alt Hacker NewsYou're missing the parts where:
1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory
1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point
2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.
2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.
3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.
Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.
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None of what you said counters anything in my post.
> Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free > free > no fees
A middleman that takes a huge cut isn’t doing anything for free. Can you at least try and have an honest discussion here.
72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.
Hosting, storage, and scaling aren’t free; costs scale with active users, data egress, and state. In-app purchase splits and platform fees erode margin, so “free hosting” rarely survives at millions of concurrent players. Model revenue net of ops costs and, if needed, use a hybrid backend with careful risk budgeting, auth, and anti-cheat.