N5 — zero corpus spend evidence; only Roblox withholding complaints, modest traction
Time-freedom
6
T6 — productizable, but enterprise integration and support stay operator-heavy
Scale
5
S5 — few hundred studios worldwide run real UGC marketplaces
What the five commandments measure
C — Control
Do you own the customer, or does a gatekeeper stand between you and revenue?
E — Entry
How hard is this to copy once it works? A rival's existence isn't the question — the durability of their advantage is.
N — Need
Is demand proven with money rather than vibes?
T — Time
Can income detach from your hours, or did you buy yourself a job?
S — Scale
How far does it reach without linear cost?
Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.
02 — The pace test — $1M/yr
At $1500/mo (assumed category price), you need 56 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.
No tracked rivals with verified revenue to benchmark against.
Part II — The Evidence the receipts, good and bad
03 — Rival scan
No similar products found in the radar corpus — either genuinely novel, or too small to track.
Roblox (in-house DevEx royalty/tax system) — Largest UGC payer already built it internally; sets the buy-vs-build default for peers.
Spring Time Software royalty engine — Already markets auto royalty calc with TDS/GST — could extend from publishing into games.
Studio in-house finance/legal teams — Compliance is board-level risk; studios often keep payout logic and DMCA in-house.
04 — Demand evidence
No radar-tracked products, no funded companies, no Reddit signals — evidence is effectively absent.
Roblox reclassified DevEx payouts as royalties requiring W-8/W-9 — real compliance pressure exists.
Creator complaints about ~24-30% withholding without treaty info show pain, but on creator side not studio side.
X chatter explicitly shows 'almost none' on the full combo — no SaaS buzz, low traction.
05 — Risks
Buyer universe is tiny; a handful of logos decide the whole market.
Touching payouts may trigger money-transmitter/payor-of-record licensing burden.
Established mass-payout/tax platforms can bolt on royalty splits faster than you can win logos.
06 — Kill switches — what kills this with one decision
Payments regulator / money-transmitter classification — Becoming payor-of-record forces licensing you can't afford, blocking the core product.
Payment rail (Stripe Connect or equivalent) native tax+split feature — Studios get withholding and royalty splits free inside rails they already use.
Single anchor customer — With so few buyers, one logo churning to in-house erases most revenue.
Part III — The Plan if you insist on proceeding
07 — What this scan can't tell you
Cannot tell whether studios currently pay outside vendors or absorb this in-house.
No visibility into contract sizes or sales-cycle length for game-studio finance buyers.
Unknown how much DMCA workflow actually bundles with payouts in real procurement.
Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-29.
08 — The wedge & the next step
Bundle DMCA takedown + payout-hold reconciliation — the piece generic mass-payout tax tools ignore — sold to mid-size mod marketplaces, not Roblox-scale giants.
Cheapest next step: Interview 10 ops/finance leads at mid-size UGC/mod marketplaces this week on current withholding and takedown handling cost.
Not quite it? Spin the model
Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 5.6 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.
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Weekly re-scan against the live corpus. If the market moves this ShipScore by a point, or flips the verdict, you hear about it. Free while we're small.