Jay Peters is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Roblox is rolling out a new feature that will let creators on the platform choose to offer in-game items at region-specific prices. This means that an item’s specific price will vary to reflect a user’s local region so that it’s equivalent around the world.
Right now, in-experience prices are the same globally (the platform is currently available in 180 countries). But if a developer turns on regional pricing for an in-game item like a pass (typically things with a one-time fee like access to a special area in a game or a permanent power-up), Roblox will automatically adjust the price in Robux, Roblox’s in-game currency, as needed.
Regional pricing will also become an option for avatar items “later this year,” according to a Roblox blog post.
In an interview with The Verge, Enrico D’Angelo, Roblox’s VP of economy, says that the main reason the company waited this long to implement regional pricing was because there was a “real risk” about arbitrage.
“The moment you have the same item being sold for different prices, and, in some cases, dramatically different prices, you can imagine how crafty some people can get,” he says. Roblox wanted to be “very confident” in the systems that it put in place “to avoid these misuses of the system.” D’Angelo says that in Roblox’s early testing of regional pricing, it’s seen “zero cases” of abuse.
Paired with Roblox’s price optimization tool for developers, which runs tests to recommend the best price for an item in a game, D’Angelo says that the company will be able to help suggest optimized prices for in-game goods and regionally appropriate prices for those goods. In its blog post, Roblox says the company has seen “a median earnings increase of 4 percent for eligible creators who have run a pricing test.”
