| title | description |
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Earning on Roblox |
Explains how Roblox's economy and virtual currency works. |
Roblox's goal is to enable the creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone, and we are constantly investing in new tools and services to empower our creator community. We give our creators, from an individual to a large studio, diverse ways to earn on Roblox by creating content and experiences, specifically:
- Developing an Experience
- Creating, Selling, and Reselling Avatar Items
- Creating and Selling Studio Plugins
This page provides information about different ways to earn on Roblox and how to convert earned Robux to cash through the Developer Exchange program.
We are building one of the world's largest immersive platforms with 70.2M global daily active users (DAUs) in 15 languages across 180 countries, available across platforms including mobile, desktop, consoles, and VR headsets. In 2022, more than 50% of our daily active users were over the age of 13 and users over the age of 17 accounted for 38% of our daily active users. In 2022, our community visited over 15 million experiences, and in the third quarter of 2023 alone, users spent 16 billion hours on our platform.
In 2022 alone, we had more than 3.2 billion virtual transactions, and over 1 billion during the third quarter of 2023. In fact, Roblox's GDP² has grown to become as large as that of some countries. During the quarter ending September 2023, over 5.6M asset creators and developers who create experiences earned Robux. Our success is directly tied to the success of our creators. Roblox earns money by selling Robux which users spend in-experience and on items and assets in our marketplaces, all created by you.
Because Roblox is a platform, we do not create experiences that compete with our community for earnings. Instead, we're always searching for new ways to increase creators' earnings. In 2021 and 2022, our creator community earned $538 million and $624 million, respectively.³ This combined figure of $1.1 billion is up 164% over the previous two years.
We are seeing healthy growth across creators and studios of varying sizes. Since 2020, the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of monetization for the 1000th creator (ranked by earnings) is almost three times that of the 10th ranked creator. And the 1000th creator earned USD 55,000 last year. As of December 2022, nearly 20% of our top 100 experiences and nearly 40% of our top 5000 experiences were also created in 2022.
Building successful content takes time and effort, but there is low risk and no upfront cost to building an experience on Roblox. You pay after earning on Roblox and we provide the tools, services, and support to help you build the most immersive experiences. Roblox has a robust community and developer forum to guide and support you along the way.
Unlike other platforms where you wait days or weeks for approvals, you can modify your Roblox experiences and publish immediately in multiple languages and on all popular platforms — iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Xbox.
Our platform, with 70.2 million daily active users (DAUs) as of Q3 2023 now able to see and join experiences with no additional downloads required, provides opportunity for rapid growth. Creators can take advantage of our organic channels, our rich social graph and network effect, seamless exploration between experiences and our cost effective on‑platform ads.
With your content live and in front of lots of users, we provide a rapid and rich feedback loop on how users are engaging with your work. This feedback loop is facilitated both by our integrated analytics system and by our monetization mechanisms. On the cost side, we handle infrastructure hosting, storage, customer support, localization, payment processing, moderation, and platform costs. You do not have to worry about standing up multiplayer servers or scaling them as your experience goes viral. Off Roblox, you often have to take care of these expenses and manage these operations yourself.
On other platforms, you can incur expenses such as storage, hosting, and infrastructure before you earn any money or even start building. On Roblox, developing an experience has minimal risk as you are charged for these expenses after you monetize.
Our goal is to drive as much money to our creators as possible while maintaining reasonable margins for our company to develop, maintain, and improve the tools and technology that support our community.
On average, 75% of all spending in experiences supports or goes to developers:
- We pay out 46% to cover costs supporting experiences — like infrastructure hosting, storage, customer support, localization, payment processing, and moderation — which other platforms generally pass on to developers.
- This enables us to return 29%* directly to the developers.
- That leaves 25% to cover Roblox's ongoing services and operating costs, future-looking investments in the platform, and margins.
This chart illustrates the estimated utilization of each dollar spent in an experience on Roblox. Note that the chart doesn't reflect our expenses as disclosed in our GAAP financial statements.
This percentage is the experience developer's earnings based on transactions in the experience, after cashing out through our [Developer Exchange][Link_Developer_Exchange] program (before any developer spending on the Roblox platform for services such as ads). Each developer's earnings share may differ.
4.4%Developers also get extra Robux for simply building an engaging experience through the [Engagement-Based Payouts](../production/monetization/engagement-based-payouts.md) feature. Roblox calculates payout based on the share of time a [Premium][Link_Premium_Membership] subscriber spends in your experience as a way to reward engaging experiences.
This percentage reflects our platform average, though the actual percent of earnings from EBP varies from experience to experience based on the engagement level in the experience.
We are a platform and therefore we do not make experiences that compete with our creators for these payouts.
22.3%Roblox covers this on your behalf. This reflects the processing payment fees related to all purchases and refunds of Robux. These fees are paid directly to Apple (iOS), Google and Amazon (Android), and Microsoft (Xbox and Microsoft Store).
These costs also include processing fees associated with other payment methods, such as credit card or PayPal, as well as costs associated with the sale of our prepaid cards.
If you developed outside of Roblox, you may have to cover these fees on your own and manage chargebacks and fraud and process refunds.
23.8%Roblox covers this on your behalf. These costs relate to Roblox's maintenance of the servers that host all Roblox experiences, as well as platform-wide customer support, user and experience moderation, user acquisition, translation, and local compliance. If you develop outside of Roblox, you may have to pay for hosting, servers, moderation, and customer service on your own. You also have to dedicate time to managing these services; on Roblox you can focus on building your experience.
18.3%These costs relate to future-looking investments in the Roblox platform. This includes investments in the people building out new capabilities and tools for our platform which will allow you to be more innovative, build more engaging experiences, help bring in new users, and make creating on Roblox much easier.
6.8%Roblox uses some of this to cover ongoing services and operating costs.
\* 29% returned directly to the developers of experiences cents per dollar spent in experience assumes the full amount of Robux earned are exchanged through the DevEx program, and not spent on the platform. Figures are as of September 30, 2023.Once you've developed an experience, you can earn through the following methods:
- Subscriptions within experiences offer you the ability to earn from your experience through subscription-based offerings and business models.
- Developer Products which are items or abilities that a user can purchase, such as in-experience currency.
- Passes for access to special privileges within an experience, such as entry to a restricted area or a permanent power‑up. When you sell your own passes in your experience, you earn 70% of the Robux spent. You can also sell passes within your experience that were made by other creators; in this case, you earn a 10% affiliate fee on the Robux spent within your experience, and the original creator of the pass earns 60%.
- Private Servers for users to play with just friends (subscription-based access fees).
Developers earn extra Robux for simply building an engaging experience. Roblox calculates an Engagement-Based Payout (EBP) based on the share of time a Roblox Premium subscriber spends in your experience, and these payouts happen automatically as a way to reward engaging experiences.
Immersive Ads allow developers to place high-quality, native ad units in their experience that will programmatically serve ads. Creators are paid through a revenue share for the impressions and teleports generated.
In 2022 alone, 1.8 billion total avatar items were sold on the platform, making virtual items a critical part of our economy and how creators can earn.
Creators can create and sell accessories, clothes, bodies, and heads for avatars in the Marketplace or in their own or other developers' experiences. We have a breadth of ways users can discover and buy your creations, whether through searching the marketplace or enabling developers to promote and sell your items. Users can purchase your item within an experience using the Avatar Inspect Menu or modules such as Merch Booth. You can also increase the discoverability of your 3D user-generated content within the marketplace through Sponsored Item ads.
After you pay any applicable upload fees and submit a new asset for approval, the moderation team reviews your asset and, if approved, you'll be able to publish your asset to the Marketplace. If you're participating in the UGC Program, you can upload and sell 3D clothing, accessories, and avatar bodies and heads. It costs 750 Robux to upload each asset.
You receive a commission every time a user purchases your item. When community items are sold in the marketplace, a portion of the sales is split between the item creator and Roblox. If the item is sold within an experience, the revenue share will additionally be split with the owner of the experience who we refer to as an "affiliate." An affiliate earns commission for marketing another user's creations.
As follows is an overview of our commission structure. To learn more about fees and commissions for the Marketplace, see Marketplace Fees and Commissions.
- Creator receives **30%** - Affiliate (experience owner) receives **40%** - Platform receives **30%** - Creator of the virtual item receives **30%** - Affiliate (Roblox) receives **40%** - Platform receives **30%**These commissions also apply to the original sale of Limiteds. When setting assets on sale, you can configure your creation as a Limited item to set an available quantity for that asset. Limiteds require a per-unit fee and can be resold by Roblox Premium members. At this time, only Roblox-created Limiteds are tradeable.
While anyone can buy a Limited item, only Roblox Premium subscribers can resell them. Every time a creator's Limited item is resold, the creator benefits from a 10% original creator commission on the value of each resale.
- Reseller receives 50%
- Creator receives 10%
- Affiliate receives 10%
- Platform receives 30%
After purchasing a Limited, there is up to a 30‑day holding period when the item cannot be resold. Robux acquired from trading or selling items that you didn't create are not considered earned and are ineligible for the Developer Exchange program.
You can create and sell Studio plugins to the community through the Creator Store. A plugin is an extension that adds additional features or functionality to Roblox Studio and helps improve creator workflows. You can either offer plugins for free or sell them for a minimum of 100 Robux.
- Creator of the Studio plugin receives **70%** - Platform receives **30%**
Any plugin without USD pricing will be taken off sale when USD pricing launches. If you have any plugins currently on sale for Robux, ensure you set up a seller account and add USD pricing for your plugins now. For more information, see Selling on the Creator Store.
Once you earn Robux, you can continue to use it in our platform to buy developer assets, plugins, advertising, in-experience items, or virtual items. In addition, when you have at least 30,000 earned Robux in your account, you may be eligible to exchange your earned Robux for real currency using the Developer Exchange program.
To learn more about strategies to earn Robux, see Monetization.
Every platform reports their creator share a bit differently. When you compare creator shares across platforms, you should consider:
- The breadth of business models — While some platforms may have a high creator share, the opportunities to earn and the ways to earn may be limited, making the absolute earning potential on the platform smaller.
- The platform may also be competing for engagement and payouts — Some platforms are actually also creators on their platform and therefore compete with their creators for engagement-based payouts. Roblox does not.
- Other platform benefits — Creator shares can be high but consider other benefits that the platform provides such as costs that they are paying on your behalf, the scale and diversity of their audience, the devices/platforms they are available on, the types of creators that are earning, and more.
- The total size of the payout pool — Understand the total size of the platform's payout pool. Other platforms may invest less in growing their user base and more on making their products accessible in new markets across the globe. This may allow them to pay developers a higher share, but at the expense of slower growth and less total earnings being put in creators' pockets.
Any user can earn Robux on Roblox, however you must be a creator who is 13 years of age or older and have the requisite minimum amount of earned Robux in your account in order to convert your earned Robux to real currency through the Developer Exchange program. You must also meet certain other requirements such as having a verified email address and being in good standing within the community. Also, only those over the age of 18 may purchase Robux or engage in other real-money transactions on the platform per Roblox's Terms of Use.
Users, unlike creators, cannot convert in-experience virtual currency for real-world currency on Roblox. Creators do have the ability to convert (if, for example, they earn Robux via an experience they create) but Robux acquired from trading or reselling virtual items is not eligible to be converted.
A virtual economy generally exists within a virtual or digital world where users can perform economic activities and transactions in exchange for virtual or real assets. It involves the exchange of virtual goods, services, and currencies that can only be used within the virtual environment or for real economic benefit.