This is prediction #1 in the list of predictions for the next five years by Roblox's CEO David Baszucki, made during the annual Keynote on September 9th, 2023.
Watch the keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfYz8weQm4M
1,000
3.00People Make Games claims: Roblox exploits young game developers by selling false hopes regarding monetization.
(Also read Ernie's response to this representation.)
@RuzgarSanli ex-roblox here. That video is mostly fake. My own opinions follow:
Thing about how Roblox might have to spend revenue: 30% apple/google tax, 22% paid out to Roblox developers as cash, leaving <50% for tax+profit+overhead of running the entire business.
What does Roblox provide?
Devs get a free full AWS: unlimited servers, bandwidth + networking, security, free s3 equivalent for game assets, key value store for game data, caching services, at no dev cost.
They get payments + credit card validations all transparently, free global updated device compatibility (all iphones+androids+ipads+playstation+xbox+PC+mac)., User discovery and auth, trust and safety (censorship), anti-botting, anti-game hacking, anti-ddos on their games, a free dev environment (Roblox Studio), Also, Roblox will distribute your game globally.
Also, Roblox will autotranslate your game, for free, to all the supported languages. Roblox will run your game for users globally, as close as possible to their location, for better ping times, for free.
Roblox maintains their own custom super fast fork of Lua. Roblox has developed a typing system for it (luau) which is awesome https://luau-lang.org/
In all, Roblox does way more for you than all those platforms do, and you can still profit.
Compare all that which Roblox gives for free, to the other guys taking a chunk of your revenue: Apple & Android taking their 30% of ALL mobile spend. They provide nearly nothing and are stealing all that dough, yet don't get hate. Roblox works their ass off to make awesome stuff, and yeah they do dumb things sometimes, but it's literally a free AWS for you to make games on if you want.
Those same kids work on steam games, or Fortnite forever and don't get half as much for free, and it's worse in nearly every way, and also nobody pays them. Path to cash on Roblox is MUCH shorter than on other platforms. So all in all I'm still a mega-fan of Roblox and what they do.