Is Roblox Stealing Millions From Its Young Developers?

roblox has changed a lot since i was 9 years old up until recently i assumed games on roblox were still as simple as they were in 2011 with pre-made assets and limited scripting but that is really far from the case today its top projects could easily be mistaken for standalone games and are backed by full-time solo developers or even studios clearly the tools and expectations from developers have grown a lot but the financial side of things has not really kept pace so today we're going to be breaking down roblox's harmful monetization system the developer exchange program before we get into it this video is sponsored by game maker alright so i'm gonna try and make a game in one minute while i talk to you guys about game maker game maker is a fast and friendly cross-platform game engine that can be a great fit for both beginners and experienced developers okay let's make club penguin with no barrier to entry it has been used in many successful projects from undertale okay it's perfect it's perfect tadio a game that started out as a student project but became something much bigger winning a first place award at the german video game awards can you do like mouse dot wait something i find cool is that everything you need to make a game is in the engine itself so you'll never have to switch softwares to edit a script for example i'm probably missing something but you don't even have to write a line of code if you don't want to you can also make games pretty easily with their drag and drop system oh you have to set the speed and if you ever get stuck there's a huge range of video and written tutorials within the engine for all skill levels and countless types of games speed set speed it just did two and then now okay that is time game maker has a forum discord and subreddit where you can connect with other game devs so there are endless opportunities to learn from help or just chat with similar people i don't know if i would successfully call this a game you can start a free trial with the link in the description leave a comment if you end up checking it out i'm sure you can make a better game than i did [Music] so how exactly do you earn income as a roblox developer well roblox allows devs to sell their own in-game purchases this means that rather than being paid per view or visit developers are left on their own to create a monetization strategy they're responsible for creating and determining what to sell figuring out how to attract buyers and handling transactions the same kind of things you'd expect from traditional developers whether players buy in-game currency power-ups virtual items or access to special locations these are all systems created by developers so roblox provides the marketplace but developers are given the same expectations as traditional game developers and are ultimately the reason people come back to roblox and spend money because of this it was surprising to find out how little of the money spent on a game actually goes to its developer when a player spends 10 dollars on a game it's converted to 800 robux roblox then takes 30 percent of this giving the developer around 560 robux this alone is a very reasonable cut but it doesn't end there on top of this 30 cut there's a 35 exchange rate when exchanging robux for real money this means that roblox is taking an additional 65 percent of developers earnings or in total 75.5 of all developer revenue on top of that in order for a developer to withdraw funds they have to be a roblox premium member which costs a minimum of five dollars per month so many developers only earn around 23 of the money players are spending on their game it's pretty easy to look at this figure and think wow this is so unfair developers are being exploited but honestly i'm not sure if this is the case let's just say there's a lot of debate surrounding this topic in the developer community even though almost all monetization responsibility is placed onto developers many people argue that roblox's high revenue cut is reasonable when you take into account the services that roblox provides roblox covers your server hosting costs mobile app store fees even some sound scripts and models and in this way the platform is pretty unique and i think that brings up an interesting point it's hard to determine whether or not a 75.5 revenue cut is fair for roblox because there isn't any similar platform of similar reach that you can compare it to you can't for instance compare unity to roblox or roblox to steam workshop because roblox definitely isn't a traditional game engine but still goes beyond a user-generated content platform so i won't answer the question of whether or not this figure is unfair i see that as a personal judgment that you can only make based on your experiences as a developer but here's why i still think this figure is harmful roblox as a company has always been very focused on long-term sustainability a pretty good example of this is actually their server infrastructure when robots first launched they made use of public cloud storage but they have since built their own cloud which is an enormous and expensive task that left investors questioning question is why is roblox investing in its own infrastructure versus going all in on the public cloud but this proved to be more cost efficient in the long term and well i think the biggest factor in roblox's long-term sustainability is the developer community to sustain their success they need to invest in high quality content that can continue to engage a consumer base roblox is dependent on skilled and quality developers and a 24.5 revenue share is definitely not an incentive for them to come to the platform especially with traditional game engines reaching lower barriers of entry than ever with beginner friendly tools and pretty appealing revenue sharing policies i mean come on guys like just look at game maker studio 2 with the link and even beyond sustainability many of roblox's future goals definitely won't be possible without more incentives for talented developers to take them seriously at a recent developer conference david bazuki roblox's founder and ceo described his goal of having a 100 person company developing a roblox game showing pretty clear hopes for growth in the creator community bouzouki also wishes to expand roblox's demographic to a wider range of ages and i think bringing in an older audience will require more appealing and complex games and consequently larger teams of skilled developers realistically these goals can only be reached through a change in revenue share i don't think roblox is stupid they certainly see the value in their developer community and with roblox earning 920 million in revenue in 2020 and an expected 1.5 billion for 2021 i definitely expect their developer exchange rates to increase in the near future but of course only time will tell all i can say now is that the current rates are holding back developers and by extension holding back roblox i hope you enjoyed this weird analysis i know it's pretty different from my normal videos but i thought it was an interesting topic also i made a second channel i want to keep you guys updated between uploads since things have honestly been pretty busy that's everything so thanks so much for watching make sure to get a free trial of game maker down below and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: PolyMars

Views: 429,085

Keywords: roblox, game dev, the fall of roblox, gamedev, polymars, roblox devex, roblox developer, roblox game dev, roblox scripting, roblox scams are getting worse, game dev job, the worst game devs, roblox game development, devex, devex roblox, indie dev scammer, the truth behind roblox, an empire built on lies, revenue share, revenue split, How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers, Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper., people make games

Id: 1XWlC96Vrd0

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/KingStop21062001]

As a game developer (unrecognized), I can confirm that. If you're one of those unrecognized developers and makes a game, you would hardly be able to get people to play your game unless you make Ads for it (which cost robux), and if someone buys like a T-shirt, gamepass, etc. from you, you get less.