User-generated content

Fresh Red Baseball Cap, the first official user-generated accessory.

User Generated Content (UGC for short) is a term most commonly applied to the Avatar Shop, but can also be applied to any non-Roblox item on the platform, a feature that allows users to publish their own items and sell them. These unique items can be viewed under the Community Creations category. The feature was initially announced at RDC 2015^{⁠[citation needed]}, but its confirmation was declared at RDC 2019.^[1] It released on August 15, 2019 to certified users on the site. Before its release, Roblox had confirmed that this feature will only be allowed to certain users at first, many had suspected that popular Roblox content creators in the official Roblox Video Stars Program will have access to it, which is now true.

Roblox has reached out to reveal that they will sometime in the future depend on content created by eligible users rather than prioritizing assets made by the official ROBLOX account, which is managed by admins to publish items as default.

Whenever a user publishes an accessory, they can input customized descriptions, Robux price, and much more. However, releasing limited unique items and making existing items limited is still restricted to ROBLOX. Although, Roblox states they want to move in a direction where creators can publish their own limited items to sell to other users^[2], their only issue with this concept is that there are a very minimal amount of eligible creators and in part of fact that they have been lacking in limited releases currently.

On December 6, 2019, it was revealed that star creators will be given the ability to request User Generated Content items to be created per TheMeganPlays' tweet.^[3] Some select star creators were given the ability to request an item early to test the feature. Roblox catalog managers originally let MeganPlays' item be created to test the feature^[4]^[5], but her item was quickly turned into a blank item uploaded by the ROBLOX account.^[6] A copy of the item was later re-uploaded onto the catalog the afternoon that the original was deleted, and can still be purchased to this day. Currently, star creators are able to upload one accessory per month.

List of UGC items

Alternatively, click "Expand" to show the list of UGC items.

Selected Developers

Currently, there are only 21 known creators who are allowed to upload their own creations without request. Those selected users are:

There are also 6 selected accounts that were/are used for testing. These are:

Criticism

The UGC feature has mostly been criticized due to potential copies of pre-existing catalog items by ROBLOX or unoriginal ideas, with a notable example being some early hats by tarabyte (BiggestHead, Illuminati, Despacito Spider, and Triple Headstack).

UGC has also specifically been criticized by the trading community for fears of limited and limited unique items dropping in value. This originally began when the Downtown Denizen Fedora was uploaded by WhoToTrus and had subsequently been claimed by a portion of the community to be a ripoff of The Classic ROBLOX Fedora, despite the Downtown Denizen Fedora using a noticeably different mesh and texture on closer inspection.

Finally, the ability for creators to allow comments has drawn criticism as the vast majority of UGC comment sections tend to be filled with spam chains unrelated to the item (such as "/e free" and "Post this on X items" copypastas) as well as generally harbor toxicity due to certain users personally attacking other commenters as well as the item's publisher themselves.

Trivia

This section is a trivia section. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections of the article.

A UGC item typically consists of a mesh created in a 3D modeling program such as Blender, which then has a texture applied to it and is imported into Roblox Studio for final checks before being published to the Avatar Shop.
- Though this entire concept is not new, players have been brainstorming and sharing ideas of their own of retextures through uploading models and meshes onto the Library section of the catalog over many years.
An early version of the upload interface can be found here, although it does not function if the user is not a designated UGC creator.
Due to the current interface, sometimes hats will go off-sale when being updated.
Creators cannot currently add scripts and particles such as Sparkles, Fire and Smoke to their items.
Creators had/have to sign a "Non Disclosure Agreement" (NDA) to create hats.
Premium is required to upload hats, and losing it will cause all pre-existing hats to go off-sale.