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To understand the point R$ fission, you need to understand why a non-circulating currency is bad.
The ROBLOX staff is planning to condition R$ as a premium currency. Now that would be all well and good if everyone on ROBLOX was a premium player, because then R$ would circulate through the whole virtual economy. Every economy is made up of, run by, and driven by people. An economy is a flow of currency, and every system that follows.
The premise of an economy is that the money needs to continually go from place to place, person to person, in a mostly unpredictable fashion. If that is happening, that basically creates the possibility that if money were being put into circulation by something other than them, they would be able to find a way to gain that money and in turn gain a profit. An economy is the foundation of business. Without this possibility there is no incentive to invest money in something if no new money will come to them.
In a virtual economy like ROBLOX where money isn't infinitely created (for a better understanding of this read goldfishmemories' "The Movement" https://forum.roblox.com/Forum/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=145756327) the money needs to be able to flow continuously so that there's the possibility of attaining wealth or else it won't work. Because when that possibility will exist, people will do whatever they can to follow the money, be it spend money to make a business model, make attractive items that they can sell for a bigger profit, or build something that will give them a community that will continually funnel them resources.
In ROBLOX's current plans for their economic system (which include permanent reservation of R$ as a premium-only currency, and relying on developers to make waves of free items) it is more than likely that it will fail. The reason being is because everything is stagnate because the currency is unbalanced.
What will happen is that there will be little to no change in the ratio of premium-players to freemium-players. There will still be the same amount of people who resolve not to spend money on ROBLOX. So now you have a bunch of people completely cut off from the currency. If they are completely cut off from the currency they cannot do business with developers and item makers because they don't have anything to trade. So basically the developer's only viable option would be to cater to the other premium members.
However, the problem is that there is not enough people generating enough R$ regardless for R$ not to become a scarcity. And the price ranges for catalog items will be way too overpriced or underpriced for the amount of R$ that is actually in the system at a time. Which is why unreasonable prices (that are usually made from re-selling of Limiteds and inexperienced clothing makers) will be everywhere and basically impossible to pay because the amount of R$ would be too finite. Without enough money in the economy it will slowly begin to die.
Free hats do not resolve this issue. Not only is there less incentive for developers to create free hats, it will be counter intuitive. If players get a big market of free hats, they will become complacent and not feel urged to buy R$, which will worsen the situation. And it is more than likely that developers will outperform ROBLOX in free hat quality because they don't understand how to stimulate the market (imagine the coolest hats in the Catalog are all free). Basically the gift system will more than likely outcompete with normal hats and R$ for player preference. Now this may satisfy freemium players, but because the economic system is still dead in the water, the developers are actually getting less and less out of developing as they are still catering to a playerbase that can no longer give them anything in return.
Now these problems can be managed without the need for a rehaul with heavy ROBLOX moderation and intervention. If ROBLOX sees not enough R$ is in the system they could just say "Here we'll just create more!" and if someone makes a hat that's intimidatingly good they could say "Okay we'll just up the price!" The problem is that's an artificial economy. It is EXTREMELY high maintenance and would require them stepping in periodically. An economy is supposed to be able to manage itself when it is doing prosperously, that is a world-known adage. And if the ROBLOX staff is not considering all these factors, their interventions may not even solve the tiny problems that will continue to pop up.
Basically what you will have is a very unstable economy. R$ is stagnant. The business loop is interrupted. A lot of the previous systems (place income, DevEx) are broken, and their new simple system would require them so much work that they would basically just re-add complexities anyway to compensate for the holes. It's just....... I don't know how to feel. Do you?
This is why I conceived R$ fission.
The first thing that needed to be solved about R$ was the fact that it couldn't circulate through half the economy. In this virtual game, virtual currency is how you give your customers bargaining power and in turn give the developers a reason to pursue them. It needs to be given.
But to do this you have to ask why can't it circulate? And the reason why is if you just gave players R$ then they could get everything that they want without having to participate in the business loop, which would make things worse because now the value of your product and your profits will have begun to fall. Then you come to the realization that just because one thing cannot be bought without repercussions, doesn't mean that another cannot. This creates the idea that the ideal currency would be able to buy one thing and not the other, everything except for one thing, or anything it wants, all at the same time.
And that is where the potency of R$ fission comes in.
R$ fission is essentially the splitting of R$ into different variations and imitations of itself that have finite and different uses. If ROBLOX can't have people getting any hat they want with an earnable currency, then make a currency that can buy everything but hats. If ROBLOX can't have people getting any gamepass that they want, then make a currency that cannot be used for gamepass. It creates a thing called secure circulation, which allows the currency to be accessible without endangering the economy itself.
The next thing two things that need to be realized are that the currencies need to be community-driven and they need to have adaptability. R$ fission fulfills this essentially by letting the developers make their own currencies, but they can only extend over the things that they make.
Individual developers are beginning to contribute more and more content to the game as a whole. There are developers that alone have created tens of places, clothing items, and gamepasses as well as models and you have to realize that soon all of these items will be sellable not to mention that hats, packages, faces and gears, will soon begin to be able to be created by them as well. Soon we'll have developers whose collections of creations are like mini-Catalogs and Games pages. And that is the reason why the currencies created through R$ fission should be tied to developers.
R$ fission takes advantage of this development, essentially using currency to divide the developers' creation into different economies making ROBLOX as a whole a web of economies. This takes advantage of the fact that there are infinite possible creations by a countless amount of developers and potential developers. As the developer becomes more influential, so will their currency. This creates a competitive industry once developers start to participate in the system at the same time.
In my R$ fission idea specifically, created R$es are allowed to circulate through all economies through repurposing and sponsoring. When R$ is allowed to end up anywhere, it creates that possibility of one person amassing a great wealth. Remember, if there are multiple people putting money into a system, and that money can go everywhere, it is possible that all the money can go to one person. Its that pursuit of riches combined with a competitive industry that would keep the economy going itself with little management and maintenance.
R$ would only be created by buying it, which means the more purchases, the more R$ in circulation at a time. If someone buys R$ to turn it into a created R$ that can buy their product, put it in circulation and enough people use it to buy their product, and it is attractive enough so that people would repurpose other people's created R$es so they could buy their items, that original someone would get more R$ than they put in, giving them the positive feedback to start the process all over again, buying more R$ from ROBLOX. This all will accumulate, considering ROBLOX targets people (like TBCers and OBCers) who are developing to make R$, and ROBLOX will eventually see a rise in profits.
With all of these factors in play, ROBLOX could be able to have a low maintenance system that is actually more lucrative than before. It encourages creative competition, rewards good content without having to overmoderate and limit it, and encourages buying more R$ so the profit loop can start all over again, for all involved. This is how we all become happy.
This is the economy of robux fission.
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