Roblox, the massive online game that serves as a digital storefront and platform for developers to create other games from within for people to play, is planning to let developers sell their games for real money in the near future. The move is an attempt to entice more developers to utilize the platform to create games. Currently, games that are set as paid access titles on the Roblox platform cost Robux. A digital currency that’s used on Roblox to pay for nearly everything that isn’t already free. Robux is basically like the V-Bucks that Epic uses inside of Fortnite.
But that’s going to be changing soon according to the company. This past week, Roblox said at its annual developer conference that it wants developers to have more freedom to make money from their game creations. Developers can already technically make money through the Roblox platform. However, the sales go through Robux first, and then developers get a cut of whatever is bought with the amount of Robux used. That current split ends up being 70% for the developer, and 30% for Roblox. Things are changing slightly with the new model, but not by much.
Roblox real money sales payouts will be based on a sliding scale
Although there aren’t currently any games on the Roblox platform that cost real money, Roblox already has a plan laid out for how developers will be paid once there are. Payouts from game sales will be based on a sliding scale. To put it another way, developers will make more money if their games cost more. Roblox will give developers 70% of the revenue from games that are $50 and above, CNBC says. Games that are $30 will lead to a 60% payout for the developer, while games that are $10 will net them 50% of the earnings.
So there is an incentive to make something worthy of a higher price tag. Roblox makes more, sure, but so does the developer. This seems like a win-win situation as both parties end up with bigger paydays.
Roblox will accept local currencies later this year
The company hasn’t officially confirmed when exactly real money will be accepted as payment on the Roblox platform. However, it does say that it’ll be sometime later this year. Once the real money payment system is live, players on the Roblox platform will be able to use their local currencies. Initially, this will only be doable from Roblox on the PC. However, the company says that it’s planning to add support for more platforms in the future. Which should mean Android and iOS at some point.
In rolling out the ability to charge real money for games, Roblox says it wants to reach 300 million daily active users. It also hopes that these new real money payments will lead to sales increases. Specifically an increase of 10% of all global gaming content sales through Roblox.