Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

gamasutra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 227 posts

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#51

Post by jerf »

endisneigh wrote: post #49
Stevvo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

By your logic unless Roblox corporation created computers they shouldn’t keep all the money, either. I’m not sure why anyone would defend a dollar amount above $1. If you have money in you should be able to get it out immediately IMO.

I expect it'll need to be higher than $1 because there's going to be some legal matters to deal with around paying the legally-minor creators any amount of money.

To be honest, when I think about it that way, you're not going to get that far under $1000 no matter what you do. There's tax forms at the very least, and probably extra stuff to do with dealing with minors, plus generalized legal risk of being sued or investigated anyhow... we need to be dealing with more than a few bucks here before it's worth Roblox's time & risk. Some of this is the cost of protecting minors, too.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#52

Post by rtkwe »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #14

>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…

> But to withdraw it, they need to have raked in roughly $1,000 worth of Robux.

It's even worse than that. They sell robux at one rate and cash them out for developers at a very different rate. That $1,000 worth of Robux becomes $350 when you go to extract it. So they're taking cuts twice, once on the actual sale and again whenever you try to turn it into real money instead of their scrip.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#53

Post by endisneigh »

jerf wrote: post #51
endisneigh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your logic unless Roblox corporation created computers they shouldn’t keep all the money, either. I’m not sure why anyone would defend a dollar amount above $1. If you have money in you should be able to get it out immediately IMO.

I expect it'll need to be higher than $1 because there's going to be some legal matters to deal with around paying the legally-minor creators any amount of money. To be honest, when I think about it that way, you're not going to get that far under $1000 no matter what you do. There's tax forms at the very least, and probably extra stuff to do with dealing with minors, plus generalized legal risk of being sued or inve…

I don’t see why the amount matters. It’s a solved problem. All of it can be aggregated and forms can be sent once at the end of the year. It’s not like this stuff has to be manually dealt with. Computers deal with virtually everything.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#54

Post by xmprt »

meheleventyone wrote: post #36
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think discoverability on YouTube is 100x easier than Twitch. I've been recommended videos with a few hundred or thousand views before. The equivalent on Twitch is a 0-10 viewer stream which I've literally never come across without it being through me actively looking for a niche game, through a raid, or through (ironically) finding their channel on YouTube which linked to their Twitch.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#55

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

Stevvo wrote: post #39
only_as_i_fall wrote: post #14

>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, th…

I’d guess that more engineer-hours have gone into making YouTube what is than Roblox. At least, if someone’s going to express a strong claim about that, they ought to supply some numbers and not just an assertion.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#56

Post by rtkwe »

tyleo wrote: post #5

I read the article but have not watched the video so I may be missing some context. It really depends on how you define “exploiting”. It doesn’t seem like you _need_ to buy the ads. A kid could make a game on any platform and would encounter similar barriers. Would it be better if the kid played Call of Duty rather than creating something? Even if the chance to profit is low does the kid get something else out of Rob…

Roblox takes their 75% cut out of each sale then if you ever manage to accumulate the 100,000 Robux needed to cash out ($1000 worth for what Roblox sells it for) you only get $350. They're double dipping their cut. You should really watch the video it lays out the case very well.

If it's meant to be educational it shouldn't be marketing itself as a way to make money or charging kids to promote their app. It would have better ways to surface new applications instead of only showing the top N that already have to have over a thousand users.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#57

Post by mike_d »

duxup wrote: post #15
wccrawford wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

Sure. I also don't think 11 year olds should be working in coal mines or farm fields either.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#58

Post by csours »

A lot of people seem to be missing the point - Roblox is motivated to make money from kids. In pursuit of making money they are likely to ignore harms associated to their business model.

Yes, this is how business works, but this is also why child labor laws exist. Roblox is treading a fine line between game development for fun and game development for work.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#59

Post by rtkwe »

happyopossum wrote: post #18

My 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…

It looks worse when that $1k becomes $350 because Roblox cashes out Robux at a 65% discount for itself after taking nearly 75% of every transaction.

Re: Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

#60

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

Sort of orthogonal, but a perhaps culturally telling anecdote: a few months ago I was actively looking for a new job, and got a cold email from a technical recruiter from Roblox (via linkedin). I was curious, so set up a time to call, he asked for me to submit my cv (which is 90% things you could see on my linkedin, but sure, whatever) through a upload page on some recruiting site of their. Within minutes of submitting the cv, I got a rejection email from them, even though I had already scheduled the call. I figured it was an error, but nope, crickets when the time for the call came around.
Post reply on HN