Roblox is going to let creators that make assets and tools keep nearly all of their sales

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Roblox is going to let creators that sell assets and tools for other creators on its marketplace keep all of the revenue from their sales minus taxes and payment processing fees, the company announced at its Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) 2023 on Friday. The change goes into effect starting sometime next year.

This will be a big change — though it will only apply to sales on the Creator Marketplace, which is for creators to sell to creators, and not to sales on the Marketplace (formerly Avatar Shop) where people can sell avatar-related goods.

Right now, creators who sell things on the Creator Marketplace get a 70 percent cut, and they only thing they can current sell on that marketplace are plugins. But starting next year, developers will be able to sell 3D models as well, meaning that there’s a near future where developers will sell 3D assets to other creators and pocket most of what they earn.

There’s another big change coming to the Creator Marketplace as well: the company is going to let people buy and sell things in dollars instead of in its Robux virtual currency, meaning that Roblox won’t take platform fees from any non-Robux sales. Like many virtual currencies, the value of Robux isn’t 1:1 with dollars and cents, so it can be hard to understand the actual dollar value of something you might want to buy. This update is set to arrive sometime next year.

“We’re starting small, but our hope is to build a vibrant economy of creator-to-creator exchanges,” Roblox chief product officer Manuel Bronstein and CTO Daniel Sturman said in a blog post. “We want