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Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

matthewball.co

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Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#151

Post by maccard »

myspy wrote: post #146
justinclift wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa and Mastercard provide entire global payment platforms, yet only (generally?) take a small fee per transaction. Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction.

Only 3% of the 30% go to payment processing. Hence why they still want 27% when developers choose their own payment system. The 27% are seen similar to Sony and Nintendo as fees to be on a platform which has wide reach but also gives tools and does stuff to enable app distribution. Is that too much? I don‘t know but it‘s what all appear to do. The platform politics didn‘t evolve as fast as the tech though. So what ab…

The 3% payment charge is the transaction fee, but that doesn’t take into account the actual handling of the rest of the transaction lifecycle, like managing refunds, or chargebacks. A single chargeback will cost you $25 whether it’s successful or not (plus refunding the transaction if you lose), but on google play and co it’s just refunded.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#152

Post by tasoeur »

modeless wrote: post #132
tasoeur wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a gray area. If you look at apps like Snapchat, instagram and TikTok, they all have this concept of filters/lens/effect which are effectively One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.

It's not gray. Your examples do not violate policy because Apple has an explicit exception to allow stuff like that when specifically running in WebKit's JavaScript engine. That's why they use JavaScript, to qualify for the loophole. But as I said, Roblox does not use JavaScript or WebKit for running games and does not qualify for that exception. There is also an exception for "plug-ins" which seems like it could cov…

Going back to my prior example, selecting an AR Effect/Lens on TikTok/Insta/Snap and is kind of akin to a mini app store if you think about it: https://sh1ftdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/IMG_8904...

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#153

Post by netsharc »

thorncorona wrote: post #142
booi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction. I would bet Apple has put more into R&D for iPhones, iPads and iOS than the entire enterprise value of visa and mastercard put together. If anything, they've worked for it more than visa/mastercard who are merely rails with distribution. Most of the heavy lifting, risk and work in the card ecosystem is done by the issuers (banks et. al.)

I think you underestimate the difficulty of competing against visa or mastercard. Visa and mastercard are logistical masterpieces. Think of how much legal work needs to be done in order to be compliant in every country in the world.

Since they're giants, I wonder how much of the compliance is the other way: countries being strong-armed to comply with their terms.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#154

Post by com »

nottorp wrote: post #143
justinclift wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a bit unclear. Are you meaning Visa/Mastercard charge less in the EU due to EU regulations? If that's what you're meaning, then I simply don't know as I've not heard that before. :)

Someone in the food chain does take less in some EU countries. Not all. The commissions are capped by law in some parts, but not others. As a small sample, in RO i think a large store chain pays like 0.5%. The consequence is credit card reward programs are either non existent or something like 0.1% cashback. The other consequence is you can pay by card almost anywhere. On the other hand I've been to NL and small stor…

They’re all covered by identical regulations.

Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are.

They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes.

Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods.

It’s not regulation in NL that blocks small retailers from taking V or MC.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#155

Post by katzinsky »

lynx23 wrote: post #116
bemmu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a full-time developer of Roblox games. It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.

Would you rather do the hardware/OS platform yourself as well? I know, the big ones are always "evil", but... How about being real?

You mean like most Linux distros?

Yeah it's great.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#156

Post by HaZeust »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #13
amitlevy49 wrote: post #2

reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable

I appreciate how they left Java edition alone and chose Bedrock edition to dump all the MTX bullshit on.

For now.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#157

Post by wiseowise »

pjmlp wrote: post #123
Aeolun wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta, except that everyone is racing for money.

Turns out supermarkets don't take pull requests, and not everyone wants to live in a community farm, doing NGO like work. Or placed in a less snarky way, capitalism spoils ideals.

Evil capitalism where people want to live nice and system provides means to do so.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#158

Post by nottorp »

com wrote: post #154
nottorp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone in the food chain does take less in some EU countries. Not all. The commissions are capped by law in some parts, but not others. As a small sample, in RO i think a large store chain pays like 0.5%. The consequence is credit card reward programs are either non existent or something like 0.1% cashback. The other consequence is you can pay by card almost anywhere. On the other hand I've been to NL and small stor…

They’re all covered by identical regulations. Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are. They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes. Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods. It’s not regulation in NL that b…

High fees is what they told me :) But then I was that weird tourist with a Visa and a MC...

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#159

Post by kreyenborgi »

chad1n wrote: post #117
modeless wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and…

You can make the same argument about Minecraft since servers download you texture packs, data packs or skins. I don't think that Apple should stop these apps, that's their game model.

also https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Redstone_compute... ;-)

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#160

Post by meheleventyone »

bentcorner wrote: post #25

In my (non-finance, parent of a roblox-player) opinion, the problem that Roblox has is that every single roblox game has a "roblox" essence. Every roblox game is undeniably roblox, and to broaden their market and attract higher-paying users, I think they need to fix that. There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wall…

There’s been a few high polish games that aren’t Robloxlike. There’s just been very few that are breakout hits on the platform or offer any incentive to an external audience. You’ve got to remember that the main audience right now is kids on low power devices who can’t run a lot of the more polished games so they tend to fall off the discovery cliff.

Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.

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