously, a proper solution could be shipped in a matter of days. But clearly, this has been sitting on the backburner for far too long.

And then engineers have the nerve to block even small fixes in the name of backwards compatibility…?

These are among the most creative and popular games on the platform. If Roblox doesn’t take action soon, this update will have single-handedly ruined the economies of these games — and thousands of others in the same genre. It seems like the majority of users who have turned this feature on are those trying to EXPLOIT it to fake donations, rather than developers looking to implement it with good intent.

This whole situation is incredibly disappointing.

7 Likes
#17

I daily drive this game (playing on Pls donate everyday) and had to take a forced break because of a Roblox change, and as Hazem said, impacting out revenue (I can still buy robux on my own tho but the issue is how im gonna donate my friends back)

I’m not a developer but a 2-3 year long player for Hazem’s game, I really can’t wait for it to be restored after Roblox implements suggested fixes to make everyone’s donation game working as usual

#18

@Reditect our staff is already aware of the issue and are looking into it

6 Likes
#19

Thanks for these check ups you do on tickets that go unanswered. It’s much appreciated :slightly_smiling_face::slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like