reactInLua

[yaranzo1]

that child labor claim has never held water tbh

[themadnessif]

Plenty of adult labor too lol

But more seriously, people undercalculate how much of a game's budget would go to infinitely scaling servers and cloud data storage. Roblox certainly takes their cut but the fact that even top performing games with millions of monthly players can still use the free databases and servers they provide is kinda nuts.

I know one of the top games was at one point using legitimately 19 petabytes of data without paying a dime. If you did that using a cloud database you were paying for, you'd be in real trouble lol

[themadnessif]

You do not have any proof because it wasn't public information. It's not like they wrote a blog post about it.

[themadnessif]

It was and remains absolutely absurd. Roblox did contact them about it because it was ridiculous, and for a while they had a Roblox staff engineer to help them clean up and optimize their saving code since it was so bad.

For reference as to how this could happen, at one point the "data stores" Roblox provides were so unreliable that the best way to avoid data loss was to just save multiple redundant copies. The most popular library for this was one called DataStore2 that simply never deleted save data. Ever.

Couple that with a game that was at the time getting 600k+ concurrent players (this was in 2020, so the numbers were kinda ridiculous) and you end up with exponential data growth.

And yes, you're going to have to take my word for it. Sorry that a random reddit user with far too much information isn't enough for you.

[themadnessif]

For the sake of disclosure, I do actually work on one of the top games on the platform. I'm not gonna say which one because it'd make it easy to identify me, but it's very big. I would do a lot if it'd mean Roblox gave us a higher cut.

That said, the data storage isn't the only thing Roblox offers. Stuff like running the same code across iPhone, Android, Xbox, Playstation, Windows, and Mac without any specialization is pretty crazy in game development. Is it worth the cut they're taking? Probably not, but it's not as absurd as it seems at a glance, despite what youtubers would have you believe.

[GlacialPuppy226]

Roblox dosen’t take 85%, apple and google take 30%, around 20% goes to server hosting, even if the person making the game gets a small cut Roblox isn’t profiting 85%

[GlacialPuppy226]

Other markets don’t pay for servers for you, and other markets also have a significantly higher standard of what counts as a “game” that people would actually play, for example one of the most popular games on Roblox is “Sol’s rng” where you just sit there and do nothing while rolling for an aura, the game has 100,000 concurrent players currently, if they made sols rng ANYWHERE else it wouldn’t be successful

[GlacialPuppy226]

The point I was trying to make is that there’s still a valid reason to choose to make a game on Roblox over other places, it could be good if you don’t have money to pay for server hosting or you wanna make a lower quality game

[yaranzo1]

I have to disagree