Roblox is paying kids basically nothing to create the very thing that makes them worth $45 billion

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A damning new report from People Make Games looks at one of the most popular video games in the world, Roblox. The main takeaway? Roblox is pocketing a majority of the money earned from the “experiences” that kids and adults alike are making.

Unlike Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store, which takes a cut between 12 and 30% from what developers sell, Roblox is taking a staggering 75%. And that’s just the base cut. The report highlights how it is much more than that in reality.

Roblox went public this year and is worth nearly $45 billion. That’s seven times more than Ubisoft. For those not familiar, Roblox allows anyone (but targeted at kids), the ability to hop into “experiences” that are created by other people. You can even create your own rather easily.

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Roblox pays for the hosting and servers, which makes it seem like you are getting a good deal. And you are, until you decide you want to monetize these experiences.

Roblox makes it a point across many of its marketing materials that users can “earn serious cash,” but as the report from People Make Games highlights, that’s simply not true.

We highly recommend you watch the report embedded above, but the gist of it is that getting noticed is nearly impossible. Especially for kids that do not have established audiences on social media platforms.

How it works is that Roblox only really shows the top games – we mean “experiences” – on the platform and an up-and-coming section.

There is no real search functionality and all of the games listed already have thousands of players. For the other 20 millionish experiences, it comes down to either getting the attention of streamers and content creators, or, you guessed it, paying Roblox to advertise your game.

But, wait for it, you don’t use real money to pay for ads. You use Robux, its in-game currency, to pay for advertising. So now, for those keeping track, Roblox gets 75%, the chance of getting seen is nearly impossible without paying for advertising, and finally, Roblox takes a 30% cut of every transaction.

As you can see, the fees and odds are really stacking up against the kids out there looking to make money on the platform. But wait, there’s more. creators are paid in Robux and if they want to withdraw Robux and turn it into cash, the minimum is 100,000 Robux which is equivalent to $1,000 USD.

To pile on to the mess that is Roblox, developers won’t even see that $1,000, instead, it would be about $350 due to the exchange rate for how Roblox pays people.

So, basically, here’s the skinny. Roblox is a really cool platform for kids, but by shoving it in their face that they can earn serious money, they have tricked the kids into building the company that is worth SEVEN Ubisofts, while paying most of them literally nothing.

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