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Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers

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

#81

Post by sillysaurusx »

See Carmack's rebuttal: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1428483898896535562

> I have been impressed by the number of real world economic and business issues that Roblox is exposing my younger son to, both in the experiences and the larger ecosystem. There is a lot of thinking in terms of effort, reward, and risk.

"You seem to be ignoring the thesis of the video. For the vast majority of their creators, their is very little reward, and mostly a lot of exploitative business preying on children."

> I am disagreeing with the thesis of the video. Roblox provides opportunities previously unavailable; it is up to the individuals to decide if they are worthwhile to invest time in.

If the most legendary game developer of all time thinks Roblox is fine, are you sure he's mistaken?

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

#82

Post by ashtonkem »

jacobr1 wrote: post #79
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…

> 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. YT probably does need to exist for many creators to get the kind of distribution that enables them to monetize their content including the operationally managing the scale of the site, the brand they've built and the ad network. A highly vie…

Also, YT content creators and the YT algorithm are clearly affecting each other in complex ways. The content created for YT is tailored to succeed on YT, and would obviously fail on any other platform with a different recommendation engine and community.

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

#83

Post by rtkwe »

all2 wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they already have one.

I was thinking something more stable than "buy for X and sell for X/10". Probably something not controlled by Roblox at all (USDC or DAI?). That would be giving up a lot of control, but it would solve the problems they're giving the kiddos.

Yeah Roblox doesn't want that. They want to be able to take a cut every chance they get and also to encourage people to just keep their money in Roblox to keep it moving through purchases so they can keep taking 75% cuts instead of the /only/ 65% they taken when someone cashes out.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by cma »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #81

See Carmack's rebuttal: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1428483898896535562 > I have been impressed by the number of real world economic and business issues that Roblox is exposing my younger son to, both in the experiences and the larger ecosystem. There is a lot of thinking in terms of effort, reward, and risk. "You seem to be ignoring the thesis of the video. For the vast majority of their creators, their…

> If the most legendary game developer of all time thinks Roblox is fine, are you sure he's mistaken?

FWIW, he's the CTO of a 30% app store trying to also break into the Roblox business (their Metaverse talk/Facebook Horizon).

So rather than Roblox only taking 40% and giving 30% to Apple, Facebook will potentially be in position to take the full 70% (or more due to getting children to pay for ad spend) of the child labor.

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

#87

Post by w-j-w »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #81

See Carmack's rebuttal: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1428483898896535562 > I have been impressed by the number of real world economic and business issues that Roblox is exposing my younger son to, both in the experiences and the larger ecosystem. There is a lot of thinking in terms of effort, reward, and risk. "You seem to be ignoring the thesis of the video. For the vast majority of their creators, their…

I'm not really convinced by "John Carmack doesn't think it's a bad deal, so it's probably ok". He might very well be an incredibly talented game developer, but he also hasn't been in the position of being unknown in the space since the 90s. He also isn't an economist. However, I do think he makes a good point about accessibility. I also think that similar arguments are commonly used to defend MLM companies, which many rightfully still dislike.

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

#88

Post by only_as_i_fall »

inetknght wrote: post #46
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…

> For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids If it's manipulative of kids then it's manipulative of adults too.

Eh, I think it's reasonable to have different expectations of children vs adults. After all, isn't there a reason why children can't sign legally binding contracts?

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

#89

Post by rtkwe »

stickfigure wrote: post #73
rtkwe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can you transfer it? If so, seems like it would be hard to prevent secondary markets from forming.

No, they don't have a way to move anything other than games. Probably specifically to avoid the chance of a secondary market forming. Trying to police real world trading is hard so they just cut off the chance for it entirely.

https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313090-Can-I...

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

#90

Post by andyfleming »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #81

See Carmack's rebuttal: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1428483898896535562 > I have been impressed by the number of real world economic and business issues that Roblox is exposing my younger son to, both in the experiences and the larger ecosystem. There is a lot of thinking in terms of effort, reward, and risk. "You seem to be ignoring the thesis of the video. For the vast majority of their creators, their…

> thinks Roblox is fine

I don't think he's claiming it's not exploitative behavior, but rather values the experience for the real world lessons.

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