[Heliodex]

The 2 videos linked here are nearing 5 years old now and have been refuted many times, including by some of the developers mentioned in the article. To condense it as much as possible:

The 1st video hinges on a point where they find that developers earn a revenue cut of 24.5%, a number that isn't correct because

1. it's found by multiplying 3 arbitrarily chosen numbers together (the DevEx rate, the default sales fee, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,

2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).

3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.

The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.

They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.

I suggest reading EcoScratcher's brilliant response <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/7e1c1f0fc493> and follow-up articles <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/e51651da6bf4>, of which their 2nd video briefly mentions and claims it misquotes (it doesn't) and misrepresents (it doesn't) their position.

Edits in response to parent comment edits:

> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden

Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.

> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!

The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate.

The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. And even this is underrepresentative due to being published before the September 2025 DevEx increase.

[Retric]

> making for a near industry-standard 33% cut.

LIES, from that link:

“On average, 67% of all spending in experiences supports OR goes to developers.” Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.

Later it mentions the actual money going to developers as: “This enables us to return 28%* directly to the developers.” And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.

That’s a 72% cut to the platform.

[bhawks]

You're missing the parts where:

1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory

1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point

2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.

2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.

3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.

Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.

[Retric]

None of what you said counters anything in my post.

> Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free > free > no fees

A middleman that takes a huge cut isn’t doing anything for free. Can you at least try and have an honest discussion here.

[getly_store]

Hosting, storage, and scaling aren’t free; costs scale with active users, data egress, and state. In-app purchase splits and platform fees erode margin, so “free hosting” rarely survives at millions of concurrent players. Model revenue net of ops costs and, if needed, use a hybrid backend with careful risk budgeting, auth, and anti-cheat.

[fragmede]

72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.

[WaxProlix]

Post-appstore cut it's 42%, which is high but doesn't seem crazy. The unsuccessful attempts and idle piddling all need to be subsidized to allow the successes to exist in the first place, and I suspect we all know better than to undercount cloud, hosting, SRE, and staffing costs. They're all ongoing and pretty painful, and getting a shot at creating something with effectively zero downside risk (vs making a game in Godot and building/buying all of the other parts yourself or with staff) will always come with a lower upside.

[Retric]

> Post-appstore cut it's 42%

That’s ~60% of the post AppStore cut or 42% of the total. If they took 42% of what remained developers would be getting more money than them.

Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC. The platform is ridiculously exploitive.

[Heliodex]

> Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC.

Plenty of PC Roblox users use a version of Roblox downloaded through the Microsoft Store, whom charge a 12% cut on all money spent on gaming apps <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publi...>. The only place where no app store cut applies is when purchasing Roblox products through the non-Microsoft Store PC app or through the website. Surprise, doing this gets the user ~20% more Robux than buying through an app store <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>.

If a user buys Robux through a platform where the app store fee isn't charged, then it isn't charged to developers either because the user will receive, and thus spend, more Robux. Creator rewards work differently to ensure that developers owning experiences played primarily by app store users aren't unfairly punished by this <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>.

[Heliodex]

I suppose it could be considered steep for anyone making a multiplayer game while managing the hosting for themselves on a tight budget. Developers with strong knowledge of monetisation strategies can make good revenue streams from games with self-hosted or self-managed servers. Maybe these developers wouldn't be able to get the same amount of revenue if they used Roblox instead.

What Roblox provides is a platform to upload experiences to with minimal risk or skill required, and services that are heavily subsidised by money redirected from their most successful experiences. The barrier to entry is lowered to the floor, and most kids using the platform to learn game development wouldn't have otherwise learned about it if they had to manage servers, study networking, etc.

Cloud services are a thing, but they're usually expensive and Roblox is paying for them for you. Free cloud services are a thing, but they're usually very limited and what Roblox is providing is essentially unlimited.

For me, the killer app for Roblox is none of this. It's Creator Rewards <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards> (previously Engagement-based Payouts (previously Premium Payouts)), a programme where any player that pays for a Roblox Premium subscription (or is a new/returning user and buys anything on Roblox in the future) results in money earned for the developers of the experiences they play. This happens without requiring any monetisation strategy, microtransactions, or paid in-game products to be created by the developer. Nothing similar is provided by most other popular game engines or platforms.

For myself as a smaller Roblox creator with no interest in creating such monetisation strategies on my own experiences, Creator Rewards makes up a much bigger income proportion than it does for most large developers on the platform. Instead of ~10%, it's more like 90% for me, and I suspect that most kids learning to code games on Roblox without having good marketing skills are in the same bucket, and so the cut won't be nearly as steep for them.

[Heliodex]

> Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.

What 'supports' here does mean is that the difference between what Roblox takes as their share to pay their own expenses and what is paid out as profit directly to the developer via DevEx or Creator Rewards, namely incoming app-store & payment fees (paid when Robux goes into the platform, mainly from purchase of Robux or Roblox Premium, in the case of Roblox Premium then Creator Rewards also should be accounted for) and platform hosting & support costs would, on a platform that pays a revenue share instead of a profit share, have to be paid by the developer instead of by Roblox. It's true that developers never receive this money for themselves. However, it would be the same if they developed their experience outside of Roblox – this money to pay for their operating expenditure would come out of whatever revenue share they earn before it becomes profit. I personally feel it's disingenuous to attribute these costs that Roblox pays on behalf of the developer to profiteering or that the money goes towards their own investment. The share that is taken by Roblox for these purposes, and by consequence not directly to developers or support of their experiences, really is 33%.

I'm taking greater pains here to clearly differentiate between the profit-share model used by Roblox and the revenue-share model used by most other platforms in the industry because of the unique way the Roblox platform operates. This is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of the entire platform, and Roblox also makes this clear on the same page:

> If you develop outside of Roblox, you may have to pay for hosting, servers, moderation, and customer service on your own. You also have to dedicate time to managing these services; on Roblox you can focus on building your experience.

The tradeoff here is not Roblox taking a draconian cut to suck developers into their walled garden so they can have access to Roblox's exclusive platform and market. They're just paying for what the developer would have had to pay if the same experience was on a platform that didn't provide the same services or was selfhosted. This is, in essence, the same normalised tradeoff that most large technology companies make today through cloud services. This makes a lot of sense given that Roblox is using the cloud (primarily AWS) to provide some of these services.

Roblox is extremely clear and accurate about what these costs are and what tradeoffs the developer is making by using the platform, and that the developer is accepting a profit share rather than a revenue share.

The ONLY exception – the sole, singular exception to the 'profit share' rule that applies across the entire platform – is for experiences that surpass Roblox's default service limits (these default limits are never hit for 99.9999% of experiences). This is 30-50 experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/announcing-roblox-extended-ser...> across the entire platform (for context on this number, >200 experiences have reached 1 billion visits), almost all built by huge teams. These experiences need to apply for Roblox's Extended Services solution <https://create.roblox.com/docs/en-us/cloud-services/extended...>, and pay extra based on the quantity of services they use. This is done so Roblox can heavily subsidise smaller experiences on the platform and give them each a better chance at success. It's the kind of thing people advocate for in real societies and I'm glad it exists on Roblox.

> And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.

The asterisk here is that this is the minimum possible profit share – the cost for both Roblox and developers is higher if the money is taken outside of the platform because of the various taxes, currency exchange fees, and transfer fees that need to be paid by Roblox (or by their payment processor, Tipalti) before the profit ever gets given to the developer. These are detailed at <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/27985018895124>.

[hrimfaxi]

Do you work for roblox? You seem to have some affiliation to them

https://github.com/Heliodex

https://devforum.roblox.com/u/lewin4/

[Heliodex]

I do not work for Roblox. These links are to profiles I control, and I have been a developer on their platform for several years. It's given me great programming experience and a lot of strong connections, helping me kickstart my career pretty well. Overall I've been pretty happy with my 'exploitation'. :-)

Nowadays I work more on open-source Roblox-related libraries rather than developing on the platform itself, as game design and development isn't a strong area of expertise for me.

[bstsb]

existing on a forum doesn’t mean they work for Roblox. i’m also on DevForum and last i checked i’m not working for them

[hrimfaxi]

Astroturfing is a well-known occurrence on this forum and I don't have any shame for being vigilant about it.

[Heliodex]

Fair enough, and you certainly shouldn't feel any shame for it. I apologise if I came across as if I were a shill or paid promoter (not the first time I've been accused as such), I've just been part of this debate for a long time and have written a lot on this particular topic.

[jameson]

> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent

This is misleading because for every dollar spent, $0.67 is not what developers get paid. The link (https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences) you referenced clearly says 25% is the "Developer share".

The cost to run the platform is the platform's cost."Platform hosting & support" and "App stores & payment processing fees" should not be considered as developer operational cost

[bhawks]

Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?

Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.

The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users

[jameson]

Wording Roblox trying to sell is deceiving.

Compare with other platforms. Payout model is as simple as platform takes % or fixed fee, rest is dev to keep. There's no verbiage that says dev share is 67% but you they actually get paid less.

What exactly goes behind the platform is platform's business, not the user. If developers are getting paid out $0.25 per dollar spent, that's the developers profit and rest is spent running the platform which is Roblox's concern.

[Heliodex]

The main reason this argument exists is because of Roblox being difficult to compare with other platforms. For the most widely used platforms/engines/storefronts in the industry, the main payout model is that the percentage (for storefronts ~30%, smaller for smaller platforms, for commercial game engines ~5%) or fixed/variable fee (per month or per seat in the client organisation) is taken as payment for using the distribution platform or a royalty for using the game engine. The remaining quantity (60-80%) is given to the developer of the game.

To make it clear, this is not profit! Any money earned after paying the storefront and the engine still needs to be spent on server hosting & maintenance, as well as moderation & legal compliance if a game is popular enough to need it. There also is a risk that the expenses taken away in this area could outweigh the revenue and the developers end up with a loss. Unless all expenses are negligible, the resulting revenue isn't just for the developer to keep.

Roblox pays for an experience's server hosting, maintenance, moderation, legal compliance, discoverability, engine development, app store fees, etc. As results, there is no risk of such loss, though Roblox's operating costs are much higher than a typical game storefront. I would consider these costs as developer operational costs. As far as I can tell, the key difference is the fact that one party is having their costs paid by another rather than one party giving another the money to pay for it themselves. This, to me, is an arbitrary distinction.

Other platforms don't have clauses that need to differentiate between money given to developers as profit and money given to developers as infrastructure/upkeep costs because these other platforms don't deal in the kind of broad integration that Roblox has from the storefront to the datacentres. In almost all cases, the final payout a developer gets from Roblox is pure profit.

The services Roblox is selling might not be using a standard industry pricing model, though it's still very clear and not at all deceptive what the product is the developers are paying for and what the profit share is after operating expenses have been paid for on their behalf.

[jameson]

Your response explains why Roblox might charge such a steep fee but that isn't my issue as I said earlier.

> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent

Profit given to dev is $0.25 per dollar spent, not $0.67. It's as simple as that. I understand Roblox needs to maintain infra, support regional regulation, etc, but that's Roblox's business operational cost and shouldn't claim the delta of $0.42 is "given to developers" because developers never received it

[Heliodex]

I'll admit I read deeper into your argument than what you actually wrote.

Comparing with a platform like a digital distribution storefront, the infra & support & other OpEx still has to be paid. Could be argued that the developer has more choice on what to spend it on in the case they are given revenue directly, and in that case it would be their OpEx. That's why I think it's equally reasonable to consider it either as developer operations cost or a business one.

Other platforms routinely state that this money is given to the developers directly, which I suppose is true (given they also often host offline singleplayer games with generally much lower ongoing costs than multiplayer, which Roblox doesn't). Their communities also routinely refer to the money interchangeably as a "profit"/"revenue" cut, which I think is less forgivable and probably an indication of larger terminological clarity problems in the game industry regarding these cuts than just Roblox.

[bstsb]

other platforms don't give you unlimited game servers, near-infinite scalability with no initial cost, a potential player base in the hundreds of millions, etc

https://create.roblox.com/docs/get-started/why-build-on-robl... https://create.roblox.com/docs/get-started/tools

[getly_store]

Yes—the 24.5% figure is suspect because it multiplies three numbers, ignoring how revenue shares vary by tier, price, and region. A credible estimate needs the full sale distribution: tiered take rates, refunds, taxes, and processing margins; a single mean price isn't representative. With transaction-level data, compute the weighted take: sum(take_rate_i * sale_i) / sum(sale_i), or present a bounded range from the observed distribution.

[freejazz]

> Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.

I strongly disagree with that.

[Heliodex]

I'd like to hear your reasons for this. From what I see, most discussions on child exploitation on Roblox eventually make clear that the exploitation happened outside of Roblox, most commonly on Discord. Moreover, it's a lot more difficult to censor a few messages talking about alternative platforms than it is to stop a long-running logged chat conversation where child exploitation usually takes place.

[freejazz]

Roblox connects them in the first place, what does it matter that it progresses outside of Roblox? That would necessarily be the case if they were to ever meet IRL anyway.

Oh it's difficult for Roblox? A $42billion company? Whose entire business model is based around kids? It's difficult for them?? Boo fucking hoo.

[Heliodex]

The problem is that the external platforms that the children progress to generally have much laxer protection systems than Roblox does, and thus end up more vulnerable. I just chose Discord as an example as they're the most commonly cited chat platform that exploitation beginning on Roblox ends up on, and they also have problems with their trust & safety team that allows this to occur.

Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases.

[freejazz]

>The problem is that the external platforms that the children progress to generally have much laxer protection systems than Roblox does, and thus end up more vulnerable.

So? Discord is a problem too. But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.

>Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases.

Again... and? By your logic IRL is the problem too because for some reason you think we should not expect Roblox to do anything about the fact that it connects children with pedophiles. But IRL isn't a platform. And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion because it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.

[Heliodex]

> But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.

If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.

> it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.

I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour, nor does there exist enough evidence to make such a claim. Try red-teaming it: take the place of a bad actor that aims to cause harm to a child on the Roblox platform.

First, the actor will need an account. Next, they'll need to join a game (one with a low content maturity rating) and find a vulnerable child. Of course, they can't actually communicate with each other, so the actor needs to verify their age. For this, they will need either the face of a child, a verifiable ID document of a child, or the ability to defraud the system (likely by forging an ID document).

Assume they can get past that, and are now considered in the same age bracket as the child, and can thus communicate with them. They now need to direct the child off-platform to avoid them being caught very easily by Roblox's safety teams and systems. They won't be able to use a social media link, as the actor isn't permitted to send them and the child isn't permitted to receive them due to them both being classified as minors by Roblox. So the actor will need to use chat or private messages to give them specific instructions, which will of course be heavily censored due to both parties being minors.

Okay, perhaps an easier way would be to have the actor create an experience with some unfiltered messaging system and let the child join them in it (if they don't have parental experience restrictions available, in that case the actor will be out of luck). They'll of course need to get the experience approved with a sufficient content maturity level. However, any unfiltered messaging system is going to be caught quickly by automated checking; all experience communications must go through TextService:FilterStringAsync(). Roblox's text-filtering is industry-leading, and much more protective than almost any other platform that allows free-form text communication.

Regardless, we'll assume that the actor is able to direct the user off-platform successfully somehow. In the case that a member of the safety team does follow up on any chat/message history and finds a Terms of Service violation, they'll request that the alternative platform take action, which will of course have no impact as the communications aren't against their Terms of Service.

> And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion

I hope I've effectively demonstrated that it's much more difficult to abuse or exploit users on the platform after recent updates. If Roblox was IRL, they wouldn't be able to implement any of these safety checks or features, and they probably would be sued into oblivion.