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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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>.
The default app store cut for most other platforms (Google Play, Apple App Store) that Roblox operates on is 30% (and similar for other distribution platforms, such as Steam), so in the grander scheme 12% isn't even that ridiculous. Including payment processing fees, this averages out to the 22% mentioned at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences> for all of Roblox's sales.
> 1 / 0.7 = 43% more money.
Can you clarify where the 0.7 is from? My assumption is that it's from the 30% fee charged by some app stores, though not every app store charges the same fee so not using an average figure isn't truly representative of how much more money Roblox & its developers would actually earn in the event that there were no such fees.
> except it clearly show the kind of Hollywood accounting going on in their other posts.
Do point out mistakes if you see any, I would be happy to correct them (-: I made another comment on how different methods of purchasing Robux affects the value at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340570> if that helps clear things up.
First no mention of the float between purchase of Roblox and transactions, but whatever platforms regularly pull that one.
As to Hollywood accounting. There is no single exchange rate between dollars and Roblox on a platform, a 5$ purchase = 5:4 on App Store, but a 100$ purchase is a 1:1. https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux
Of course they ignore this only saying app stores and payment platforms get a 22% cut. Ok sure you have some average numbers of Roblox per dollar and then work out an exchange rate sure that’s reasonable.
But wait on that page: users can now receive up to 25% more Robux when purchasing through gift cards, computer, or web. This extra Robux translates into higher revenue shares on Robux purchased on those channels. (As high as 25% or less than 7%) So now they aren’t averaging the exchange rate instead doing yet another calculation even though a 20$ purchase on their store has a worse exchange rate than a 200$ purchase on the App Store…
Meanwhile an account with 6k Roblox at time of purchase may have been filled by some gift cards and some App Store purchases at different ratios over time while the user is spending money on the platform meaning that 6k doesn’t actually correspond cleanly to either App Store or gift cards Roblox…
But like trust US bro even if we aren’t saying what the actual formula is it’s fine. I can’t help but wonder what the actual numbers look like if such a lopsided deal is still presented with such weasel wording.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
| then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.
So one thing to call out here is that the assumption that DoW is working on specifically these use cases is not bullet proof. They simply may not want to share with anthropic exactly what they are working on for natsec issues. /we can't tell you/ could violate the terms.
It is also dumb that DoW accepted these terms in the first place.
What a failure as a species that parents are not trusted or believed to be capable of raising their children. Therefore let's build out the panopticon.
The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account.
Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.
The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.
> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.
Your argument based on false equivalence bias might work with in a megachurch but not here.
Amazon dropping Parler, a shitty US-based right wing social network nobody outside the US ever heard of, is totally on the same level as US waging economic warfare against Europe and laying claim on sovereign countries like Canada and Greenland. /s
You're projecting a lot, are you by chance attending the same megachurch? Or is it called gigachurch now? Do they also offer drive-in to grab a coffee and soda before service?
There's a docuseries about the US called "The Righteous Gemstones" - I can highly recommend it.
Your HN submission was flagged for being anti-Ukraine propaganda.
I fully understand why you whine about Parler but you are not a credible actor by any means. There is no reason to take any of your bad faith arguments serious.
Id agree if it were a VP of Eng (total mess) or Product (should know and be bought in on the dev process) but this is a VP of sales. Depending on the company they can be much more operational and I would just assume that they asked the individual due to familiarity or happenstance and didn't understand the level of effort to deliver.
Quickly understanding the urgency/importance of the ask while communicating the impact it is having on the deliverable is the right call. Good business people work like this all the time. Seeing the discussion is a good learning opportunity for a junior.
| My personal take is that folks involved with the change severely underestimated the societal impact that it had. The fact that proper build support is non-existent to this day shows that agents are not a priority. That's okay if it isn't a priority, but when it was communicated with Mockito I perceived it as "Mockito is holding the JVM ecosystem back by using dynamic attachment, please switch immediately and figure it out on your own".
Id like to hear the platform team's perspective on this. As it stands, it is a pretty sad state of affairs that such a prominent library in the ecosystem was made out to be the scapegoat for the adoption of a platform change. It is not a healthy thing to treat the library maintainer community like this.
The JDK team has advertised these changes for years. People who want to do wild & crazy dynamic stuff in their testing infrastructure still can, with a tiny amount of added setup. This is the correct tradeoff, vs having the JVM pessimistically unable to apply all sorts of optimizations because they never know when their users might have inadvertently opted into runtime shenanigans.
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.
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