Bad Business on Roblox
Bad Business
Ethan Gawronski was about 10 years old when he discovered Roblox. He dove into its games, mostly to socialize with other kids.
Now, at age 20, Gawronski has his own Roblox game that he works on full time with his girlfriend, Elle Deppe. The couple, who met on the app, earned more than $49,000 in the past month from their action game, Bad Business, by selling outfits and weapons players can use to make their characters look cooler and perform better.
“In private developer communities, there were people that were making stupid amounts of money and we thought we could do that,” said Deppe, who’s also 20, in a recent interview.
Bad Business is among the millions of user-created games on Roblox, the kids’ entertainment set to go public on Wednesday after being valued at $29.5 billion in January. The company has built one of the top-grossing apps for Apple and Google devices by turning youthful users into game creators without forcing them to learn complicated coding. The company rewards developers by sharing 30% of the revenue from virtual purchases.
Roblox said in the latest update to its prospectus that it paid developers $328.7 million last year, up almost 200% from 2019. That far outpaced the company’s sales growth of 82% last year, when it booked $923.9 million in total revenue.
More than 1,250 developers earned at least $10,000 in the digital currency Robux, which can be converted to cash. Over 300 earned $100,000 or more.
Roblox is telling…
