Time for another report on Robloxia’s developing economy.

There are currently 410,687 RO$ in circulation.

83,547 RO$ have been earned in the past week.

64,361 RO$ have been spent in the past week.

The top 20 Roblox tycoons control 136,318 RO$, or 33.2% of the money supply.

536 Robloxians have more than 100 RO$.

This table contains some very interesting data. Some of you might want to refer to it next week.

The Roblox economy is still in its infancy. We’re getting to the point where we’ve got some good data, and we may start experimenting. The end goal is to maximize total revenue (the bottom right number on the above chart). We also want to encourage user involvement in the economy at all levels. From a game design perspective, we have observed several things.

The Rich Get Richer

The top 20 Roblox tycoons control a much bigger percentage of the money supply, compared to the last market update. To some extent, we expect this. 99% of all Roblox games played occur in the top 1% of all places – this dynamic encourages accumulation of wealth into a few accounts. Our theory for explaining the recent jump is that the richest players now have bought everything that they want, and are presently accumulating cash without spending any of it. From a game design perspective, this means we need to invent a cash sink for rich players – perhaps a limited commodity that is bid on and thus has no fixed upper price.

Pricing Hats

When we first released hats, we had no idea how to price them. Looking at the data, we can now see that it doesn’t make sense to sell hats for much less than 50 (we sold a lot of red hats for 7, but didn’t make that much), or much more than 2500 (though there is a niche market for super-expensive luxury hats). It seems that there are two “sweet spots” for hat pricing. We can make a good return selling a lot of hats priced between 75-500 RO$, or selling a only few hats for 1000-2500 RO$ each.

Pricing Shirts

One thing that we were surprised to learn is that some Shirts are actually out-selling some hats. In particular, 56 people have shelled out 101 RO$ for black suits and, even more incredible, 23 people have paid 178 RO$ for red suits. When we first started selling shirts, I though 45 RO$ for the I Heart BM shirt was way too much, but as you can see from the chart above, most of our most profitable shirts have been priced at more than 40 RO$. We’ve sold a ton of Bloxxer shirts, but at 4 RO$ each, we haven’t made too much on them. This suggests a price range of 15-60 RO$ for future shirts.

The Future

We’re shaking things up in the marketplace soon. We’ll be increasing the prices of some hats, and lowering others, to see what happens. We are also going to discontinue one hat in an attempt to create a collector’s item that will exist only in limited quantity and be sought after once we’ve implemented trading of assets. There are also impending changes in the shirt market – but we have no idea what will happen there.

– Telamon