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Roblox is minting teen millionaires

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Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#261

Post by pastage »

alphawhisky wrote: post #210
pastage wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can mince his words. In the end anyone who organize gambling for profit is scum. If you do it for charity I know form experience it is massively profitable, but.. I am not sure it is worth it for society.

Hey now, silent auctions and raffles are great for small communities and aren't prone to degeneracy. I know a lot of fire departments that get a majority of their funding from a mix of these attractors and things like cookouts and public events.

I believe it just enables and validate the bigger actors. I do not know where the line should be drawn, if gambling is ilegal you build an illicit trade, if it is legal that trade just become more evil.

We should be careful with gambling especialy when CEOs are talking about it and only caring about the legal frameworks.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#262

Post by tracker1 »

Brybry wrote: post #161
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #142

My grandsons would come and stay, bringing tablet devices with them, and would prefer to stay glued to them the whole time. Since we banned their use, they now play outside with my other grandchildren, on the rope swing, the zip line, or exploring in the woods making dens and forts, using their imaginations. Children should not be playing computer games, or scrolling on any social media, IMO.

I think a fair number of us here got into computers because of playing computer games as kids. The issue is setting limits. Now obviously banning is easier and lower friction but limiting to an X time per day routine can also help with self-discipline. Depends on the person. Kids can have the same issue with TV. I had an issue as a kid with books . My parents had to limit my reading time because I would stay up all n…

I know I had a pretty bad overuse of TV as a kid.. that said, my mom's restriction of an hour a day was a bit too restrictive imo, didn't last long though, because hanging out in the livingroom in the evenings was kind of a given, even if I didn't get to choose what was on...

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#263

Post by numpad0 »

amiga386 wrote: post #38

Roblox turns a blind eye to child exploitation (whether being creeped on by adults, or being exploited by teens/adults to make games) and makes a fortune out of it. If it weren't online, it'd be illegal and people would be in jail. Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make gam…

> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux

I don't understand why that isn't regulated to hell by all sorts of securities and banking laws, with reporting requirements and background checks and eKYC and mandatory reserves and all that. If the poker chips can be transferred and then cashed, I don't think that's allowed in most gambling laws. That's way past gambling.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#264

Post by wvbdmp »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #195
roysting wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best you could hope for is regulation of the delta or maybe enforcement of markets. The problem is really that such abuse is a kind of debt bondage, you have no other choices but essentially the Roblox company store. It’s a newish form of the same abuse due to the nature of tech, game addiction, and the decay of culture and society; but it’s also why society has not developed a response against that particular pr…

It’s not debt bondage in Roblox. It’s company scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Well, company scrip specifically IS actually illegal, so it must be something slightly different.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#265

Post by getly_store »

bhawks wrote: post #100
Retric wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. LIES, from that link: “On average, 67% of all spending in experiences supports OR goes to developers.” Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money. Later it mentions the actual money going to developers as: “This enables us to return 28%* directly to the developers.” And yes that 28% includes an asterisk. That’s a 72% cut to the platform.

You're missing the parts where: 1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory 1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point 2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still…

Hosting, storage, and scaling aren’t free; costs scale with active users, data egress, and state. In-app purchase splits and platform fees erode margin, so “free hosting” rarely survives at millions of concurrent players. Model revenue net of ops costs and, if needed, use a hybrid backend with careful risk budgeting, auth, and anti-cheat.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#266

Post by getly_store »

Heliodex wrote: post #49
amiga386 wrote: post #38

Roblox turns a blind eye to child exploitation (whether being creeped on by adults, or being exploited by teens/adults to make games) and makes a fortune out of it. If it weren't online, it'd be illegal and people would be in jail. Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make gam…

The 2 videos linked here are nearing 5 years old now and have been refuted many times, including by some of the developers mentioned in the article. To condense it as much as possible: The 1st video hinges on a point where they find that developers earn a revenue cut of 24.5%, a number that isn't correct because 1. it's found by multiplying 3 arbitrarily chosen numbers together (the DevEx rate, the default sales fee,…

Yes—the 24.5% figure is suspect because it multiplies three numbers, ignoring how revenue shares vary by tier, price, and region. A credible estimate needs the full sale distribution: tiered take rates, refunds, taxes, and processing margins; a single mean price isn't representative. With transaction-level data, compute the weighted take: sum(take_rate_i * sale_i) / sum(sale_i), or present a bounded range from the observed distribution.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#267

Post by freejazz »

Heliodex wrote: post #255
freejazz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's. I strongly disagree with that.

I'd like to hear your reasons for this. From what I see, most discussions on child exploitation on Roblox eventually make clear that the exploitation happened outside of Roblox, most commonly on Discord. Moreover, it's a lot more difficult to censor a few messages talking about alternative platforms than it is to stop a long-running logged chat conversation where child exploitation usually takes place.

Roblox connects them in the first place, what does it matter that it progresses outside of Roblox? That would necessarily be the case if they were to ever meet IRL anyway.

Oh it's difficult for Roblox? A $42billion company? Whose entire business model is based around kids? It's difficult for them?? Boo fucking hoo.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#268

Post by Heliodex »

freejazz wrote: post #267
Heliodex wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to hear your reasons for this. From what I see, most discussions on child exploitation on Roblox eventually make clear that the exploitation happened outside of Roblox, most commonly on Discord. Moreover, it's a lot more difficult to censor a few messages talking about alternative platforms than it is to stop a long-running logged chat conversation where child exploitation usually takes place.

Roblox connects them in the first place, what does it matter that it progresses outside of Roblox? That would necessarily be the case if they were to ever meet IRL anyway. Oh it's difficult for Roblox? A $42billion company? Whose entire business model is based around kids? It's difficult for them?? Boo fucking hoo.

The problem is that the external platforms that the children progress to generally have much laxer protection systems than Roblox does, and thus end up more vulnerable. I just chose Discord as an example as they're the most commonly cited chat platform that exploitation beginning on Roblox ends up on, and they also have problems with their trust & safety team that allows this to occur.

Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#269

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

thmsths wrote: post #239
embedding-shape wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure it is worth it for society. As always, seems to depend on the scale. Letting anyone in the world place bets on when the next nuke will hit a city? Probably pretty bad overall for society. Doing raffles for some local tiny organization run by Ada and William so they can continue hosting a ten person event? Probably pretty good overall.

The problem once again comes when you decide to hyper optimize for profit. Ada and William will rely on word of mouth, maybe a few posters to drum up attention to their raffle. Meanwhile large gambling orgs will run ad spots non stop with celebrities enticing you to join their app with free bonus bets and once you're in they will send you daily notifications to nudge you to place "just one more bet". Easy to see how…

Yep.

Can't even go to a local baseball game without the shit being shoved down your throat let alone try to watch one on TV.

Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires

#270

Post by MisterTea »

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…

> Some of it has to do with roblox being free.

This reminds me a of recent conversation I had with a friend about the success of Roblox. The big thing my friend said that Roblox has over Fortnight or any other gaming platform is ease of installation.

He told me how their young cousin came to visit and wanted to play Roblox. He told his little cousin he didn't have Roblox and that he would have to download and install it. The young child eagerly replied "It's super easy! let me show you!" So he let his cousin on to his PC. In less than 3 minutes he installed a small client, signed in, download the game files and was playing.

My friend was surprised and said Epic is struggling with this very problem and knows Roblox is successful precisely because of this ease of deployment. This is the same reason Discord is popular: you hop in, create an account and off you go. For Epic, Unreal Engine games are gigabytes in size and games are dependencies of other games built on top such as expansion packs. e.g. to play a Lego expansion pack game you need to buy and install the base Lego game. Roblox avoids this and the game files are small and fast to download.

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