Roblox Creator Royalties and the Forever License | Elacity
From November 1, Roblox treats creator payouts as royalties. The license behind them is perpetual, irrevocable and covers AI training. Here is what that means for creators.
Roblox Will Call Creator Payouts Royalties. The License Behind Them Never Expires.
If you build on Roblox, your payout gets a new legal name on November 1. Roblox creator royalties sound like ownership, until you read who wrote the terms they are paid under.
Roblox's updated Creator Terms say creator payments "will be treated as royalties paid for Roblox's exploitation of your licensed Content." Its DevEx tax page spells out the practical side: from November 1, DevEx payouts are classified as royalties, U.S. creators receive a Form 1099-MISC for them, and creators without valid tax information may see 24% backup withholding.
This is not a niche rule. Roblox says its creators earned over $1.5 billion in 2025, and that the median creator in its DevEx program received about $1,500 in the twelve months to June 30, 2026.
The failure of the platform-written royalty
A royalty, in the ordinary sense, is what an owner collects when someone else uses their property on terms the owner set. Roblox's version keeps the payment. The terms belong to Roblox.
To publish anything, a creator grants Roblox a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, fully sublicensable and transferable license to use it. The listed purposes include "developing, improving, or training any AI or machine learning models." The license also outlives the upload: Roblox may keep using content you have deleted under that same perpetual grant.
Roblox also becomes the seller. From November 1 it acts as the "principal distributor and merchant of record," and the terms state that users and creators do not enter into a direct transaction with each other. The player licenses your game from Roblox. You get paid by Roblox. The two of you never meet in the contract.
The payment is defined just as narrowly. It is owed when Roblox monetizes your content, and the terms say no payment is due for the grant of the license itself or for any use that does not monetize it.
Why the Roblox creator royalty is still a fair deal on paper
None of this is sinister. A platform that hosts, sells and refunds needs a license to do it, and acting as merchant of record lets Roblox handle tax, payments and consumer refunds in one place.
Roblox also lets creators opt out of AI training item by item. It says withdrawn data leaves the training set within 30 days and trained models are updated within 365 days. The catch sits in the defaults: sharing is on by default for items published since July 10, 2024, and free Creator Store assets cannot opt out at all.
Training rights are also getting more valuable. In September the Third Circuit found that "the market for licensing headnotes as text to train AI is rapidly developing," as Baker Botts notes in its analysis of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS. A perpetual license that covers training hands that option to the platform by default.
The structural problem remains. Every term above lives in a document Roblox can amend with notice, and continued use counts as acceptance. A royalty the payer defines, and can redefine, is a payout with a better name.
The Elacity Solution: put the terms in the work
Elacity is building the other arrangement, where the creator writes the terms and the work carries them. Three mechanisms separate it from a better-worded platform contract.
1. The license travels inside a Wealth Capsule
Elacity dDRM is Elacity's own protocol for packaging a work as a Wealth Capsule: an encrypted, programmable good whose rights are recorded on-chain. It is designed so the creator sets the scope, duration and allowed uses, AI training included, and those terms move with the work instead of living in one platform's terms of use.
2. Access follows the right, not the storefront
The key that opens a Wealth Capsule is designed to be released only after the buyer's rights are checked on-chain. A use the creator never licensed, such as training a model, is designed to need its own right rather than riding in on a hosting license.
3. The runtime asks before code acts
Beneath it sits the open-source ElastOS runtime, part of the Elastos project founded by Rong Chen, which Elacity helps build in public (https://github.com/Elacity/elastos-runtime). It is designed so data stays in the owner's space and code comes to the data. In the ElastOS alpha, an app can't make its own permission: it asks, and the Runtime mints and signs a capability token, then checks it before the app can act. Capabilities, not access control lists.
Now the honest edge. The protected-content path in Elacity dDRM is not switched on yet, the machines that release keys are run today by a known set of operators, and the portal for creating and selling Wealth Capsules is still being built. ElastOS is early, and its next release is still in testing. None of it changes the contract a Roblox creator accepts this week.
What to do before November 1
- Update your tax details in Creator Hub by October 31, as Roblox's DevEx page asks, so withholding is set at the right rate.
- Review the AI data-sharing setting on each game, avatar item and paid asset, since newer items share by default.
- Read the Creator Terms section on Roblox's right to monetize. It defines exactly what your royalty pays for.
For the mechanism behind sealed, rights-checked goods, read how decentralized DRM decides who holds the key. The buyer side of the same arrangement is in what happens to your digital purchases when a platform shuts down. More on creators owning their work lives under Creator Economy.
Ask who wrote the terms
Sasha Mitchell, Elacity's founder, puts the principle plainly: "The people who create the value should own it. That is the entire reason Elacity exists." A royalty is only as much yours as the terms behind it.
Follow Elacity on X for the next piece on who writes the terms of creative work.