I have no experience of Roblox development, but if it teaches transferable skills to 'real' programming then it's still probably a net good.
The scripting under the hood teaches some real skills. They use Lua. Very handy.
Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
31–40 of 227 posts
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#32Wonder what the IRS would think of these earnings. If someone earns $5,000 worth of Robux but spends it all in Roblox rather than ever converting it to currency, is that taxable income? Or would it be like S&H Green Stamps? While there likely aren't many who make games that earn that much or whatever the IRS's threshold is, this is the kind of edge case that ends up making headlines when (if) the IRS comes sniffing around.
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#33This is no more exploitative than someone trying to make it big on Youtube, Twitch, or Spotify and gaining zero traction. If the content someone creates on these platforms doesn't capture an audience, the hosting platform doesn't generate any revenue and neither does the creator. It's completely free to produce the content (minus your time) and the platform hosts it for free, even though 99% of it never receives any…
Well yeah, streaming services also suck for creators. That doesn't excuse the practices of Roblox.
However, the comparison isn't entirely fair for several reasons. First off, those platforms don't restrict releasing the content on other platforms. If I'm unhappy with Spotify, I can move my music to Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even my own website. This isn't ideal, and doesn't excuse bad practices, but it is possible. Roblox games only work in Roblox, and if I want to move my games elsewhere, I have to rebuild it entirely from scratch.
Secondly, all of these services have various tools that enable discoverability, without requiring any payment. These tools are obviously not ideal, but I can become successful on Youtube without giving Google a single cent, and without advertising outside of the site. It's unlikely, but it's possible. Roblox requires you to spend money for any chance at discoverability, and even then there are no guarantees. Roblox doesn't even let you cash out unless you have an active subscription.
Finally, all of these other services pay me in actual money, not their own fun bucks. The conversion rate is also ridiculously bad for creators. According to the video linked in the article, you can only cash out when you have $1000 worth of Robux, which then only returns $350 back to you. Combine this terrible conversion rate with the fact that Roblox takes an additional cut of basically every transaction, and the actual percentage of money going to creators is potentially as low as 17%, which is way worse then any other service I know of.
So yeah, I would say this is more exploitative then someone trying to make it big on other platforms. And we should call out these bad practices specifically when we see them, instead of brushing it off under "all platforms are bad too."
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#34My kids (and I) certainly don't see it as exploitation - they love learning to create games, and would be happy to do it even without any chance of payout. I don't think the $1k minimum payout is crazy either, as the overhead of paying 10s of thousands of kids $11.32 would kill margins (leading to Robux having to take a higher %age). I'd have to think most kids are in the same boat as mine - if their games ever earn…
Same with me. My kid makes Roblox games for her and her friends. It didn't take her long to realize that the odds of her making any money at all were very slim. In the meantime she gets to learn programming skills in a way that she finds fun.
I do feel a bit bad for the older kids that put real effort into it, but I don't see how it's much worse than trying to start a youtube or twitch channel and failing. At least with coding they're getting some valuable experience.
All that said, the way they sell "Robux" is absolutely predatory. We've had to have several talks about what is reasonable to spend money on. They even let you pay with Amazon. Payments via Amazon are on by default for Amazon accounts and don't require re-authentication, so a kid who clicks on a link in Roblox on a computer that has already authenticated with Amazon can drain their parent's account.
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#35Not sure what Roblox is in first place. An integrated game engine and hosting site?
That's precisely what it is. The game animations are fairly simple, but you can build a world and write fairly sophisticated game elements/rules/etc with Lua, and the kids actually seem to like the cartoonish models.
Once you write a game or create a world, you can click and publish it for anyone to join.
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#36This is no more exploitative than someone trying to make it big on Youtube, Twitch, or Spotify and gaining zero traction. If the content someone creates on these platforms doesn't capture an audience, the hosting platform doesn't generate any revenue and neither does the creator. It's completely free to produce the content (minus your time) and the platform hosts it for free, even though 99% of it never receives any…
Yeah, I'm reading this and thinking it is pretty similar to the situation on twitch. I'm the world's lamest twitch streamer in a category with paltry viewership, so it took me over 600 hours of streaming to get a payout[0] and I had to hit arbitrary milestones for affiliate in the first place. I have no idea how discovery even works on twitch, but I have to imagine it's the same as everywhere else: popular stuff gets…
Twitch isn’t amazing at it in total but it does recommend smaller streamers to people.
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#37>Second, there’s the matter of how extensively Robux (Roblox’s in-app currency) are used to navigate the creator economy. Roblox creators are paid first by receiving a cut of Robux that comes from the sale, which they can use to purchase other Roblox experiences, in-game assets, cosmetics, etc. That means once a developer enters the Robux economy, their money is all spent inside the Roblox system until they’re able t…
There’s probably a long tail where a tiny fraction of devs make more than that. Free labor!
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#38>Second, there’s the matter of how extensively Robux (Roblox’s in-app currency) are used to navigate the creator economy. Roblox creators are paid first by receiving a cut of Robux that comes from the sale, which they can use to purchase other Roblox experiences, in-game assets, cosmetics, etc. That means once a developer enters the Robux economy, their money is all spent inside the Roblox system until they’re able t…
> YouTube will pay you as soon as you make something like $20 iirc.
Isn't it $100?
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#39>Second, there’s the matter of how extensively Robux (Roblox’s in-app currency) are used to navigate the creator economy. Roblox creators are paid first by receiving a cut of Robux that comes from the sale, which they can use to purchase other Roblox experiences, in-game assets, cosmetics, etc. That means once a developer enters the Robux economy, their money is all spent inside the Roblox system until they’re able t…
Roblox is not comparable to YouTube.
When you make a video and upload it to YouTube, that creation is entirely the result of your own hard work and ingenuity. YouTube doesn't need to exist for your video to exist.
When you make a game in Roblox, you are combining some amount of hard work and ingenuity of your own with a larger amount of hard work and ingenuity by Roblox Creation.
If you want to keep all the money, then you need to do all of the work.
Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids and they haven't got the life experience to see these problems coming or deal with them appropriately. If it were aimed at adults, but kids wanted to try, too, like Youtube... I don't have as much problem with that. But the target audience of Roblox ads is kids and always has been. It doesn't seem at all fair to trap kids into this ecosystem, sell them the thing…
What then? Just don't let them make money on the platform?
That's how it works in minecraft right? Kids can design and build a minigame within the context of minecraft, but minecraft doesn't provide provide some minecraft diamonds to USD conversion service that allows players to bring real money into the game, or to cash out game money for real money. (Some third party servers might provide this, in violation of the Terms of Use.)
This seems like a fine state of affairs to me.