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Roblox is minting teen millionaires

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Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#51

Post by nsingh2 »

ge96 wrote: post #35

It's one of those things, you hear about it (Starter story) and think "I should start churning out games too" but gotta be in it/have drive/creativity too. I personally haven't been playing games for a while (I have a gaming rig). Also have to keep up with trends that kids are into Would be interesting to look at the numbers eg. how many games are created, percentage who gets paid. Like steam releases with free game…

From [1] (2022 numbers), the median creator earned around 50 Robux per year, which is ~19 cents with the current DevEx rate, and the average was 13,500 Robux.

Out of ~7.5 million creators in 2022, only 11,000 qualified for cashing out.

The distribution is brutal, realistically you have to stick with it for years before getting a hit, if ever. Not to mention the stats probably look worse in the LLM era. You definitely have to like doing it as a hobby.

One caveat is that the creator total likely includes a lot of casual experimentation. If many users make one or two games and then stop (I can see most kids doing this), the 7.5 million figure may overstate how many people are seriously trying to make money from it.

[1] https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2023/07/vision-roblox-econ...

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#52

Post by gmueckl »

ikr678 wrote: post #41
gmueckl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In very simple terms, Roblox is an MMO based exclusively around user generated contents (games, items, assets...), including its own virtual currency, microtransactions, marketplaces and convertibility to/from real money. Roblox as a company takes pretty hefty cut from all transactions. There has been a silent shift in the gaming market over a long time now. Roblox is one aspect of it. Another is the absolutely massi…

Hasnt this 'casual' games market always existed? Once upon a time Zynga/Candycrush was a behemoth on the back of facebook embedded games.

Back then, the market was much, much smaller than it is today if I'm doing the math correctly. Zynga reached an early peak in the early 2010s, but multiple companies, including Zynga (at least pre-acquisition) reach bigger revenue numbers today.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#53

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #27
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #13

I come from the Minecraft modding/server community. There is interesting fact that I like to tell people about the sheer size of Roblox compared to other communities like Minecraft. The largest Minecraft server in the world is Hypixel at around ~30K concurrent players. Most other servers are very far behind. There is one Roblox game that looks and plays like Minecraft and copied one single gamemode (Bedwars) common i…

Some of it has to do with roblox being free. (I don't have a minecraft account) but Trust me when I say this but within developing countries especially. You can find 3-4 people out of 1 who plays on hypixel but can't because they can't pay for the game usually when we are really young which is also roblox's most major userbase. I can imagine Hypixel being atleast 2x and a rough estimate of 5x more the size if they su…

I agree with this. For the last ~4 years I have been working to turn my Minecraft server into a free browser game on a custom engine.

Though in Roblox's case, there's two additional factors helping the success of games on its platform besides being free to play

- Roblox has become the de-facto portal from which lots of people play games by default, especially on mobile devices like tablets where discovery for other games (that aren't P2W and can spam ads) is very poor

- Multiplayer games are exceptionally easy to develop on Roblox. (With a standalone game you have to grind on an engine for years like what I'm doing. I'm developing thousands of LOC per weekend with a multi-agent setup and there is just so much necessary complexity that launching an alpha build will take months.)

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#54

Post by intrasight »

nomel wrote: post #50
intrasight wrote: post #17

"According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16." - Wikipedia 2 decades in the making, they are really hitting their stride. But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.

> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators My understanding is that the recent improvements are face scans, and communication limited to people within a few 4 year windows. They've also increased moderation of chat significantly, especially for the lower age windows. What low hanging fruit do you see? What's the "ideal" system? Seems like a hard problem, if any sort of cooperative communicatio…

It is indeed a hard provlem. No low hanging fruit. There certainly not alone, but have a bigger issue with grooming and predation since half of all kids use their platform.

It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#55

Post by nomel »

intrasight wrote: post #54
nomel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators My understanding is that the recent improvements are face scans, and communication limited to people within a few 4 year windows. They've also increased moderation of chat significantly, especially for the lower age windows. What low hanging fruit do you see? What's the "ideal" system? Seems like a hard problem, if any sort of cooperative communicatio…

It is indeed a hard provlem. No low hanging fruit. There certainly not alone, but have a bigger issue with grooming and predation since half of all kids use their platform. It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.

> It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.

What would these reforms look like?

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#56

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

bstsb wrote: post #15

even tiny roblox games make money. i developed for a small game (~10m plays) a few years back and i still earn a decent residual from player revenue, even as the game slowly loses traction

I made a roblox game years ago with no more than like 2 concurrent players at a time. The game's ideas were immediately copied by a much bigger game (this turned me off the Roblox platform for good).

I still got enough robux to DevEx just from premium roblox subscribers playing the game. (If I cash it out i would get a few hundred dollars. Which is nothing for me today but absolutely a lot of money for an aspiring teenage developer.)

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#57

Post by fakedang »

intrasight wrote: post #33
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See this is why I think the whole age verification thing is backwards. If you want to create child friendly spaces then you need to verify someone's age is under 18, 16, 13 etc.. That's a way more real and tangible harm than a teenager looking at a nudie mag.

For sure. But age verification protocols can handle such rules: App to IdP: is this person 13-15 IdP: yes

Is Persona an IdP or does it request you to verify with personal information every single time?

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#58

Post by tadfisher »

yieldcrv wrote: post #37
intrasight wrote: post #17

"According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16." - Wikipedia 2 decades in the making, they are really hitting their stride. But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.

> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk. I run a studio that makes Roblox experiences and this is Discord's problem, and will immediately become Telegram's problem the decade where parents and policy makers figure out its Discord's problem their kid went into an experience within Roblox so I can see that's the branding, the parent paid the kid's a…

This is the actual excuse Roblox used when confronted with actual evidence of child sex trafficking originating on their platform, at the same time balking at implementing age gates and chat restrictions. So of course they caved and implemented age gates and chat restrictions when their "central bank" (a.k.a. concerned parents) learned about Roblox's "issues" from YouTube exposés and other concerned parents.

It doesn't matter that the illegal shit happens off-platform. It is not a good look to be the top of the funnel for traffickers, which is why they put in these invasive restrictions.

If you don't like it, then invest in "creating experiences" for platforms which don't target children. Because asking "what is Roblox supposed to do about their pedo problem" didn't and will never work to placate the people who actually fund the platform.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#59

Post by TacticalCoder »

intrasight wrote: post #17

"According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16." - Wikipedia 2 decades in the making, they are really hitting their stride. But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.

> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.

It's first and foremost a huge risk for kids.

My solution is simple: my daughter (11 y/o) can play Roblox but she must be in a game with another friend (whom I know and whom I know her parents) and she must on a video/conf-call with that friend, using another device, while she plays Roblox. That way I hear everything they're saying.

And they're ecstatic and having lots of fun.

I check the chat once in a while: the rule is "not hiding the chat when parents look or no more Roblox".

Keeps her mostly at bay from predators.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#60

Post by toast0 »

NuclearPM wrote: post #20
joezydeco wrote: post #5

The one place where Lua coders are valuable.

1. Roblox 2. WoW addons 3. Neovim 4. OpenResty 5. NodeMCU 6. Wireshark 7. Lightroom 8. Hammerspoon 9. LÖVE 10. Redis

> 6. Wireshark

I love this game, but there's no paid DLC; not sure how they monetize.

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