Roblox divulgou uma mediana de pagamentos. A Epic nunca divulgou

At its developer conference in San Jose last week, Roblox did something neither big creator platform had done before: it published the shape of its payout curve rather than the size of it. The median creator in its Developer Exchange programme earned roughly $1,500 across the twelve months ending June 30, 2026. The top ten averaged $65.7 million over the same period.

Both numbers describe the same programme. That is the point, and it is the number every island builder should be asking Epic for — because Epic has never published one.

What Roblox actually disclosed

The headline figures came out of RDC 2026 and the accompanying newsroom post on September 11, with the distribution detail picked up in reporting the following week.

• More than $5 billion paid to creators since DevEx launched in 2013, and roughly $1.7 billion in the twelve months to June 30, 2026.
• Median DevEx creator: about $1,500 for that entire year.
• Top 10 creators averaged $65.7 million, up from $33.9 million in 2024. Top 100 averaged $10.8 million; top 1,000 averaged $1.4 million.
• More than 42,000 creators took part in DevEx, up roughly 70% from about 24,500 in 2024.

Roblox also announced Roblox Wallet, an account held with a financial partner and reachable from Creator Hub, which pays earnings out every business day in real currency as holds clear. It rolls out later this year to eligible US-based independent creators 18 and older, with international expansion planned, and a Roblox Card that spends the balance directly arrives in 2027.

What Epic publishes instead

Epic's creator-economy disclosures are totals and milestones. It passed $1 billion paid to the creators of Fortnite islands since UEFN launched in 2023, having reached $320 million inside the first year. It has said roughly 3,000 islands now earn more from in-island transactions than from engagement payouts, and that creators receive 40% of island revenue.

Every one of those is a number about the top of the funnel or the size of the pool. None of them tells you what a median island earns, how many creators receive a payout at all, or how steeply the curve falls after the first hundred islands.

Why the median is the number that matters

A total payout figure answers a question creators are not asking. "A billion dollars has been paid out" is compatible with almost any distribution, including one where a few dozen islands take nearly all of it. If you are deciding whether to spend three months building an island, the useful question is what the middle of the distribution looks like, and the honest answer on Roblox is now on the record: half of the creators who cashed out took home $1,500 or less for a year of work.

That is not an argument against building. It is an argument for treating the headline totals on either platform as marketing rather than planning data, and for asking Epic the same question Roblox just answered about itself.

The comparison has real limits

• The two programmes count different populations. Roblox's median is drawn from creators who enrolled in DevEx and converted Robux to currency — a self-selected group that excludes everyone who never reached the cash-out threshold, which pushes the median *up*, not down.
• Epic's engagement payouts and in-island transactions have their own structure and thresholds, so a like-for-like median would not be a straight substitute for Roblox's.
• Roblox's figures cover the twelve months to June 30, 2026; Epic's $1 billion is cumulative since 2023. They are not the same window.
• Neither platform publishes a distribution for the creators who earned something but never cashed out.

None of that makes the disclosure less useful. It makes it the only one of its kind — and it sets a floor for what island creators on any platform should expect to be told.