Roblox the company's seriously one-side monetization split for creators on the platform (75/25, in favor of the publicly traded corporation) has been a canker on its truly massive user base for quite some time. So lopsided is it, that more users creators in Second Life still make more revenue from that virtual world's vastly smaller consumer pool.
The latest update announcement from Roblox's CEO, however, promises some fairer revenue splits (with strings):
We are announcing new economics, where developers will be able to price their paid access experiences for purchase in real currency value1 on desktop and earn a higher revenue share. Experiences selling at $9.991, $29.991, $49.991 will receive 50%, 60%, and 70% revenue share, respectively. We’ll roll this out for people to purchase on desktop this year, with plans to later expand to other supported devices.
The footnotes in that excerpt, by the way, warn that only direct revenue purchases in cash from the PC edition of the platform get that share.
Emphasis theirs, which seems intentional. This will make Roblox PC experience rev shares (on the high end) on par with Valve's Steam, which also pays out 70% to game devs on that platform. (Which also happens to mostly be a PC-based platform.) This makes me wonder if Roblox is also hoping this revenue offer is appealing to PC game devs who want an alternative to Steam.
Overall, the big catch is this:
The vast majority of Roblox users are mainly on mobile (up to 80%), and there, Roblox has to pay Apple and Google (and Meta) 30% off of their payments. So don't expect this fairer revenue share to reach mobile-based payments anytime soon.
Still, I see promise in Roblox more actively competing with Steam on PC -- something I theorized after seeing this amazing Roblox-based game.
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