Report Shows The Roblox Median Creator Earns Minimum Wage, But Top Dogs Make
You don’t need me to explain to you that Roblox is popular. Odds are good that, if you have any family or relatives below a certain age, they probably have an account, and they’ve probably already spoken to you about it…
You don’t need me to explain to you that Roblox is popular. Odds are good that, if you have any family or relatives below a certain age, they probably have an account, and they’ve probably already spoken to you about it at length.
Roblox isn’t just a magnet for users with its many user-generated experiences, though, it’s also proven to be very, very profitable. So profitable, in fact, it has its very own Developers Conference, which just ran this past week. At this most recent Roblox Developers Conference, an interesting piece of information was divulged about the precise profit margins that Roblox creators typically rake in, and the surprising disparity between the biggest names and the rank-and-file.
As was announced at the conference, and compiled in a report by TweakTown, profits obtained by Roblox Developers through the Developer Exchange program have a positively disparate range, with the most popular, highest-user experiences raking in profits in the millions, while those in the middle of the road barely pull down annual profits comparable to the United States federal minimum wage.
Alongside the reveal of these details, Roblox also announced several new initiatives that it hopes will help to bridge this massive gap, from marketing experiences directly to users to offering new development tools.
Total Earnings are in the Billions, But Profit is Concentrated on a Lucky Few
According to the statistics offered at the conference, Roblox creators, as a whole, have pulled in approximately $1.7 billion in the 12-month period that ended this past June, a 50% year-over-year boost. Since developers first started turning profits with the launch of Developer Exchange back in 2013, a grand total of approximately $5 billion has been made.
Here’s the catch, though: the vast majority of that profit is consolidated within the top 1,000 Roblox creators. Those at the tail-end of that metric raked in around $1.4 million, those in the top 100 pulled down $10.8 million, and the privileged few in the top 10 most popular experiences brought in a mighty $65.7 million.
Now, with even the bottom of the top 1,000 pulling in millions, it might seem like Roblox creators as a whole are doing alright for themselves. However, there are around 42,000 creators that make up the Developer Exchange’s membership, which means that thousand make up only 0.023% of its membership.
The privileged few in the top 10 most popular experiences brought in a mighty $65.7 million.
As soon as you move away from the top percentile, profits swiftly begin plummeting. By the time you reach the median of the list, creators only earn around $1,500 annually, and that’s in the best-case scenario. For reference, the current minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour which, annually, adds up comparably to those numbers.
Roblox is Hoping New Initiatives Even the Score
Obviously, expecting every single Roblox creator to pull in millions of dollars is unrealistic, to say the least. That said, this is the same company whose CEO thinks Roblox would make a great dating site, in spite of pressure from the U.S. Senate, so what even is “unrealistic” at this point?
In an effort to give the less-profitable Roblox developers a fighting chance at getting their games more fleshed out and marketed to the right audience, the company announced a handful of new initiatives.
The first of these initiatives is Roblox Everywhere, and in a nutshell, it allows Roblox developers to publish their games as standalone apps on PCs, consoles, and wherever else Roblox is supported, rather than having to go through the Roblox launcher and ecosystem. Roblox will handle fine details like cross-play, which will help developers focus on building up and improving their works.
Additionally, Roblox will be rolling out some other little perks, such as allowing offline single-player Roblox games and modes, as well as allowing Roblox users to quickly launch games from a single link in an internet browser, specifically Chrome.
Roblox will also continue to push its AI-powered build tool, claiming that the suite has already helped 9,000 developers get their games published.
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