Roblox built up by allowing users to create 'mini-games' that copied every single major title out there, but keep your avatar or a portion of it across games. When I watched my kid play it was littered with copyrighted music, games, and characters everywhere. It's interesting that once it got in trouble with some copyrights it still survived - although I suspect that is just because everyone who could sue them hasn't yet.
Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
571–580 of 590 posts
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
The accountants can’t be bothered because your comment isn’t even using basic terms correctly. Your comment suggests that reinvested cash is being "hidden" as expenses, but in reality, these reinvestments are usually recorded as capital expenditures (CapEx) rather than operating expenses (OpEx), depending on the nature of the investment. While CapEx can be depreciated over time, it is not typically expensed immediate…
This is the whole point: When you’re expanding rapidly and want to grow market share above all. Growing that market share with customer acquisition is economically an investment in the future revenue of the business. Advertising is one example of how this might be done. You can classify investing in your business through advertising spend as an operating expenditure for accounting purposes. And potentially for tax pu…
I’m really not sure of your point.
If I have a huge market opportunity and I can grow the business by spending the cash flow, I should do that instead of distributing that cash flow as profits. That opportunity will most likely not persist.
What you are proposing is that businesses should pay taxes on their income irrespective of expenses which is just a good way to break a lot of perfectly good businesses, and reduce the ability for businesses to capture new markets.
There are a number of ways where tax law could better capture the participation of large businesses, but this tack you’re on is not one of them.
One cannot avoid using technically correct terms (“jargon”) when discussing this as the categories of capital are critical to both the essential function of a business and the point you’re trying to make.
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#573reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
Minecraft took the moral approach of allowing independent servers and mods (in the Java edition.) Roblox took the scummy approach of monetizing child labor and taking a cut. I am so glad, despite the other bad things Microsoft has done with Minecraft, that they haven't taken the Roblox path.
I had a Minecraft server when I was 12, and now as an adult I feel it was a very valuable experience for be personally
And it was more fun to run the server than play the game
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#574I do not believe for a second that 13. Two of my three kids all have their ages set to 13+ because they decided to combine the age-related features you do want (limited chat, no tracking etc) with the content lock. I'm happy for my kids to play "Tree-house of Horrors" style games but not to be groomed by older player. Yet Roblox has no option for it.
@decremental nah I used it to teach them, I also regularly check their messages in game. Most of the problems they have are other kids screaming racist things or swearing.
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
I struggle to understand why people are so toxic with chat in video games. I don't go to the supermarket, or even the bar and hear people just casually chatting about "who hates [racial slur]?" There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes. I feel that, in order to buy this, you must accept that t…
> There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes. I don't agree. HN is one of the best examples. We're as anonymous as we can be here and still this is one of the most friendly online environments I know. Clearly community culture plays a big role too. And it keeps offering refreshing content, I le…
>[HN] is one of the most friendly online environments I know.
Um....wow! Are you and I on the same site? There's a lot of ways I'd describe HN, "friendly" isn't one of them.
Genuine meanness and cruelty is WAY more common here than friendliness and there's an overall tone of reactionism, cynicalism, and negativity for the sake of it. People here are very cocky and confident talking about things they don't know anything about.
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN hivemind has already delivered but I've found that for "I can describe it but can't remember the name" an LLM will have a decent chance of surfacing the name given the description (and is usually a very simple case to verify unlike much LLM output).
Checked this with ChatGPT and it thought I was talking about WorldCom.
Just tried with Claude and it got it differently wrong.
My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer.
I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when it's worth trying" at this point.
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#577My kiddo has easily spent 500+ on Roblox across birthday/Xmas gift cards/chores. I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get. As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers…
Wild. You know there’s a problem but you continue to feed into your child’s addiction. This is known as “enabling”.
Yeah, this post is legit insane - what child has $500 to spend on ANYTHING, let alone fucking Robux (which presumably requires a credit card)!?
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Roblox games absolutely utterly suck There are hundreds of millions of users a month who strongly disagree with you.
Are you one of those millions of users? No? Why don’t you play Roblox?
I both play and build games on Roblox. Look at my comments.
Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#579Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
Checked this with ChatGPT and it thought I was talking about WorldCom.
Just tried with Claude and it got it differently wrong. My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer. I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when i…
ChatGPT actually completely misunderstood the description, and cited WorldCom as using “aggressive accounting” to show excess profits, vs. TCI’s supposed “excess losses.” So it didn’t even manage to find another example of a company doing something similar to TCI.