Build, Partner, or Publish on Roblox: How a COO Should Decide

Every brand that explores Roblox ends up weighing the same four variables: cost, speed, control, and expected return. The decision is rarely about what is theoretically possible. It is about what your organization can execute in the next 12-18 months within your resources and without distracting the core business.

There are three potential paths. Build an internal studio and keep everything in house. Co-develop with a single proven Roblox studio while you retain the product mandate. Publish with a platform partner like Spaceport that can help with developer selection, production management, marketing, and live operations. Each path can work. The question is which one gets you to a reliable signal the quickest with a cost profile you can defend.

You can go the Internal build route, to maximize control. You set the creative bar, own the economy, and direct the roadmap. It also carries the steepest ramp. Roblox has specific tooling, an economy that behaves differently from mobile free-to-play, and a discovery layer that rewards teams that ship and market in weekly cycles. If you already operate live games or plan a multi-title slate, the fixed cost can amortize well and this could make sense for you. The trade you make is time. Most first-time internal teams need several months before retention and monetization stabilize, which pushes revenue recognition later in the process.

With co-development, you get speed by renting a developer’s experience. A veteran studio brings pipelines, scripting patterns, and live-ops playbooks you do not yet have. Even so, you still make the canon calls and approve content, so the brand stays on model. Unfortunately, the friction to watch is at the seams: things like approvals that stall production, gameplay that feels off to fans, or live ops that lose pace once launch passes. All of these issues are solvable if you have a clear governance model, a single decision owner on the brand side, and an economy design that is locked before art scale-up. Doable, but with a well defined model of operating and communicating.

Lastly, going the publishing route, you concentrate accountability. With a capable partner, they can line up a studio, orchestrate go-to-market with creators and native events, and operate the economy against growth targets. While your share of revenue is smaller, your fixed cost and management burden also decreases. Ultimately, the real benefit is faster learning. With an earlier launch, you get more weeks in market, in turn giving you more cycles to tune retention and conversion before a retail beat or a content season.

Let’s make the tradeoffs more concrete by considering a simple picture that uses ranges instead of tidy single points. Assume a branded experience that, once stable, can generate low to mid single-digit millions in consumer spend in its first full year. Platform fees and taxes reduce that top line by roughly one third. Internal build keeps all net receipts but typically launches later. Co-development leaves a larger share with the developer but moves earlier. Publishing leaves about half with the brand but often ships first and layers on distribution benefits. It’s the mix of launch timing, share, and fixed cost that drives payback.

What I’m trying to point out is not that one model always wins. It’s that everything comes at a cost. If your business case requires evidence within a quarter or two, publishing is often the best path because it compresses time to signal. If you value ownership above all and can invest across a slate, internal build can create a durable margin by Year 2. Meanwhile, co-development fits when you want creative control with a faster clock but are ready for fully managing a true partnership.

Whichever route you choose, it’s important to remember to protect three fundamentals. First, secure a weekly operating rhythm that covers updates, events, creator outreach, and economy health. Roblox rewards studios and games that produce consistently. Second, put approvals on a service-level agreement. Creative safety is essential, but slow decisions are expensive. Third, size your marketing and community plan to your goals. Organic discovery is not a strategy. Creator seeding, native events, and paid where applicable should be part of the launch plan, not an afterthought. These are the ingredients to your success. 

One last thought on numbers: any P&L is only as good as the assumptions behind it. Discovery, retention, and content cadence can shift the outcome more than the spreadsheet suggests. Fees differ by channel and region, and live ops costs usually climb as you expand your content calendar or tighten moderation. That’s why your first launch shouldn’t be treated like a trophy, it’s a pilot. The quicker you learn from real players in market, the better your second release will be, no matter whether you build, partner, or publish.

If your goal is to get clear results quickly without taking on heavy fixed costs, publishing with the right partner is often the smartest first step. Once you’ve built momentum with data in hand, a community starting to grow, and a team that’s ready for more, you can always move toward co-development or even an internal build to take on deeper ownership for the long run.

Craig Zevin is the COO at Spaceport. He bring a wealth of expertise across product and marketing with experience that includes everything from seed-stage startups through Big Three consulting firms. At heart, what he cares most about is working with passionate, excited teams that are committed to building great products and sharing them with the world.