The ROBLOX economy is booming. Through all hours of every day, trades are in progress, virtual gear is being created and sold, users are marketing their content, groups are created and money is being managed. ROBLOX’s virtual economy is growing at the hands of our users.

The economy can seem like a daunting system for newcomers, so we put together a quick article explaining the overall aspects of our bustling economy. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go in depth on many of the sections of this article, for those who have already worked with our economy system.

Builders Club

ROBLOX is a gaming platform, and its games can be played anytime, anywhere, by anyone with an internet connection. While it’s free to make and play games, you’ll need to sign up for a premium membership to buy and sell most anything on ROBLOX.

The three tiers of Builders Club Membership

Spending Robux

There are three membership tiers: Builders Club, Turbo Builders Club, and Outrageous Builders Club. Joining any of the three tiers will allow you to begin buying, selling, and trading items and goods.

Once you’ve joined Builders Club, you will begin receiving a daily allowance (which varies, based on which tier you’ve joined) of Robux, our in-game currency. You can begin crafting your own items—custom shirts and pants, for example—and sell them in our market. Our catalog also features a gamut of things to buy, including user-generated clothing and limited items, which are only sold occasionally and become more valuable over time.

There are other things to spend Robux on, as well. If you’re planning on creating and promoting games, Robux can be used to purchase badges, which you can then allocate to players who do exceptionally well in the game you’ve created. You can also use Robux to spruce up the overall look of your game’s page with custom image and video thumbnails. Also, Robux can be exchanged for tickets, which you can use to promote your games through user-generated ads (more on this later). We want you to be able to promote the games you create, and Robux let you do just that.

Earning Robux

We’ve gone over how to spend Robux, now let’s figure out how to earn some. Many users who have created a popular game sell “VIP t-shirts”, which are shirts you can sell that give players in your game extra abilities (i.e. stronger/faster firepower, special powers, etc) that people without VIP shirts don’t get.

You can also sell clothing you’ve built, though this is normally a far less fruitful endeavor, as the catalog is already chock full of clothing choices. It can also be a worthy investment to purchase some limited items that you can sit on for varying degrees of time—remember, the longer you wait, the more valuable the item becomes, and the higher return you can potentially earn when you choose to sell or trade the item.

Advertise Your Games

The age-old adage states, “you’ve got to spend money to make money”, and this rings especially true in ROBLOX’s world of advertising. If you build a game and want to get the word out, paying for a user-generated ad could pay huge dividends in the amount of traffic your game can accumulate. Here’s how it works.

This is a very fundamental example—there are a couple of additional nuances to the system, but for the most part, that’s how it works. The more tickets you bid on your ad, the more likely it is to be visible to other users going through the site.

Robux vs Tickets

Though they’re both forms of currency, there are fundamental differences between Robux and tickets. You will accumulate tickets simply by logging in and creating great games. Tickets can be used only to purchase ads to promote games.

Robux, on the other hand, are far more valuable, and the primary source of currency in ROBLOX.

So how do you swap Robux for tickets? Like most facets of ROBLOX, we leave that up to our users. Our Currency Exchange system is built on user-interaction—if you want to swap your Robux for tickets to promote a game you’ve created, you’ve got to find a user and work out a mutually beneficial trade that seems fair to both parties involved.

Item Trading

While we’re on the subject, let’s touch briefly on item trading in ROBLOX. All limited items can be traded between Builders Club members; which makes for a fun mini-game in of itself. You can build a robust inventory by selectively trading items, and since you can only trade limited items, you’ll have to gauge how much the item you desire may potentially increase in value moving forward. Like our Currency Exchange system, we let users decide what a fair deal is, which makes each exchange unique and dynamic.

Groups

We’re proud to say that our Groups continue to grow in both popularity and user-interactivity. In terms of the ROBLOX economy, groups can be a very useful tool. While you can join any group you’d like to on ROBLOX, you’ll have to pay a small amount to create your own. This could pay dividends for game popularity, though, especially if your group becomes popular. If you’re the moderator of the group (i.e. if you own it), you can send out messages and share your games with every member of your group, steering all members towards your game.

The Future

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve and redefine every aspect of ROBLOX, and our economy is no different. We’d like to make enhancements to the catalog that would make it easier for users to find great stuff, improvements to the trading system, and devise more ways for ROBLOX players to both spend, and make, money. This was a broad overview of our economy, and we plan on going more in depth with each of these categories in the approaching weeks and months.

Do you have a particular aspect of our economy you’d like to learn more about? Please sound off in the comments below.