Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
Video Statistics and Information
No captions available for this video.
Channel: People Make Games
Views: 915,890
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Roblox, Roblox money, roblox monetisation, roblox monetization, robux, Roblox developers, roblox games, roblox kids, roblox children, People Make Games, Quintin Smith, games, video games
Id: _gXlauRB1EQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)
Published: Thu Aug 19 2021
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
It was bound to happen in this day and age that a game that reaches that Minecraft-level of success is also in the hands of a company that'll exploit as much money out of their users as it can get away with.
I sure hope they do another video on Roblox to showcase the scummy practices developers put in place to get as much money out of children as possible.
Companies used to exist inside national economies and regulatory environments, and abused workers to the maximum extent they were allowed to get away with in an effort to maximise profits before governments started increasingly clamping down.
Then companies went multinational, and started shopping around for the most profitable economies and laissez-faire regulatory environments that would allow them to provide goods and services to the most lucrative markets while siting their workers and tax-burden in the locations that would allow them to avoid the most tax and exploit their workers the most.
These days, increasingly tech companies are instead building their own economies with grossly unfair rules and structures that allow them maximum latitude to abuse workers (and - surprise! - many of them are kids, who simply don't know any better)... and will continue to cheerfully recreate the entire history of worker-abuse until every regulatory environment those internal economies exist within decide to start regulating them just like they regulate their own real-world counterparts.
We’re really getting to a point where we need government intervention to ensure there are labor regulations on a game platform whose avatars are all quasi-Lego people.
Had someone in my neighborhood posting online about getting their kid into Roblox game development, it's not just kids that are falling for the idea of making money from it. I think it can be "ok" in moderation, I mean I did a ton of scripting / graphic art when I was a kid for $0 return, difference is no one was dangling a carrot in front of me
I have great memories of playing Roblox when I was younger and it was very new back in 2007/2008. It's actually nuts to me that it's gotten this huge and we've come to this point.
I actually was able to turn 100k Robux into real money ($250) in 2017, and I made that money from selling limited items that are no longer available. I made 100k more doing the same thing a few months later, and came to find out that they added a rule where you can't do the exchange if you made Robux through selling limited items. I'm now part of the statistic of people who have 100k Robux stuck in the game that I can't do anything with
Obviously Roblox "paying" their developers with their in-game currency and requiring a monthly fee + $1000 minimum for withdrawl is pretty scummy. It's also terrible that they are pushing monetization onto kid-devs.
When I made started making games in middle school, I had no illusions of making loads of money, I mostly just wanted to make something. There was definitely an aspect of showing off to friends and family, but I just thought it was neat. My games were me just messing around, learning what was fun, and making things that were within my very limited skillset.
I think Roblox could be a really cool platform where kids can make and host multiplayer games to show off to the friends and family (and maybe some random people stumble across it too if it's good). Easy access to tools like this is actually really cool, and the fact that an 11-year-old can make a multiplayer game like this is really neat. It's a shame that Roblox is so interested in shoving these kids towards monetization, but it's hardly a surprise.
I really hate that creating art has become this constantly monetized thing. When you have millions of people all vying for some temporary slice of the world's attention, only a few people are going to hit it big, and there's no way around that. People should be encouraged to create for creation's sake, not for some misguided possibility of making a ton of money. The fact that now this weird quest for viral success has creeped into the childhood of some kids is really sad.
I recently went through a bit of a Roblox tutorial and it was definitely programming. Kids might have unreasonable expectations of what they can achieve but their Roblox failures definitely are putting them leaps and bounds ahead of every other aspiring game developer at their age.
EDIT: My original comment wasn't clear at all about what I was talking about. I wasn't commenting on whether Roblox is exploiting them or not just disagreeing on a comment made in the video about how the skills are not transferrable. Roblox uses Lua which is a legit language, learning Lua while making Roblox games is definitely going allow these kids to quickly pick up something like C# if they ever want to learn Unity.
Great vid. I found the analogy between Robux and old company scrips to be quite apt. If paying with scrips is illegal, it’s hard to imagine that it’s legal to pay experience Devs (the ones actually creating the value of the game!) in this fake currency. I don’t quite agree with the one dude that top down regulation of Roblox is needed (in that we’re making laws specifically to target uh Roblox), but seems like a modern lawsuit needs to be brought to bear.
Find it hard to believe that any Roblox devs would have the capital for such a lawsuit against this billion dollar corp. A government body more generally would probably have to bring it. NLRB maybe?