Roblox - Developers vs. Platform
Roblox is a popular gaming platform where players play games designed by other members of the gaming community. Although Roblox has done a good job rising as a prominent gaming platform for kids, it has difficulty rising to older age groups. The primary reason for this is because in the age old battle of quantity or quality, Roblox has heavily invested in the belief that quantity is superior. The core concept behind Roblox is the idea of allowing the community to make games on their own, because the people who play the games know best what people want. However, this only really attracts people who, while they may posses the ideas for a great game, do not posses the talent in game design to actually bring this idea into fruition. Although there are games that deserve merit on the site, they are the overwhelming minority, and can still not hold up to the standards of more professorially produced games. While these games may hold the interest of younger people, many lose interest in the site as they move into their teenage years.
One way to fix this issue is an extremely simple solution: money. The way Roblox games work is that to actually make money off of the game, you have to make exclusive goods called game-passes, or charge a certain amount to gain access to the game. These can be purchased with Robux, the digital currency of Roblox. To start with, only 10% of the Robux earned is given to the creator, the rest goes to the site itself. The exchange program on Roblox is known as DevEx, or the Developer Exchange program. To actually begin the process of monetizing your game, you need to have made a minimum of 50,000 Robux off of your game. But because of the 90% cut Roblox makes, the people who play your game would actually have to spend 500,000 Robux for you to start pulling a profit. Once you fulfill these requirements, you can exchange the 50,000 Robux for $175 USD. When purchasing Robux, it costs roughly $0.0125 USD per Robux. This would mean that the $175 Robux you would earn would cost $6250 to buy. This comes out to only around 2.8% of money spent on your game actually reaching your bank account. Keep in mind all of these calculations are done with the assumption that the developer does not have a premium pass, that in some cases reduces the amount taken in return for monthly compensation.
Even though the platform used for producing games is simple and easy to use, and easily modifiable to suit the developers needs, it simply does not make sense for skilled developers. For context, similar platform Steam takes less than 30% cut in its developers earnings (Depending on brackets for exact amount), compared to the 97.2% from Roblox. Developers will often choose the platform that offers the lowest cut taken, which is why almost every skilled game developer would choose Steam in a heartbeat to launch their game on, even if Roblox is easier to produce it on. Because of this, Roblox game designers are frequently hobbyists, so the quality of the games also suffers. Updates are often inconsistent, and design teams are generally small. Even though the margins a platform like Steam takes are much smaller, better game designers will come to it because they can keep much more of the money they make. This is one of the reasons why in 2017 Roblox make around $45 million in revenue, compared to Steams $4.3 billion. Although profits have increased drastically in that time-frame, much of that growth was due to COVID-19 confining people to their own homes, and less to do with actual improvements to Roblox, so judging success based off of year to year performance will lead to unreachable predictions.
By increasing the profits of the creators, better designers would join the platform and existing developers would be more encouraged to keep consistent updates. With better quality games, a greater audience would want to play on it, and more people would spend money on their games. Because the company has made statements saying further profits for creators are unlikely, I find Roblox difficult to recommend. The stock price is incredibly unstable, with large gains or losses occurring almost daily. However, news of changes to developer compensation may foreshadow periods of growth or fall for the company. Additionally, as with all online games a large component to success is to do with social media presence. Many games have been brought to the top, or pulled down from the impact of the influencer community. So while it is important to stay on the lookout for changes to developer policy, if large groups of popular streamers or other influencers start playing a game, their followers will certainly follow.
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