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this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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I’ve worked at a professional studio (+100 employees) that specializes in Roblox.
It’s very strange how that side of the industry works. Some people can make a killing just on the marketplace side, like providing assets for others (e.g. someone told me they made $200k/yr independently creating assets).
However, the vast majority of games & creators make nothing, or they make Roblox but now enough to withdraw funds into real money (something like 95% of creators fall into this category). It’s also hard to design for Roblox, because it’s like TikTok for games. What works there is somewhat unique to Roblox itself.
It could have changed since I worked in that field, but it’s a very topsy-turvy side of the industry.
It isn't 'strange', it is, as you say, very obviously and intentionally monetized the same way TikTok is.
The 1% huge payoff vs 99% no payoff divide being essentially random is the point.
The draw of potentially going viral and potentially becoming a multi millionaire is what draws in people, particularly young people whose brain's haven't matured yet and thus aren't capable of realistically assessing risk vs reward.
Its gambling, but essentially as an independent contractor career or hobby.
The cost is opportunity cost, your time and attention and work.
Probably many of the people pouring tons of work into Roblox for years now could have just made their own indie games at this point, probably made a lot more money.
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/reminder-about-ip/116517
Here the official Roblox account on their own forums clarifies that anyone making a Roblox game is inherently giving Roblox a liscense to use all of their IP.
So... if you proof of concept something in Roblox, it gets decently popular, and then you decide eh, im gonna pull the gamemode out of Roblox after I develop something similar in Unity or Godot or something... does... Roblox retain some amount of rights and is now able to sue you?
Does Roblox even honor the request to withdraw your Roblox game?
I am genuinely asking these questions, I am not able to find examples or guidelines for these scenarios/hypotheticals.
Tons and tons of the software industry revolves around who technically owns the right to exactly what ideas, what code, what formats... and the entertainment industry is similar with character likenesses, plot lines, etc.
I remember really vaguely reading an article about how it had kind of an exploitative model, especially considering the amount of labor done by kids, but it's like an entirely different world i just tried to understand when my nephew played.
"Kind of". Exploitation is the whole game. I linked to some videos in another comment that dug into it (https://lemm.ee/comment/20719563).
Yeah it's been years since I read about it, so I didn't want to come across like I knew more than I did. And maybe they're better now, was my thought. But the stuff I've read since this morning says otherwise.
A few years ago I posted in a reddit advice thread about how I banned my kid from roblox because of that exploitation-by-design and everyone freaked the fuck out at me and told me I was a terrible person.
Yup. For most kids, it can be exploitative because of the restrictions around withdrawing funds, the super vast majority of the audience is under age, many games have gacha models (gambling). I did get to make & work on games relevant to my kids, so that was very cool.
On the whole, I’m glad I’ve left that area of the industry for now. I’d prefer not to go back (only did about a year / 12 in my career). There are great companies in that space trying, but it’s not easy.
Damn asset creators and their three figure salaries
I assume that's $200k a year and not straight $200?
Yes, edited now. Thank you.