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 games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Oh, and the company scrip - Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money. They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden. This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
In all, approximately 17% of the real-world money paid into Roblox is paid back out to creators. What a scam.
My kids play Roblox and get often get gift cards from friends for birthday presents etc. I've always hated that a gift card for $20 can't be redeemed for the equivalent Robux. Instead you get options to purchase Robux and the most you can redeem is about ~$16, so then you have left over cash and have to get another gift card. Dark pattern.
Not really. The lower tiers are only less efficient on platforms that require purchase through an app store or other payment processor that takes a large cut. Buying through a gift card or through the Roblox website or non-Microsoft Store PC app gives more Robux for the same price <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>. These increased rates are also balanced to prevent the lower tiers from being less efficient: the package for 800 goes to 1000, whereas 10 000 goes to 11 000.
There's an option buried somewhere in there to convert left-over real dollars into robux. They don't make it too prominent else no-one would be sitting there looking at the expensive robux options that offer (mostly, but NOT always!) a better exchange rate.
I mean, League of Legends does that as well. For example you can buy X RP, but a champion or skin or whatever costs either less or more, never the exact amount. I have seen this in hell of a lot of places as well.
CEO of Roblox was once asked whether he would ever put prediction markets inside Roblox, he gave a straight face answer: https://youtu.be/XpIXRgMlPo4?t=2122
In case you don’t want to watch the video: his answer is yes BUT he needs to figure out how to do it legally in the different jurisdictions that control kids gambling.
And well, and he wants it done for a "educational" purpose without Robux (which I assume is the in-game currency), slightly missing context from your TLDR there.
And then of course he continues (although won't make for a good social media rage point so understandable you didn't provide full context):
> Well, I actually think it's a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that's legal.
> no free Robux, no free prizes, just a game called the dress to impress predictor where it's not like trying to get kids money or anything like that.
Still, probably what he sees in his mind is "more money yay" as always, he is a CEO of a for-profit company, that's what they do. But still felt disingenuous not to include the full context, doesn't even make it "that much better", he still seems like a scumbag with it.
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.
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 one would be relatively harmless while the other could cause widespread addiction.
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.
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.
Are you using gambling as an example here? I don't fully understand the relation. There isn't any way to gamble Robux for more Robux on the platform, and in the cases which are arguable (such as on-platform item trading), the money must be transferred through Roblox's Developer Exchange programme, which can't be done for Robux not earned directly from experiences.
If I understand what you mean correctly, then any Robux transferred between 2 users wouldn't be able to be cashed or exchanged for fiat for the same reason as above. If they can try to fake it by selling avatar items or experience products to another user, they would immediately be hit with the usual 30% marketplace fee, then have to attempt to get through manual DevEx review with what is very obviously a suspicious set of transactions.
The reason they're not scrutinised by security and banking laws is because the Roblox platform and economic system are carefully designed so that such abuse is neither profitable nor feasible, and as such there's nothing to uncover in any potential investigation.
> (...) puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Sounds an awful lot like the AppStore, to be honest.
I'm not sure what it would take and/or how the reaction would be to 3rd party "bank" player(s) inside the game offering real exchange rates sitting in between and suing if Robox killed their account and took their "Robux" with it. Assuming players can exchange Robux inside the game without issue.. I'm guessing they take a cut on all transactions, which is kinda sus/garbage itself.
It’s depressing how many lucrative big tech (FAANG/Unicorn) jobs are effectively scams with business glitter on top. And it’s not always obvious unless you really sit down during the interview process and scrutinize the business model.
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, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,
2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).
3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.
The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.
They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.
> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden
Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.
> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate.
The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. And even this is underrepresentative due to being published before the September 2025 DevEx increase.
“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.
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 gets 1 robux for each penny.
2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.
3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.
Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.
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.
72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.
Post-appstore cut it's 42%, which is high but doesn't seem crazy. The unsuccessful attempts and idle piddling all need to be subsidized to allow the successes to exist in the first place, and I suspect we all know better than to undercount cloud, hosting, SRE, and staffing costs. They're all ongoing and pretty painful, and getting a shot at creating something with effectively zero downside risk (vs making a game in Godot and building/buying all of the other parts yourself or with staff) will always come with a lower upside.
> Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC.
Plenty of PC Roblox users use a version of Roblox downloaded through the Microsoft Store, whom charge a 12% cut on all money spent on gaming apps <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publi...>. The only place where no app store cut applies is when purchasing Roblox products through the non-Microsoft Store PC app or through the website. Surprise, doing this gets the user ~20% more Robux than buying through an app store <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>.
If a user buys Robux through a platform where the app store fee isn't charged, then it isn't charged to developers either because the user will receive, and thus spend, more Robux. Creator rewards work differently to ensure that developers owning experiences played primarily by app store users aren't unfairly punished by this <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>.
The default app store cut for most other platforms (Google Play, Apple App Store) that Roblox operates on is 30% (and similar for other distribution platforms, such as Steam), so in the grander scheme 12% isn't even that ridiculous. Including payment processing fees, this averages out to the 22% mentioned at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences> for all of Roblox's sales.
> 1 / 0.7 = 43% more money.
Can you clarify where the 0.7 is from? My assumption is that it's from the 30% fee charged by some app stores, though not every app store charges the same fee so not using an average figure isn't truly representative of how much more money Roblox & its developers would actually earn in the event that there were no such fees.
> except it clearly show the kind of Hollywood accounting going on in their other posts.
Do point out mistakes if you see any, I would be happy to correct them (-: I made another comment on how different methods of purchasing Robux affects the value at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340570> if that helps clear things up.
I suppose it could be considered steep for anyone making a multiplayer game while managing the hosting for themselves on a tight budget. Developers with strong knowledge of monetisation strategies can make good revenue streams from games with self-hosted or self-managed servers. Maybe these developers wouldn't be able to get the same amount of revenue if they used Roblox instead.
What Roblox provides is a platform to upload experiences to with minimal risk or skill required, and services that are heavily subsidised by money redirected from their most successful experiences. The barrier to entry is lowered to the floor, and most kids using the platform to learn game development wouldn't have otherwise learned about it if they had to manage servers, study networking, etc.
Cloud services are a thing, but they're usually expensive and Roblox is paying for them for you. Free cloud services are a thing, but they're usually very limited and what Roblox is providing is essentially unlimited.
For me, the killer app for Roblox is none of this. It's Creator Rewards <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards> (previously Engagement-based Payouts (previously Premium Payouts)), a programme where any player that pays for a Roblox Premium subscription (or is a new/returning user and buys anything on Roblox in the future) results in money earned for the developers of the experiences they play. This happens without requiring any monetisation strategy, microtransactions, or paid in-game products to be created by the developer. Nothing similar is provided by most other popular game engines or platforms.
For myself as a smaller Roblox creator with no interest in creating such monetisation strategies on my own experiences, Creator Rewards makes up a much bigger income proportion than it does for most large developers on the platform. Instead of ~10%, it's more like 90% for me, and I suspect that most kids learning to code games on Roblox without having good marketing skills are in the same bucket, and so the cut won't be nearly as steep for them.
> Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.
What 'supports' here does mean is that the difference between what Roblox takes as their share to pay their own expenses and what is paid out as profit directly to the developer via DevEx or Creator Rewards, namely incoming app-store & payment fees (paid when Robux goes into the platform, mainly from purchase of Robux or Roblox Premium, in the case of Roblox Premium then Creator Rewards also should be accounted for) and platform hosting & support costs would, on a platform that pays a revenue share instead of a profit share, have to be paid by the developer instead of by Roblox. It's true that developers never receive this money for themselves. However, it would be the same if they developed their experience outside of Roblox – this money to pay for their operating expenditure would come out of whatever revenue share they earn before it becomes profit. I personally feel it's disingenuous to attribute these costs that Roblox pays on behalf of the developer to profiteering or that the money goes towards their own investment. The share that is taken by Roblox for these purposes, and by consequence not directly to developers or support of their experiences, really is 33%.
I'm taking greater pains here to clearly differentiate between the profit-share model used by Roblox and the revenue-share model used by most other platforms in the industry because of the unique way the Roblox platform operates. This is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of the entire platform, and Roblox also makes this clear on the same page:
> If you develop outside of Roblox, you may have to pay for hosting, servers, moderation, and customer service on your own. You also have to dedicate time to managing these services; on Roblox you can focus on building your experience.
The tradeoff here is not Roblox taking a draconian cut to suck developers into their walled garden so they can have access to Roblox's exclusive platform and market. They're just paying for what the developer would have had to pay if the same experience was on a platform that didn't provide the same services or was selfhosted. This is, in essence, the same normalised tradeoff that most large technology companies make today through cloud services. This makes a lot of sense given that Roblox is using the cloud (primarily AWS) to provide some of these services.
Roblox is extremely clear and accurate about what these costs are and what tradeoffs the developer is making by using the platform, and that the developer is accepting a profit share rather than a revenue share.
The ONLY exception – the sole, singular exception to the 'profit share' rule that applies across the entire platform – is for experiences that surpass Roblox's default service limits (these default limits are never hit for 99.9999% of experiences). This is 30-50 experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/announcing-roblox-extended-ser...> across the entire platform (for context on this number, >200 experiences have reached 1 billion visits), almost all built by huge teams. These experiences need to apply for Roblox's Extended Services solution <https://create.roblox.com/docs/en-us/cloud-services/extended...>, and pay extra based on the quantity of services they use. This is done so Roblox can heavily subsidise smaller experiences on the platform and give them each a better chance at success. It's the kind of thing people advocate for in real societies and I'm glad it exists on Roblox.
> And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.
The asterisk here is that this is the minimum possible profit share – the cost for both Roblox and developers is higher if the money is taken outside of the platform because of the various taxes, currency exchange fees, and transfer fees that need to be paid by Roblox (or by their payment processor, Tipalti) before the profit ever gets given to the developer. These are detailed at <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/27985018895124>.
I do not work for Roblox. These links are to profiles I control, and I have been a developer on their platform for several years. It's given me great programming experience and a lot of strong connections, helping me kickstart my career pretty well. Overall I've been pretty happy with my 'exploitation'. :-)
Nowadays I work more on open-source Roblox-related libraries rather than developing on the platform itself, as game design and development isn't a strong area of expertise for me.
Fair enough, and you certainly shouldn't feel any shame for it. I apologise if I came across as if I were a shill or paid promoter (not the first time I've been accused as such), I've just been part of this debate for a long time and have written a lot on this particular topic.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
This is misleading because for every dollar spent, $0.67 is not what developers get paid. The link (https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences) you referenced clearly says 25% is the "Developer share".
The cost to run the platform is the platform's cost."Platform hosting & support" and "App stores & payment processing fees" should not be considered as developer operational cost
Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?
Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.
The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users
Compare with other platforms. Payout model is as simple as platform takes % or fixed fee, rest is dev to keep. There's no verbiage that says dev share is 67% but you they actually get paid less.
What exactly goes behind the platform is platform's business, not the user. If developers are getting paid out $0.25 per dollar spent, that's the developers profit and rest is spent running the platform which is Roblox's concern.
The main reason this argument exists is because of Roblox being difficult to compare with other platforms. For the most widely used platforms/engines/storefronts in the industry, the main payout model is that the percentage (for storefronts ~30%, smaller for smaller platforms, for commercial game engines ~5%) or fixed/variable fee (per month or per seat in the client organisation) is taken as payment for using the distribution platform or a royalty for using the game engine. The remaining quantity (60-80%) is given to the developer of the game.
To make it clear, this is not profit! Any money earned after paying the storefront and the engine still needs to be spent on server hosting & maintenance, as well as moderation & legal compliance if a game is popular enough to need it. There also is a risk that the expenses taken away in this area could outweigh the revenue and the developers end up with a loss. Unless all expenses are negligible, the resulting revenue isn't just for the developer to keep.
Roblox pays for an experience's server hosting, maintenance, moderation, legal compliance, discoverability, engine development, app store fees, etc. As results, there is no risk of such loss, though Roblox's operating costs are much higher than a typical game storefront. I would consider these costs as developer operational costs. As far as I can tell, the key difference is the fact that one party is having their costs paid by another rather than one party giving another the money to pay for it themselves. This, to me, is an arbitrary distinction.
Other platforms don't have clauses that need to differentiate between money given to developers as profit and money given to developers as infrastructure/upkeep costs because these other platforms don't deal in the kind of broad integration that Roblox has from the storefront to the datacentres. In almost all cases, the final payout a developer gets from Roblox is pure profit.
The services Roblox is selling might not be using a standard industry pricing model, though it's still very clear and not at all deceptive what the product is the developers are paying for and what the profit share is after operating expenses have been paid for on their behalf.
Your response explains why Roblox might charge such a steep fee but that isn't my issue as I said earlier.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
Profit given to dev is $0.25 per dollar spent, not $0.67. It's as simple as that. I understand Roblox needs to maintain infra, support regional regulation, etc, but that's Roblox's business operational cost and shouldn't claim the delta of $0.42 is "given to developers" because developers never received it
I'll admit I read deeper into your argument than what you actually wrote.
Comparing with a platform like a digital distribution storefront, the infra & support & other OpEx still has to be paid. Could be argued that the developer has more choice on what to spend it on in the case they are given revenue directly, and in that case it would be their OpEx. That's why I think it's equally reasonable to consider it either as developer operations cost or a business one.
Other platforms routinely state that this money is given to the developers directly, which I suppose is true (given they also often host offline singleplayer games with generally much lower ongoing costs than multiplayer, which Roblox doesn't). Their communities also routinely refer to the money interchangeably as a "profit"/"revenue" cut, which I think is less forgivable and probably an indication of larger terminological clarity problems in the game industry regarding these cuts than just Roblox.
other platforms don't give you unlimited game servers, near-infinite scalability with no initial cost, a potential player base in the hundreds of millions, etc
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.
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.
>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.
So? Discord is a problem too. But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.
>Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases.
Again... and? By your logic IRL is the problem too because for some reason you think we should not expect Roblox to do anything about the fact that it connects children with pedophiles. But IRL isn't a platform. And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion because it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.
> But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.
If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.
> it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.
I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour, nor does there exist enough evidence to make such a claim. Try red-teaming it: take the place of a bad actor that aims to cause harm to a child on the Roblox platform.
First, the actor will need an account. Next, they'll need to join a game (one with a low content maturity rating) and find a vulnerable child. Of course, they can't actually communicate with each other, so the actor needs to verify their age. For this, they will need either the face of a child, a verifiable ID document of a child, or the ability to defraud the system (likely by forging an ID document).
Assume they can get past that, and are now considered in the same age bracket as the child, and can thus communicate with them. They now need to direct the child off-platform to avoid them being caught very easily by Roblox's safety teams and systems. They won't be able to use a social media link, as the actor isn't permitted to send them and the child isn't permitted to receive them due to them both being classified as minors by Roblox. So the actor will need to use chat or private messages to give them specific instructions, which will of course be heavily censored due to both parties being minors.
Okay, perhaps an easier way would be to have the actor create an experience with some unfiltered messaging system and let the child join them in it (if they don't have parental experience restrictions available, in that case the actor will be out of luck). They'll of course need to get the experience approved with a sufficient content maturity level. However, any unfiltered messaging system is going to be caught quickly by automated checking; all experience communications must go through TextService:FilterStringAsync(). Roblox's text-filtering is industry-leading, and much more protective than almost any other platform that allows free-form text communication.
Regardless, we'll assume that the actor is able to direct the user off-platform successfully somehow. In the case that a member of the safety team does follow up on any chat/message history and finds a Terms of Service violation, they'll request that the alternative platform take action, which will of course have no impact as the communications aren't against their Terms of Service.
> And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion
I hope I've effectively demonstrated that it's much more difficult to abuse or exploit users on the platform after recent updates. If Roblox was IRL, they wouldn't be able to implement any of these safety checks or features, and they probably would be sued into oblivion.
>If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.
What are you, their PR agent?
>I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour.
It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
To clarify, no <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334849>. I don't have any affiliation with Roblox Corporation, and I hope this will be able to make clear to you that my intention is to debate this matter in good faith.
> It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
This isn't particularly constructive. Roblox publishes monthly updates on their safety status including statistics on the whole platform <https://about.roblox.com/newsroom>, and more in-depth statistics are also available for specific experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/4028415>. There isn't any similarly concrete evidence to claim that Roblox directly facilitates links between child sexual abusers and children, so the difference between opinion and fact from that side of the argument is moot.
> Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money.
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 practice any more than the corrosive and addicting nature of “games” that are essentially not much different than gambling, only more legal and across a wider user base.
I have a theory that much of the gambling industry in the USA has atrophied because the “investors”, aka, the corrupts and rotten people of the gambling industry that are/came from organized crime, have moved into “gaming”. I have specific reason to believe that was a general trend beyond specific cases. For example, people who’s job was to develop extremely addicting slot machine “games” both visually and in their manipulation of addiction patterns, i.e., how to push and milk someone to the limit before they can be pulled back into the gamblers fallacy.
But now I’ve gotten way off topic…but not really. It’s all dark, evil patterns; using game addiction to exploit the capture through debt bondage.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
It would be legal to never pay it out in real money at all, if other marketplaces are any indication. Like “store credit” or gift cards. You can’t get it out of the walled garden and the walled garden unilaterally controls the value.
The point of the discrepancy between purchasing Robux and converting to fiat is to allow Roblox themselves to be able to pay for the infrastructure and support they provide to developers. If the rates were equal, there would be an effectively equal amount of money going into the platform as going out of it, which wouldn't leave enough to pay for their expenses.
This system is known as the Developer Exchange programme <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/articles/203314100>. The differing exchange rates are a necessary part of how the platform works and should 100% be legal. Analogues to "company scrip" or the like commonly used to unjustify the system are propagated by people that don't have a coherent enough grasp on the platform's economic system.
that also has a cap, you're not getting more than $6 per 1000 robux there, which is a little under double the official rate but still only 2 thirds of what users actually paid for said robux. not including the risk of the platform banning you.
i picked the 10k robux for $100 package as the baseline - the grey market has never reached that ceiling. no, when cashing out, 1 robux is 1 robux, doesn't matter what currency you paid for it. an exception was if the robux was old, from the period where you could trade tix (free) for robux, but i don't think that applies anymore
Yup, so many people focused on sexual exploitation that they ignore the traditional exploitation. Doesn't look any better when you realize ALL sexual exploitation is downwind of this financial one.
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 in servers like Hypixel. It had 60K+ concurrent players last time I checked late last year.
There are almost definitely more people playing BedWars on Roblox than there are playing it on Minecraft at this very moment.
(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 support Cracked Minecraft accounts for example.
Btw, this is also the reason why aternos is so popular within some communities because a free server which can have cracked option. Sign me up starts happening in bulk.
Me and my friends had an aternos server. It was truly something out of this world meeting them tomorrow after having 10 people together in a minecraft server.
I was the person though who spent way too much time and had less stacked gear lol in the end because some of my friends were like bandits haha, who stole my stuff from caves and in general, I have spent much of my time in minecraft during the starting (nothing -> diamond) then afterwards (diamond -> end/netherite)
Anyways my point is that we all could've definitely been on hypixel and something similar if Hypixel supported crack client. For example 11 of us or more played the game one time or another (not sure) within our single class of 50 people and only one of the guys had an minecraft account.
One of my friends literally got into some cash-app type stuff with a shady tetris to earn money app which showed ads to earn 25$ just so that he can buy minecraft to play on hypixel and the game fundamentally required something impossible and my friend felt so depressed at the time and he's one of the smartest people I know. A) people are easy to scam, B) he and many of us had so much desperation to play on hypixel in general.
You can get an alt (and I used to) for free or very cheap which would work everywhere unless on hypixel which had stricter rules and the difference between account prices could be 10x back or more that at that point its just better to make a minecraft account just for hypixel or similar. (I remember seeing accounts for 3$ or something that would work everywhere except hypixel)
I asked him if I should write a blog post to name and fame the company but he denied and he was truly sad that day :(
All of this combined can show how Roblox truly hits a jackpot with it being a free game. Most people might not pay but because of the perceived fame of the game and the number of people playing it. The people who pay would be more likely to pay and I see some people/kids who really look for ways to make robux online.
So with all of this, its easy to see how these (usually teen developers like us) can make something which can land 100k$ as unachievable that sounds.
one of my friends racked in quite a lot of money making 3d sprites in blender for these roblox people and in exchange used to have them buy blender extensions. Those extensions were truly a lot of money if he had to go buy them.
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.)
I would also add it's easier to download and set up than Minecraft. I still have nightmares about setting up various Microsoft and Xbox accounts and trying to help my kid play with her friends. IMO that Roblox doesn't have this friction is huge
In this day and age Prism launcher [0] will handle Minecraft and any modpacks you want to use. The only caveat is pointing it at your download folder so it can open the tabs for any mods that need a manual download and it will import them, but that's hardly difficult.
Minecraft (Mojang/Microsoft) have also made it clear that with them moving from OpenGL to Vulcan they're maintaining the ability for Minecraft to run on Mac as well as Windows/Linux, which is fantastic.
My bet is that the real different lies in mobile devices - iPads/tablets and phones are something that kids have more access to than laptops or desktops, and lots of people don't bother with parental controls.
Sure, but I still need a Microsoft account of some sort to play Minecraft? And parental controls still exists inside Microsoft or Xbox (is that the same account??). I spent a couple days just trying to make it possible for my daughter and her friends to be connected on Minecraft. And then you need to figure out what a launcher is, that Prism even exists. And you get a completely different experience on iPad where Prism doesn't exist. It's stil a hassle compared to Downloading free Roblox and start playing and having the same experience across devices.
My 9 yo has alt accounts I didn't setup, that's how easy Roblox is. I have MC/Microsoft account info for like 10 people, mostly family/friends kids, in my password manager because their parents were fine with them playing, but didn't want to deal with account management. Every sleep over starts with me logging everyone in on the various available devices, with their parents on standby to help with the multi-factor shitstorm that ensues.
Roblox is getting pretty bad though with age verification, and they will NOT help recover a lost/hacked account no matter how much money was spent on it. 5 year account, likely thousands of dollars in robux spent on it, kid clicked a bad link and it's gone. Roblox just responds they can't help, even though the original email address was verified, and used 2 factor auth through its history. They used to be helpful, they don't care anymore.
In a way I found sketchy/scammy aspects of Roblox helpful to educate my kid about that sort of thing. Early on a classmate scammed her out of some item on AdoptMe, nothing monetary valuable but it shook her and really caused her to think critically about online transactions and security. These days the friend group talks about IP bans and account bans so we did a good session about what IP addresses are, how they work, etc. She also did temper her expectations on how attached to get to the main account since it can get hacked or locked etc.
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.
The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]
There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.
I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.
In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
Dunno man, when the “core gameplay loop” gets interrupted every 2 minutes with “do you want to pay to win?” Banners and 50% of the screen is covered in ads and trap buttons that pop up a purchase dialog when you press them accidentally (a given on mobile with touch controls), it’s fairly obvious the gameplay loop is the last thing in the developers mind.
> games allow you to spend money to rapidly get better
Audience is the problem here. It's obviously not a big deal if the platform is targeted for adults, but majority of users are underage. The platform can certainly implement guardrails for the vulnerable users if they wish to
Those guardrails exist. They’re called parents. My son doesn’t have a credit card and therefore doesn’t have robux. Having no robux, he can’t spend it on anything.
Just because two things are "annoying", doesn't mean they have the same ethical problems.
The fun single player games only need to convince you they are a fun experience and you should buy them once.
Games with loot boxes are trying to convince you every day to spend money on them. Dunno about roblox, but often the items are visible, and "defaults" are often perceived as poor or noobs.
We can't be naive: It's a whole other level and companies are spending millions on manipulating kids to spending more and more money.
> the core gameplay loops work just fine without it.
Of course it's functional, it has to string people along for enough time to get them to start paying.
That doesn't mean grinding a system tuned to get you hooked enough to give up and pay is a 'just fine' as a game. It's openly deliberate malicious design.
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 night under my covers with a flashlight reading.
There is a big difference between games now and games then. E.g. an SNES game was made to be fun, but not to be intentionally addictive, you would never buy a new game if it was.
Many online games are designed to be as addictive as crack to extract as much revenue as possible. Our kid is in the typical video gaming age, almost every kid of her age is stuck in Roblox and some in Fortnite.
Setting limits helps, but more broadly, games that require a monthly subscriptions or buying in-game currency should just be outright forbidden for anyone under 16 or 18. Yes, kids need to learn to recognize and suppress abusive patterns, but these addictive games, together with social media, and Youtube Shorts is destroying their mental health and normal, healthy exploration of the world.
I think parents are also failing in general. It's insane how many use tablets as a pacifier, some give 2 year-olds an iPad to play with. Or setting bad examples like using phones themselves at the dinner table.
I’m a parent. Girls 7 and 4. I think you’re right about a number of parent habits.
Hard to impose a device limit on a kid if that kid watches you use your device constantly. I’m not some hero here - constantly reminding myself to be aware.
Now, I think imposing limits in the open world is a specific challenge. To your point, you’ll see kids at restaurants on iPads. Well, now your kid wants iPad. You don’t give it? They start a shitstorm.
I don’t think an outright device ban is so critical. But limits are important, and even more important is sticking to what you said you would do as a parent. With mine, they sense that moment of giving and almost instinctually rush to exploit. That said, flexibility is important too - knowing when you use it.
As for game, I set a rule on an iPad. No games with ads. Those seem to be the worst of them, and there are tons.
Now, I think imposing limits in the open world is a specific challenge. To your point, you’ll see kids at restaurants on iPads. Well, now your kid wants iPad. You don’t give it? They start a shitstorm.
Our daughter certainly did not have access to an iPad at that age. Maybe she could use her mom's iPad (I don't have one) once every few weeks for a brief period. The shitstorm only happens a few times, they get over it pretty quickly.
It got harder once she was 9 or 10, because most kids have access to a phone after school. Once she got a phone and a tablet, there have been very clear time restrictions. A lot of kids hang around on devices all afternoon, the rule here on weekdays is that she can have some screen time before dinner. (I remember that also being TV time for us when we were kids.)
She was allowed to play on the Nintendo Switch when she was 7 or 8, but only fun, non-addictive games (the typical Nintendo titles) and no multi-player.
Hard to impose a device limit on a kid if that kid watches you use your device constantly. I’m not some hero here - constantly reminding myself to be aware.
Yeah, that is hard. I think banning phones from shared moments like (the time around) breakfast, dinner, or when having a cup of tea together is an easy and impactful move. Those are moments when they are also not playing, so it's a good time to be together without distractions.
My kiddos don't have that access either. They do have their own iPads but not with unlimited access. Most common usage: flights, long drives. Otherwise, no weekday or weekend usage for the most part.
As for the shitstorm, yes, they get used to your rule and calm down. But that was my point: lots of folks overreact and create the vicious cycle. Your kid complains, you give the phone, they shut up. Repeat. Repeat again. Now your kid expects the phone. And now you believe they will only ever stay calm if you give them the phone.
Breaking the cycle requires you to stick to your statements, but also, in public, to not give a shit about embarrassment. When you worry if you're disturbing everyone else or you feel inadequate as a part that can't calm a kid, you might give in. You can't!
PS: multiplayer games in my statement -> multi-player with me. Not internet.
Kudos dad/mom, that's a hard job. I feel like getting them exposed to technology and the dopamine generator that is games as a younger kid can help you teach more lessons around managing habits that can become maladaptive. Our world is increasingly engineered for addiction, and having conversations about self control starting young can help develop maturity. I know plenty of friends (2001 baby) that did not have access to internet/games until the 8th grade when the school provided laptops, and they STRUGGLED to handle the intensity of that distraction because they were never exposed and weren't taught healthy habits around technology. Exposure therapy is a great way to manage that.
Yes - I think the general approach of collaborating on things with your kids is the way to go, though not always the path I choose (I'm a normal dad with my own pluses and minuses).
But if you only ever say no, or the reverse, and never explain or attempt to explain, you're missing some opportunities to chat with your kids. They of course need to sort some things on their own too.
I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.
I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.
The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.
TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.
I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.
(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)
We set time limits on tablet and rules like getting your homework done first, but my 9 year old specifically begs me to let him have Roblox, which I think he is too young to play.
I told him he can play it, but he has to beat Chrono Trigger (tablet version) first. He didn't even get to the county fair and gave up, saying it was too boring, the nerve!
Anecdote here: I was given a computer at age 4, and I didn't really have any limits on how long I could use it. On the other hand, I wasn't allowed to register any accounts and I had to ask before visiting sites I had never been to before. >75% of my time on the computer at that age was spent on hacking with Scratch. I learned a lot and developed my love of computers at that age. I'm absolutely glad that I didn't have "screen time", but I can also see that if I didn't have the limits I did I could have ended up pretty badly.
But also maybe the parent post and you refer to kids of different ages?
I didn't have access to a computer until I was 9, and then also we didn't have tables and smartphones, so there computer was only available at home as well.
I think below a certain age the limit is fine to be set as 'not at all'.
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...
The computer games I used to play are nothing like the stuff my son is playing. Its not just a matter of how much time is spent. They are the same as social media, engineered for maximum engagement, contain ads or try to sell you something .
I have heard a number of parents saying their kids are "good behaved" when they are silently glued to a screen, while roaming outside, making noise and playing are bad behaviours, specially when they break things or get a bruise.
playing Roblox got me into game development, and helped to teach me the basics of general programming. i did have previous experience from Python etc, but Roblox gave me a breeding ground for actually doing something with those skills.
"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.
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.
Implying there's a simple solution that isn't being implemented because they weren't forced to by law. So what is that simple solution?
Children typically don't have any form of government issued ID. You can verify someone is a legal adult (you probably shouldn't, but the point is that you can) whereas you can't easily verify that someone online is a child.
Okay. That would indeed make it an easy problem to solve from the perspective of a service operator. However I don't think I'd consider that to be a "sensible reform". Rather a dystopia that must be avoided at all costs.
Then getting over the collective fear of the government having a role in our online identity. They provide foe our physical identity so I don't understand why we're afraid of them providing our digital identity too.
I realize people may find this controversial, but from personal experience with gaming, I see all of these types of games as “predators” in and of themselves when they are “monetized”, because they are deliberately and explicitly exploiting the addicting nature of games in general, by being and manipulating a freebase of dopamine and serotonin just like the gambling industry does/used to.
If we survive this era with an intact advanced civilization, I believe people will look back on this period and “games” as an insane thing to permit, let alone facilitate and perpetrate upon one’s own children, the next generation, the offspring necessary for survival of a life form, species, race, society, or culture.
The ideal system as far as I'm concerned is one that regulates Roblox out of existence for a variety of sins.
At this point I'm just waiting for someone to dig up a name associated with Roblox in the Epstein files, because that's the only way I can conceive of how they've managed to avoid getting shut down this long.
Please don't make excuses for literal evil p*dophile megacorporations. There is plenty of low hanging fruit, and even if there wasn't, this issue is important enough that if they can't fix it they should go out of business.
1. They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts. Done. Problem fixed. Oh, but they'll lose money, won't they? That takes precedence over child safety.
2. The community is willing to help. You can find examples of independent actors uncovering tens of thousands of NSFW communities and accounts and submitting them to Roblox with detailed descriptions of the activities of each one, only for Roblox to perma-ban AND SUE the people doing the investigations, and not ban the offending accounts.
3. They can build an actual strong safety team. A $40B company can afford to throw a few million dollars per year to hire 200 people to do that same investigatory work. This is typical tech firm behavior, where they believe every problem can be automated away, and they're not willing to do the minimal amount of manual labor.
1. Kids under 9 can use chat with parent consent, for kids over 9 don't even need that. After 13, there's no option to even disable it for parents [1].
2. Suing multiple youtubers who come to you with evidence of child abuse on your platform does not square with "they do" in any concievable universe [2] [3]
> To use Communication features like Experience chat, Voice chat, and Party chat, all users must successfully complete an age check.
your words were "They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts". which they have. all "non age verified accounts" cannot use chat.
i have never attempted to assert that Roblox is a completely safe platform, or indeed that their safety team is as effective as it could be - however, your flippant statements were provably untrue with any research.
as for Schlep - while i applaud his stated aims, he was effectively "baiting" predators, offering to move conversations off-Roblox through platforms like Discord to bypass the moderation enforced by Roblox. in general, i fundamentally hate the idea of predator hunters; it seems so strange to monetize justice in this way, especially when it seems they care more about the content than the outcome of their "cases"
I should've worded this better. By "non-verified accounts" I mean basically mean "accounts that haven't been verified by an ID check". This is the only means that I consider an actual verification, face/photo scan is a PR stunt and malicious compliance.
I assume I don't have to try too hard to convince someone on this forum how easy photo/video verification is to bypass. Look at Australia, it's happening en masse right now.
Most age verification systems guard against children pretending to be adults. If we're talking about social media, this is a fairly low stakes thing, and false positives aren't too critical - sure, a teen will bypass the Instagram age-check and use Instagram, big deal.
Here you're trying to guard against the exact opposite - adults pretending to be children. Not only are the stakes way higher as there's no legitimate reasons to try and bypass the system, you also don't have access to the only reliable method - government ID checks.
Edit: I can concede the point about Schlep, as what he does is dangerous and I could see someone "follow in his footsteps" and ge thurt. However you have to keep in mind that he's never the first to talk to these people -- there's so many of them that he's literally had dozens of them approach him. I was mainly thinking of Ruben Sim, who compiled a large database of NSFW accounts without any real world interaction, and was banned and sued for it.
I think one approach would be that all communication features could be opt in, by parents. but, that doesn't actually "solve" anything, since predators just make child accounts for themselves, and opt in.
sounds like your solution would have to be "no children communicate on the internet".
yeah, i agree with your points on age verification. ironically, the main backlash from the Roblox community was that they were even rolling out verification in the first place - not that it didn't go far enough! i'm sure you'll agree it's a tricky problem to solve - if communication is fully banned, then many children will simply move to lesser-moderated platforms.
i'm not a Ruben Sim fan. while his list of "ERPing" accounts is a good idea, and it's amazing to see real games implement blocks on these players, i find his opinions on the furry community strange and a bit obsessive
> Please don't make excuses for literal evil pdophile megacorporations.*
I hate Roblox with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns, and wish they and their business model to be utterly destroyed.
But allowing our emotions to override our objectivity is not the solution. It's important to be as fair and objective as possible if we want our arguments to be taken seriously.
> 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 allowance in Robux, so I can again see that's the branding
but this is largely a symptom of parents nationwide not paying attention whatsoever
I've talked to many parents, aunts and uncles, they don't know they're the central bank of Roblox of a currency that can be accumulated and cashed out, let alone that its a distributed set of third party experiences.
Roblox Corporation already has age gated talking ability on platform. What specifically should they be doing when everything happens in different communities and off platform?
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking. If I understand the business correctly, the brands are inquiring to design specialized worlds in Roblox so kids can play in them and look at ads?
that's not my business, the economy is pretty vast with several key verticals
the experiences I'm involved with just have their own things to purchase as part of the game loop. it's much more akin to a vending machine.
never involved with any brand, at least that wasn't roblox native, and by roblox native I mean influencers that may as well be a brand of their own.
if you followed the "metaverse" concept from earlier in the decade, there was Meta's attempt, there were crypto and NFT based attempts, although that's all said to have died, the metaverse is happening within Roblox. the point if that if you had a grasp of what the metaverse was supposed to be, you can use that understanding to understand what Roblox is
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.
This doesn’t really make sense though. If half of all American children are on your platform of course that’s a prime target. That’s a volume issue, not something inherent to the platform.
I’m going to guess those numbers are still far lower than the number of times kids get messed up by a trusted adult.
Crazy that of all places someone here will say that the volume has nothing to do with the platform? The entire point of the platform is its size. The entire point of the tech industry is its size...
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.
Please check this box to confirm that you do _not_ possess a government issued photo ID ...
Sorry, in order to use this service you will need to visit your local police station and have them verify that you are in fact a child ...
Yeah I'm not seeing how this is supposed to work. I don't think age verification solves very many real world problems. (It does mitigate some, such as alcohol consumption. Just not most.)
You could verify the ID of an adult who vouches for the child they are a legal guardian of. That way, if it turns out that Brayden(M12) is actually Linda(F45) you know who to send law enforcement to to ask some very pointed questions.
That said, I don't think online ID verification is effective and even if it was, it wouldn't be worth the level of mass privacy invasion. If your goal is actually to help kids who are victims of abuse, your efforts are much better spent elsewhere. For example: making child abuse report hotlines/websites more easily accessible and widely known, fixing social services so that they actually provide better help when requested instead of making things worse, better education for children about what is and is not OK behavior even from "trusted" adults, and how to get help from someone who isn't a relative when you need it. "Stranger danger" hysteria catches all the outrage and public discussion, but is the least common source of abuse.
> fixing social services so that they actually provide better help when requested instead of making things worse
Agreed, and I wish more people would realize this. When I was a kid, one of my friend's brothers was accused of molestation. The accused kid was around 8 or 9 and the victim was around 5 or 6. The social services came in and immediately got the mom fired from her job (she was a school teacher), put the family through tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, utterly disrupted the lives of the entire family, got the accused kicked out of school and put in a special school for troubled kids (which itself brought a whole host of issues), and nearly ripped the family apart. There was no evidence at all of the crime, other than the word of the accuser (a 5 or 6 year old child). Fast forward a few years later and the accuser apologized profusely and admitted that it had never happened. Oh and also the accused was at a friend's house at the time of the supposed molestation, and the friends' parents had told the investigators that. Law enforcement dropped the case having determined it not likely to be true and certainly nowhere near the evidence for prosecution (in fact, there was evidence that the event never happened), but social services proceeded with all of the above anyway. So yeah, there's a lot of work to do to make anybody want to trust them to help rather than make everything worse.
> 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".
I feel like for a 11yo, you can't even explain the risks. Not just for lack of true comprehension, but also just kids shouldn't have to worry about that stuff, and just be kids.
Wut? If they’re using the internet they should be aware of that stuff. That’s what ‘just be kids’ means these days. Just being a kid isn’t a static state of being.
So then they shouldn’t use the internet. I’m not going to fill my kids mind with all the dangers in the world when all they should be thinking about when they’re 8 is academics, friends and personal pursuits and achievements.
My son has had the local police do a presentation to his class/preschool/daycares about online safety every year since he was 4 so it's pretty drilled in by this point.
Getting watched by your parents is far different than getting watched by the government. It's no different than parent watching out of the window on kids playing in backyard
> And then people wonder why authoritarianism is on the rise...
It's on the rise because of utter failure of progressive govt to do what people want them to do. People want country to be more prosperous, not to have bleeding heart activists import immigrants or other leftist bullshit. Authoritarian turn is knee jerk reaction to that beacuse they are only ones promising the country for the citizens of the country. If you want less of that, make left that cares about country's people
Still, at some point you do have to give some privacy to your kids. I know the trend is helicopter parenting but it's not helping the kid to be overprotecting.
Getting watched by your parents is far different than getting watched by the government. It's no different than parent watching out of the window on kids playing in backyard
Maybe it's a cultural difference, but after age ~8-9 or so, we would just roam around our town/village without our parents knowing where we were. You just had to be back home at 17:30 for dinner.
Yes, there was some mischief (we were kids), but you had to own up to it if you got caught and there weren't smartphone cameras around everywhere, so if you did something dumb, it would not be on the internet the next day.
The problem with modern games and social media is that they are like giving crack to a 10 year-old. They are made for dopamine hits that leads to addiction. Kid's brains are not fully developed until well after 18, so they have limited capability to recognize and deal with addiction.
People want country to be more prosperous, not to have bleeding heart activists import immigrants or other leftist bullshit. Authoritarian turn is knee jerk reaction to that beacuse they are only ones promising the country for the citizens of the country.
Maybe every generation feels this. But I really think ours lucked out. We were shielded by childhood from the worst of the early times and then bolstered with past success for the worst of the later times.
I was big into the WC3 custom maps community back in the day, the idea that you could make money doing any of this was silly. The point when I was growing up was two things:
1. Make something fun to play
2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio
I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.
So true. A member of the clan I was in was operating a proper hedge fund, taking in investments from the clan and using it to flip on the Grand Exchange. Iirc he was even doing sorts of arbitrage, market making, and other advanced stuff.
Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol
There were dozens of ways to make money off of RuneScape back in the day. Selling bot scripts, running bot farms (this is still very lucrative to this day), running gambling rings, bulk buying gold and reselling, the list goes on.
The ecosystem was incredible and it was basically a crash course in Anarcho-capitalism, I'm pretty immune to any kind of scam because of having been in that environment.
I made close to 20 grand as a 16 year old through some bug abuse, over the course of 2 weeks if I recall. But alas, I blew it pretty quickly because easy come, easy go.
The whole game is basically one giant random number generator, so there was a lot to gamble on.
E.g., two players put one million gold pieces in their inventory, equip no equipment (so no attack bonuses), every hit on each other is now an RNG roll with identical odds for each player. Battle to the death and voila.
That one's quite basic but there were more elaborate games such as flower poker. The game had a flower seeds item which when planted would spawn a flower on the floor. The flower would be of a random color (e.g. red, blue, white, ...). People would bet on which color flower would pop up, or plant plant five flowers sequentially and try and get something akin to a poker hand (e.g. three of a kind, full house).
Quite silly, in retrospect, as I'm typing this out.
RuneScape private servers used to bring in tons of money. I helped manage one when I was in my early teens, and I can confirm the owner (who was only a few years older than I) was bringing in mid six-figures annually.
Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.
I had swim teammates who made at least hundreds of thousands minting and selling autominers on eBay. I assume if I knew a couple who did that well some made millions.
I admittedly harbor a bunch of resentment towards Roblox for the predatory way they have encircled my childrens' friends, and my children as well, so take my feelings with a grain of salt.
I didn't get far in this article.
It feels like the modern equivalent of "there is a kid named LeBron James who is only 19 and will be make millions in the NBA." Roblox Millionaires might be true, but feels like an anomaly, and in this case, causes serious harm IMHO. Lebron James actually has used his wealth and prominence to make a difference in the world, and if he encouraged kids to get active, it feels like on balance a good thing.
I just don't see a good/happy career path for anyone becoming a Roblox Millionaire no matter whether it is true for even one person. Maybe it isn't the point, but if it isn't, why even celebrate it?
My youngest has played Roblox half her life, but is very angry about recent decisions like requiring ID to chat in-game.
Still, if she's anything like other players, she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games, and we've spent a few $100 on Robux gift cards over the years.
> she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games
It sounds like you disapprove, or at the very least recognise it’s not harmless, so I’m struggling to understand why you allow and incentivise it (by pouring hundreds of dollars into it).
Would you expand on that? I have no intention of judging you as a parent—if you say you approve of her time on Roblox, that’s that. I’m only asking because it seems you might not.
You know, just as a thought, if you have engaged with her like taking her outdoors or other activities, she wouldn't spend so much time or money on a stupid online video game.
Telling parents how to raise their children, while also making baseless assumptions of their life as well, is an approach with which you'll only antagonize people.
The parent comment does not appear to be supportive of what's happening regarding Roblox ("mindless").
If they are not interested in making the situation any different, but just want to vent, I think it's a waste of everybody's time.
> antagonize people
You can potentially antagonize anyone in any situation on an online forum even with the nicest words. I don't see how it matters. If the person is not receptive, I couldn't care less.
> You can potentially antagonize anyone in any situation on an online forum even with the nicest words.
True. But the nicest words are less likely to be taken as antagonist than the nastiest words. That’s why we should still strive to use the nicest words when we can, assuming the goal is to have a chance to change the other person’s mind.
> I don't see how it matters. If the person is not receptive, I couldn't care less.
It matters because we don’t yet know if the person in question is receptive. Maybe they are.
Or, meet halfway. Talk to her ABOUT the games. At least attempt that.
Reminds me of a family member who complained about his oldest playing Minecraft. He said “I don’t understand it” - guy is 49, grew up in Montana, shot guns as a teen. Very different upbringing.
But I never saw him attempt to understand. My daughter is not stuck on games at the moment but when she does play I do my best to talk through with her.
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.)
I think game ideas can get copied everywhere but it happens much faster on Roblox and there is almost no recourse for the smaller developer who got copied.
The platform doesn't care when someone makes a copy, there's no way for players to push back and actually hurt the developer making the copy (unlike Steam where trying to do it will get you bombarded with negative reviews and buried by the algorithm), and superficial visual quality and marketing attracts players more than actual gameplay quality.
If we are talking about game mechanics, they get copied all the time, of course. If it's about superficially reproducing a game including the assets, I don't think any big players on PC or consoles steal ideas from indie/smaller developers. That is despised and likely not allowed by the platform, if not challenged in court.
(I have no idea about what happens on mobile platforms)
Curious, how does the game monetise, do you have loot-boxes in-game or something? Or is it enough that people play it? What kind of game mechanics are possible to build around?
Did you you have previous game making experience? I've toyed with the idea of trying to make it a small project for me and my kids but I thought it might be a bit beyond them (and then ultimately become just my project)
i had experience, mainly with web development; that being said, Roblox Studio is very intuitive for building and UI design, as is Lua (specifically Luau).
my advice is to just start building something. the Toolbox has thousands of 3D models which make the initial experience easier and more fun, and there are hundreds of YouTube tutorials teaching you the basics of Roblox scripting.
also use the excellent DevForum, which has thousands of explainer posts:
enough money to cash out via DevEx, Roblox's developer program, every month or so ($110). it's absolutely not a salary - there are barely five people playing at any given time - but given i've done nothing in a year, it's appreciated.
edit: looked at the old stats online. a few years back that game was pulling $1,500+ with no effort each month
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 assets
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.
> Today, at 19, he’s collecting $400,000 a month for his creation... In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby.
Lol if he waits like half a year he should have plenty enough to go make games as a hobby.
Roblox games have a shelf life of days, getting to a month or more you either have to produce days worth of content in less than a day - it's extremely exhausing.
>Founded in 2004, Roblox paid out $1.5 billion to game creators last year. On average, the top 1,000 developers — individuals or companies — earned $1.3 million, according to the company.
This is so far out of the realm of what I do with computers that I'm not even really sure what Roblox is. I guess sort of a virtual game world? Seems crazy that there's so much money in it.
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 massive amount of money raked in by some free to play mobile phone titles. For example, Playrix has a revenue comparable to Ubisoft, but their main products are a series of match-3 type games for phones.
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.
It's not to shut the kids up, it's to shut them in so that all the Karens that rat your ass out the minute your kid is spotted outside on their own won't be able to kick off an investigation based on a phone call that it's illegal for you to even see the complainant of in the report.
Society basically expects you to hide your kids if you can't watch them every second, the externality society imposes on parents is the costs of boarding them up inside.
It's basically a litmus test for whether you have kids or not at this point. The age at which kids become aware of Roblox from their peers is getting younger and younger in my experiences anyway. Before I had kids, I had very little idea either, and I consider myself fairly well acquainted with PC gaming.
The solution is to give them a taste of better built (specifically competetive) games and they will never like roblox.
In my experience, this doesn't work. The primary reason being that most of their friends are playing Roblox and if they are consuming any content on the internet, much of it at their age is related to Roblox.
Our kids have never been allowed to play, and it still comes up somewhat regularly despite all the various games and consoles they have available.
Agree 100% with the sibling responses here. This almost never works in my experience. Kids want to play what their friends are playing - I remember feeling this way a long time ago too.
Roblox is a game engine and social platform. The basic idea is, you create a game in their engine, using their development tools (such as Roblox Studio), and then you market/promote the game on their website for others to play together with their friends. The game runs on their servers, and you don't have to worry about your own infra if you don't want to, in exchange for the money players spend on Robux (their virtual currency, and now the only one), which they can in turn spend on developer products and other paid items that you set up in your games. Then once you make enough Robux from player purchases, you can cash it out through a process called Developer Exchange which essentially makes you a W-2 employee of Roblox (or whatever financial partner they use, Tipalti?)
The idea is that people like playing with their friends and when they can take their friends and make new friends across hundreds of thousands of games they stay for a long time and (they or their parents) make lots of purchases. The social features of Roblox are a huge part of the appeal, even though I was mostly interested in the engine.
Second life is trying to be a metaverse in the style of snowcrash; it’s one big world. Roblox is more like Newgrounds, where you have a bunch of distinct games or experiences that you select from a menu, but skins and currency and whatnot are portable between the games.
> The travel offers him a fresh perspective. It shows him that his work “isn’t that big a deal. It’s not the end of the world because ultimately there’s people walking down the streets of Sydney right now who don’t care about my Roblox game performing 50% worse.”
> Colley has indulged, just a little. Last year, after the Roblox developer conference, he took a private jet to Las Vegas with some friends. Did he place any bets? “I’m not old enough,” he says, “but I had people gambling next to me.”
Honestly it's encouraging to hear that some teenage millionaires have some very reasonable views, it certainly goes against the stereotype of young wealth. I hope these aren't the exceptions that prove the rule.
Do you know that in roblox you go into games and you just walk over something and it prompts you to buy stuff to "beat the game" or "level up". It's an exploitative "game" that targets kids.
"In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby."
Kid is making $400k PER MONTH...and he wants to do this for 10 YEARS before he is comfortable retiring. Apparently his FIRE number is $40M.
Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living
I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.
You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.
But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.
FWIW, the 4% rule is for safe withdrawals for around 30 years of retirement, as in, you retire at 65 and you hope to live until 95, and even then it has a non-zero chance of running out of money. It's not a percentage you should use if you want to retire at 40.
4% is the standard number that's quoted by pretty much any financial planner. It's based on backtesting and assume that there's be large downswings along the way.
You have a lot more flexibility around those downswings at 40 than you do at 80. For example you could retire but continue doing work that brings you joy and also happens to make money. A lot of people in this situation start lifestyle businesses or do consulting work, for example.
At $4mm in a market account (not 401k), you also have the option to take out margin loans at shockingly low interest. This gives you untaxed cashflow without touching your principal. 160k untaxed is a lot more cashflow than the same number in salary or retirement distributions.
It's very rational to overshoot in that situation. If you build your lifestyle and then FIRE, you are derisking your budget while you still have income.
But wanting to change your lifestyle when you retire is incredibly risky, especially if you're young without life experience.
Any misstep costs you a fraction of lifetime earnings, and there's no way to recover it.
well you certainly could get the lambo, it would just be 10% of your net worth, which is already far less (ratio) than what most Americans pay for their car...
If he thinks he can get that with a ten year grind, why would he stop short? 10 years isn't long compared to most careers so maybe he should go longer and get a bigger house or something. Of course roblox will probably fall out of fashion and stop being so profitable by then.
A ten year grind, starting as a teen no less, leaves you with a lot of life left to live. And it's not like he won't be able to live a little while in the middle of that grind.
Honestly the people criticizing the kid for this are probably just jealous of his self-made opportunity.
Someone thinking they need 40M to escape the "anxiety about the cost of living" is not just a personal decision. It is either extreme greed or delusional. He makes money doing Roblox he is the "laptop class". If you make 400k per month and can't afford to live something is wrong with you. Let's not conflate parents struggling to support their families with whatever this kid is doing.
For reference a worth of $40M puts you well within the top fraction of one percent of all Americans, nevermind the world. If anything given his age it is probably more likely his wealth will become a liability for him rather than an asset. The trope about people who come into that much wealth that young and it creates problems for them exists for a reason. Staying at his desk cranking out more Roblox products might be the best way to keep him away from becoming the victim of his own success.
Anyway good for him. You're right there is a lot of anxiety out there. On some level he should rightly get as much as he can. But let's not pretend you need millions and millions to be safe. We should be working to change that anyway, not merely celebrating massive outliers. I assume since you care about struggling families so much you support his taxation so some of that money can go to people or communities that are struggling? Or since you seem open the idea he needs 40M to survive perhaps you think the government should keep their hands off?
> Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
I am teen and I think that FIRE has many terms but This still is like a really really FAT fire.
At some point though, I think that what my generation might forget is that even with Fire, you still live a normal life or you would need tremendously more money if your lifestyle is lavish, something which we see in social media (sometimes even on paid money)
If you want to buy 100k$ watches and 1 Million dollar or more lamborghinis, probably even this money would not be enough for you.
But if you want to live a normal life like you do. even 2-3 years of sustained could be MORE than enough even for some slightly expensive side hobbies say horse riding or minor watch collecting even. But if you are online and you see people flexing their 1 million dollar watch, you are gonna add 12 more years of life on a project to get to that level
I'd say its more of an expectation/comparison issue and I am not even sure if 10 years can satisfy that
My personal Fat Fire number is more like ~2 million and I don't even want Fat Fire particularly because I would be happy doing a job that I might like so more of a lean FAT which can be around 300-500k even.
maybe this changes into what is affordable or not within the more western hemisphere though as things feel even more (unaffordable?) but even that doesn't really explain why he might need 40M from my perspective.
To be honest, it can very well be ambition. Might as well make 10 years of money if possible because then the number feels so absurdly large that I can do anything that I want and then I will make my own game. Not realizing that you would only need a fraction of 40M to realisticly achieve that same goal and we are discounting the fact that 400k is even sustainable in a such long period of time.
As someone who been a teen long time ago, I can’t imaging someone in this age responsibly planning their retirement.
I’d 100% blow out all money on some useless crap.
If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.
> Or waste their most fun years slaving for the man.
For what its worth, even I don't know my future so it's a real possibility. But one of the quotes I really like from Witold Pilecki is that, "In the hour of death, I feel joy rather than death" so although there is no such thing as no-regret life but I would hope to try to have less regrets overall in life in this context.
At some point, it boils down to having a job or not. Maybe my first job's gonna be really slaving as you mention. It's hard to know but I pray for a decent job/college hopefully that's got some good work-life balance hopefully.
> If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.
Thank you for your kind words!
I think that chasing a high paying job in FAANG and if I am dissatisfied with the work there or my impact on the world through that and I am still doing it for money, then, its to a degree similar problem to the roblox kid that we talked about.
Wishing for large amounts of retirement money through FAANG to then go what I would wish to do in life with Tech would be weird going through decades of my life into something when I can try to find what I wish to do in life in general and I had thought about it and the answer was tech-related as I felt like an individual can really make some impact through tech (And later I discovered hackernews)
I am frugal as well. Although I don't want to limit myself by saying I will never pick FAANG because maybe situations change and I can change too but money only motivated me in prospects of retirements to then do what I wish to do, so when I had the idea that I can actually do what I want to do (Now-ish) and not have to have a decade or two of my life doing something I might not enjoy/like in agreggate.
(and I have written about it and I will link it here as well on why I picked Tech and not finance)
One of the passion projects I want to take a deeper look during college hopefully if I don't take drop/go to college this year is into creating a small consultancy firm where I can suggest people which infra is nice and cheaper (Hetzner/OVH) and migrate people from either closed solutions like slack or whatever their company might use to an open standard while being cheaper and my idea is that I might charge them just enough even with consultancy fees and helping them migrate over and managing it for them that its more profitable for them
I even bought the domain for this (Actually it was I stumbled on domain accidentally which gave me this idea) https://use.expert [Nothing is in here]
I even made a logo of it myself within paint basically (https://files.catbox.moe/9t5hgw.png) with the tagline just use.expert but I think that quite frankly, I am not an expert right now as in I got to learn way more about all of this too.
So I think that I am motivated by these things more than FAANG company. Right now, I have to work within finding a decent college and that's rough for me because to get a CS college, you have to give an exam that got nothing to do with CS and also which includes chemistry and chem is something that I struggle with (quite a lot) and there are days where I procastinate about it too so I myself don't know what's my future gonna turn out and how I get into decent college.I envy not having too worry about college and my friends who didn't really care about other things and get excellent marks as I used to be quite good too. It's just one of the things I struggle with and I think that I definitely get frustrated by my brain at times too. I think I just hope that I am able to somehow bump it and just get into college somehow wheter by taking drop year again or similar this time solely focused within studies primarily. I just hope that I can make it really. Another thing I wish is for me to be more humble in life as I do feel like Sometimes, I drink too much of my own cool-aid or self-importance and that's not really good. It has to be careful balance and something I wish to improve in my life hopefully. I think I just write in HN because I have forgotten how I used to act with only some memories of my life7-8 years ago and so I don't wish to forget how I am now, a decade later too so most of comments I write are usually for self-preservation sort-of.
I actually got an english exam tomorrow, so wish me luck as I need it :)
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 games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Oh, and the company scrip - Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money. They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden. This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
In all, approximately 17% of the real-world money paid into Roblox is paid back out to creators. What a scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
My kids play Roblox and get often get gift cards from friends for birthday presents etc. I've always hated that a gift card for $20 can't be redeemed for the equivalent Robux. Instead you get options to purchase Robux and the most you can redeem is about ~$16, so then you have left over cash and have to get another gift card. Dark pattern.
visit this page and click the bright blue, prominent button labeled "Convert to Robux":
https://www.roblox.com/my/account#!/billing
you will receive the exact amount you would get from the equivalent conversion rate of the closest "package"
Assuming this works like any other tiered package system, wouldn't this make you still lose more money due to the lower tiers being less efficient?
Not really. The lower tiers are only less efficient on platforms that require purchase through an app store or other payment processor that takes a large cut. Buying through a gift card or through the Roblox website or non-Microsoft Store PC app gives more Robux for the same price <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>. These increased rates are also balanced to prevent the lower tiers from being less efficient: the package for 800 goes to 1000, whereas 10 000 goes to 11 000.
There's an option buried somewhere in there to convert left-over real dollars into robux. They don't make it too prominent else no-one would be sitting there looking at the expensive robux options that offer (mostly, but NOT always!) a better exchange rate.
Scams and grifts from top to bottom.
Fortnite does that as well. Annoying dark pattern.
I mean, League of Legends does that as well. For example you can buy X RP, but a champion or skin or whatever costs either less or more, never the exact amount. I have seen this in hell of a lot of places as well.
CEO of Roblox was once asked whether he would ever put prediction markets inside Roblox, he gave a straight face answer: https://youtu.be/XpIXRgMlPo4?t=2122
In case you don’t want to watch the video: his answer is yes BUT he needs to figure out how to do it legally in the different jurisdictions that control kids gambling.
And well, and he wants it done for a "educational" purpose without Robux (which I assume is the in-game currency), slightly missing context from your TLDR there.
But as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334696, for sure he's still out after dat monez, he's the CEO after all.
Where does he mention “without Robux”?
Literally seconds after the linked segment. Give it a listen for a minute.
Edit: To be precise, he says "no free Robux":
> no free Robux, no free prizes, just a game called the dress to impress predictor where it's not like trying to get kids money or anything like that
You could have also read the comment I linked earlier.
Brilliant conversation.
"Would you let kids gamble?" - "It sounds very fun and obvious." "To be clear, we think it's a horrible idea!"
The CEO does not say it’s a horrible idea. The interviewers say that. CEO says it’s “brilliant idea”.
And then of course he continues (although won't make for a good social media rage point so understandable you didn't provide full context):
> Well, I actually think it's a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that's legal.
> no free Robux, no free prizes, just a game called the dress to impress predictor where it's not like trying to get kids money or anything like that.
Still, probably what he sees in his mind is "more money yay" as always, he is a CEO of a for-profit company, that's what they do. But still felt disingenuous not to include the full context, doesn't even make it "that much better", he still seems like a scumbag with it.
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.
> 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 one would be relatively harmless while the other could cause widespread addiction.
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.
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.
He's also previously said he wants Roblox to be a dating service lol
[flagged]
Jesus Christ. This man is just a sociopath who doesn't bother to mask anymore.
Eventually the money just inures you.
> 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.
Are you using gambling as an example here? I don't fully understand the relation. There isn't any way to gamble Robux for more Robux on the platform, and in the cases which are arguable (such as on-platform item trading), the money must be transferred through Roblox's Developer Exchange programme, which can't be done for Robux not earned directly from experiences.
If I understand what you mean correctly, then any Robux transferred between 2 users wouldn't be able to be cashed or exchanged for fiat for the same reason as above. If they can try to fake it by selling avatar items or experience products to another user, they would immediately be hit with the usual 30% marketplace fee, then have to attempt to get through manual DevEx review with what is very obviously a suspicious set of transactions.
The reason they're not scrutinised by security and banking laws is because the Roblox platform and economic system are carefully designed so that such abuse is neither profitable nor feasible, and as such there's nothing to uncover in any potential investigation.
> (...) puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Sounds an awful lot like the AppStore, to be honest.
I'm not sure what it would take and/or how the reaction would be to 3rd party "bank" player(s) inside the game offering real exchange rates sitting in between and suing if Robox killed their account and took their "Robux" with it. Assuming players can exchange Robux inside the game without issue.. I'm guessing they take a cut on all transactions, which is kinda sus/garbage itself.
It’s depressing how many lucrative big tech (FAANG/Unicorn) jobs are effectively scams with business glitter on top. And it’s not always obvious unless you really sit down during the interview process and scrutinize the business model.
I guess thats the reason why they are a billion-doll-marketcap company by today?
Didnt know about these asymmetries within payin/payout: This is like a casino where I have an "exchange rate for their chips"?
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, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,
2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).
3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.
The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.
They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.
I suggest reading EcoScratcher's brilliant response <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/7e1c1f0fc493> and follow-up articles <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/e51651da6bf4>, of which their 2nd video briefly mentions and claims it misquotes (it doesn't) and misrepresents (it doesn't) their position.
Edits in response to parent comment edits:
> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden
Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.
> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate.
The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. And even this is underrepresentative due to being published before the September 2025 DevEx increase.
> 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 gets 1 robux for each penny.
2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.
3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.
Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.
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.
None of what you said counters anything in my post.
> Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free > free > no fees
A middleman that takes a huge cut isn’t doing anything for free. Can you at least try and have an honest discussion here.
72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.
Post-appstore cut it's 42%, which is high but doesn't seem crazy. The unsuccessful attempts and idle piddling all need to be subsidized to allow the successes to exist in the first place, and I suspect we all know better than to undercount cloud, hosting, SRE, and staffing costs. They're all ongoing and pretty painful, and getting a shot at creating something with effectively zero downside risk (vs making a game in Godot and building/buying all of the other parts yourself or with staff) will always come with a lower upside.
> Post-appstore cut it's 42%
That’s ~60% of the post AppStore cut or 42% of the total. If they took 42% of what remained developers would be getting more money than them.
Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC. The platform is ridiculously exploitive.
> Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC.
Plenty of PC Roblox users use a version of Roblox downloaded through the Microsoft Store, whom charge a 12% cut on all money spent on gaming apps <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publi...>. The only place where no app store cut applies is when purchasing Roblox products through the non-Microsoft Store PC app or through the website. Surprise, doing this gets the user ~20% more Robux than buying through an app store <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>.
If a user buys Robux through a platform where the app store fee isn't charged, then it isn't charged to developers either because the user will receive, and thus spend, more Robux. Creator rewards work differently to ensure that developers owning experiences played primarily by app store users aren't unfairly punished by this <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>.
> whom charge a 12% cut on all money spent on gaming apps
How ridiculous, why that’s almost as high as what Roblox does below.
> ~20% more Robux than buying through an app store
1 / 0.7 = 43% more money.
Which might not be such a big deal except it clearly show the kind of Hollywood accounting going on in their other posts.
> How ridiculous
The default app store cut for most other platforms (Google Play, Apple App Store) that Roblox operates on is 30% (and similar for other distribution platforms, such as Steam), so in the grander scheme 12% isn't even that ridiculous. Including payment processing fees, this averages out to the 22% mentioned at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences> for all of Roblox's sales.
> 1 / 0.7 = 43% more money.
Can you clarify where the 0.7 is from? My assumption is that it's from the 30% fee charged by some app stores, though not every app store charges the same fee so not using an average figure isn't truly representative of how much more money Roblox & its developers would actually earn in the event that there were no such fees.
> except it clearly show the kind of Hollywood accounting going on in their other posts.
Do point out mistakes if you see any, I would be happy to correct them (-: I made another comment on how different methods of purchasing Robux affects the value at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340570> if that helps clear things up.
I suppose it could be considered steep for anyone making a multiplayer game while managing the hosting for themselves on a tight budget. Developers with strong knowledge of monetisation strategies can make good revenue streams from games with self-hosted or self-managed servers. Maybe these developers wouldn't be able to get the same amount of revenue if they used Roblox instead.
What Roblox provides is a platform to upload experiences to with minimal risk or skill required, and services that are heavily subsidised by money redirected from their most successful experiences. The barrier to entry is lowered to the floor, and most kids using the platform to learn game development wouldn't have otherwise learned about it if they had to manage servers, study networking, etc.
Cloud services are a thing, but they're usually expensive and Roblox is paying for them for you. Free cloud services are a thing, but they're usually very limited and what Roblox is providing is essentially unlimited.
For me, the killer app for Roblox is none of this. It's Creator Rewards <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards> (previously Engagement-based Payouts (previously Premium Payouts)), a programme where any player that pays for a Roblox Premium subscription (or is a new/returning user and buys anything on Roblox in the future) results in money earned for the developers of the experiences they play. This happens without requiring any monetisation strategy, microtransactions, or paid in-game products to be created by the developer. Nothing similar is provided by most other popular game engines or platforms.
For myself as a smaller Roblox creator with no interest in creating such monetisation strategies on my own experiences, Creator Rewards makes up a much bigger income proportion than it does for most large developers on the platform. Instead of ~10%, it's more like 90% for me, and I suspect that most kids learning to code games on Roblox without having good marketing skills are in the same bucket, and so the cut won't be nearly as steep for them.
> Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.
What 'supports' here does mean is that the difference between what Roblox takes as their share to pay their own expenses and what is paid out as profit directly to the developer via DevEx or Creator Rewards, namely incoming app-store & payment fees (paid when Robux goes into the platform, mainly from purchase of Robux or Roblox Premium, in the case of Roblox Premium then Creator Rewards also should be accounted for) and platform hosting & support costs would, on a platform that pays a revenue share instead of a profit share, have to be paid by the developer instead of by Roblox. It's true that developers never receive this money for themselves. However, it would be the same if they developed their experience outside of Roblox – this money to pay for their operating expenditure would come out of whatever revenue share they earn before it becomes profit. I personally feel it's disingenuous to attribute these costs that Roblox pays on behalf of the developer to profiteering or that the money goes towards their own investment. The share that is taken by Roblox for these purposes, and by consequence not directly to developers or support of their experiences, really is 33%.
I'm taking greater pains here to clearly differentiate between the profit-share model used by Roblox and the revenue-share model used by most other platforms in the industry because of the unique way the Roblox platform operates. This is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of the entire platform, and Roblox also makes this clear on the same page:
> If you develop outside of Roblox, you may have to pay for hosting, servers, moderation, and customer service on your own. You also have to dedicate time to managing these services; on Roblox you can focus on building your experience.
The tradeoff here is not Roblox taking a draconian cut to suck developers into their walled garden so they can have access to Roblox's exclusive platform and market. They're just paying for what the developer would have had to pay if the same experience was on a platform that didn't provide the same services or was selfhosted. This is, in essence, the same normalised tradeoff that most large technology companies make today through cloud services. This makes a lot of sense given that Roblox is using the cloud (primarily AWS) to provide some of these services.
Roblox is extremely clear and accurate about what these costs are and what tradeoffs the developer is making by using the platform, and that the developer is accepting a profit share rather than a revenue share.
The ONLY exception – the sole, singular exception to the 'profit share' rule that applies across the entire platform – is for experiences that surpass Roblox's default service limits (these default limits are never hit for 99.9999% of experiences). This is 30-50 experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/announcing-roblox-extended-ser...> across the entire platform (for context on this number, >200 experiences have reached 1 billion visits), almost all built by huge teams. These experiences need to apply for Roblox's Extended Services solution <https://create.roblox.com/docs/en-us/cloud-services/extended...>, and pay extra based on the quantity of services they use. This is done so Roblox can heavily subsidise smaller experiences on the platform and give them each a better chance at success. It's the kind of thing people advocate for in real societies and I'm glad it exists on Roblox.
> And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.
The asterisk here is that this is the minimum possible profit share – the cost for both Roblox and developers is higher if the money is taken outside of the platform because of the various taxes, currency exchange fees, and transfer fees that need to be paid by Roblox (or by their payment processor, Tipalti) before the profit ever gets given to the developer. These are detailed at <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/27985018895124>.
Do you work for roblox? You seem to have some affiliation to them
https://github.com/Heliodex
https://devforum.roblox.com/u/lewin4/
I do not work for Roblox. These links are to profiles I control, and I have been a developer on their platform for several years. It's given me great programming experience and a lot of strong connections, helping me kickstart my career pretty well. Overall I've been pretty happy with my 'exploitation'. :-)
Nowadays I work more on open-source Roblox-related libraries rather than developing on the platform itself, as game design and development isn't a strong area of expertise for me.
existing on a forum doesn’t mean they work for Roblox. i’m also on DevForum and last i checked i’m not working for them
Astroturfing is a well-known occurrence on this forum and I don't have any shame for being vigilant about it.
Fair enough, and you certainly shouldn't feel any shame for it. I apologise if I came across as if I were a shill or paid promoter (not the first time I've been accused as such), I've just been part of this debate for a long time and have written a lot on this particular topic.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
This is misleading because for every dollar spent, $0.67 is not what developers get paid. The link (https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences) you referenced clearly says 25% is the "Developer share".
The cost to run the platform is the platform's cost."Platform hosting & support" and "App stores & payment processing fees" should not be considered as developer operational cost
Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?
Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.
The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users
Wording Roblox trying to sell is deceiving.
Compare with other platforms. Payout model is as simple as platform takes % or fixed fee, rest is dev to keep. There's no verbiage that says dev share is 67% but you they actually get paid less.
What exactly goes behind the platform is platform's business, not the user. If developers are getting paid out $0.25 per dollar spent, that's the developers profit and rest is spent running the platform which is Roblox's concern.
The main reason this argument exists is because of Roblox being difficult to compare with other platforms. For the most widely used platforms/engines/storefronts in the industry, the main payout model is that the percentage (for storefronts ~30%, smaller for smaller platforms, for commercial game engines ~5%) or fixed/variable fee (per month or per seat in the client organisation) is taken as payment for using the distribution platform or a royalty for using the game engine. The remaining quantity (60-80%) is given to the developer of the game.
To make it clear, this is not profit! Any money earned after paying the storefront and the engine still needs to be spent on server hosting & maintenance, as well as moderation & legal compliance if a game is popular enough to need it. There also is a risk that the expenses taken away in this area could outweigh the revenue and the developers end up with a loss. Unless all expenses are negligible, the resulting revenue isn't just for the developer to keep.
Roblox pays for an experience's server hosting, maintenance, moderation, legal compliance, discoverability, engine development, app store fees, etc. As results, there is no risk of such loss, though Roblox's operating costs are much higher than a typical game storefront. I would consider these costs as developer operational costs. As far as I can tell, the key difference is the fact that one party is having their costs paid by another rather than one party giving another the money to pay for it themselves. This, to me, is an arbitrary distinction.
Other platforms don't have clauses that need to differentiate between money given to developers as profit and money given to developers as infrastructure/upkeep costs because these other platforms don't deal in the kind of broad integration that Roblox has from the storefront to the datacentres. In almost all cases, the final payout a developer gets from Roblox is pure profit.
The services Roblox is selling might not be using a standard industry pricing model, though it's still very clear and not at all deceptive what the product is the developers are paying for and what the profit share is after operating expenses have been paid for on their behalf.
Your response explains why Roblox might charge such a steep fee but that isn't my issue as I said earlier.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
Profit given to dev is $0.25 per dollar spent, not $0.67. It's as simple as that. I understand Roblox needs to maintain infra, support regional regulation, etc, but that's Roblox's business operational cost and shouldn't claim the delta of $0.42 is "given to developers" because developers never received it
I'll admit I read deeper into your argument than what you actually wrote.
Comparing with a platform like a digital distribution storefront, the infra & support & other OpEx still has to be paid. Could be argued that the developer has more choice on what to spend it on in the case they are given revenue directly, and in that case it would be their OpEx. That's why I think it's equally reasonable to consider it either as developer operations cost or a business one.
Other platforms routinely state that this money is given to the developers directly, which I suppose is true (given they also often host offline singleplayer games with generally much lower ongoing costs than multiplayer, which Roblox doesn't). Their communities also routinely refer to the money interchangeably as a "profit"/"revenue" cut, which I think is less forgivable and probably an indication of larger terminological clarity problems in the game industry regarding these cuts than just Roblox.
other platforms don't give you unlimited game servers, near-infinite scalability with no initial cost, a potential player base in the hundreds of millions, etc
https://create.roblox.com/docs/get-started/why-build-on-robl... https://create.roblox.com/docs/get-started/tools
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
So? Discord is a problem too. But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.
>Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases.
Again... and? By your logic IRL is the problem too because for some reason you think we should not expect Roblox to do anything about the fact that it connects children with pedophiles. But IRL isn't a platform. And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion because it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.
> But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that.
If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.
> it facilitates pedophiles predating on children.
I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour, nor does there exist enough evidence to make such a claim. Try red-teaming it: take the place of a bad actor that aims to cause harm to a child on the Roblox platform.
First, the actor will need an account. Next, they'll need to join a game (one with a low content maturity rating) and find a vulnerable child. Of course, they can't actually communicate with each other, so the actor needs to verify their age. For this, they will need either the face of a child, a verifiable ID document of a child, or the ability to defraud the system (likely by forging an ID document).
Assume they can get past that, and are now considered in the same age bracket as the child, and can thus communicate with them. They now need to direct the child off-platform to avoid them being caught very easily by Roblox's safety teams and systems. They won't be able to use a social media link, as the actor isn't permitted to send them and the child isn't permitted to receive them due to them both being classified as minors by Roblox. So the actor will need to use chat or private messages to give them specific instructions, which will of course be heavily censored due to both parties being minors.
Okay, perhaps an easier way would be to have the actor create an experience with some unfiltered messaging system and let the child join them in it (if they don't have parental experience restrictions available, in that case the actor will be out of luck). They'll of course need to get the experience approved with a sufficient content maturity level. However, any unfiltered messaging system is going to be caught quickly by automated checking; all experience communications must go through TextService:FilterStringAsync(). Roblox's text-filtering is industry-leading, and much more protective than almost any other platform that allows free-form text communication.
Regardless, we'll assume that the actor is able to direct the user off-platform successfully somehow. In the case that a member of the safety team does follow up on any chat/message history and finds a Terms of Service violation, they'll request that the alternative platform take action, which will of course have no impact as the communications aren't against their Terms of Service.
> And if Roblox was IRL, it would've already been sued into oblivion
I hope I've effectively demonstrated that it's much more difficult to abuse or exploit users on the platform after recent updates. If Roblox was IRL, they wouldn't be able to implement any of these safety checks or features, and they probably would be sued into oblivion.
>If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.
What are you, their PR agent?
>I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour.
It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
> What are you, their PR agent?
To clarify, no <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334849>. I don't have any affiliation with Roblox Corporation, and I hope this will be able to make clear to you that my intention is to debate this matter in good faith.
> It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
This isn't particularly constructive. Roblox publishes monthly updates on their safety status including statistics on the whole platform <https://about.roblox.com/newsroom>, and more in-depth statistics are also available for specific experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/4028415>. There isn't any similarly concrete evidence to claim that Roblox directly facilitates links between child sexual abusers and children, so the difference between opinion and fact from that side of the argument is moot.
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> Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money.
Wtf? That should not be legal.
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 practice any more than the corrosive and addicting nature of “games” that are essentially not much different than gambling, only more legal and across a wider user base.
I have a theory that much of the gambling industry in the USA has atrophied because the “investors”, aka, the corrupts and rotten people of the gambling industry that are/came from organized crime, have moved into “gaming”. I have specific reason to believe that was a general trend beyond specific cases. For example, people who’s job was to develop extremely addicting slot machine “games” both visually and in their manipulation of addiction patterns, i.e., how to push and milk someone to the limit before they can be pulled back into the gamblers fallacy.
But now I’ve gotten way off topic…but not really. It’s all dark, evil patterns; using game addiction to exploit the capture through debt bondage.
It’s not debt bondage in Roblox. It’s company scrip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk
Well, company scrip specifically IS actually illegal, so it must be something slightly different.
It would be legal to never pay it out in real money at all, if other marketplaces are any indication. Like “store credit” or gift cards. You can’t get it out of the walled garden and the walled garden unilaterally controls the value.
The point of the discrepancy between purchasing Robux and converting to fiat is to allow Roblox themselves to be able to pay for the infrastructure and support they provide to developers. If the rates were equal, there would be an effectively equal amount of money going into the platform as going out of it, which wouldn't leave enough to pay for their expenses.
This system is known as the Developer Exchange programme <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/articles/203314100>. The differing exchange rates are a necessary part of how the platform works and should 100% be legal. Analogues to "company scrip" or the like commonly used to unjustify the system are propagated by people that don't have a coherent enough grasp on the platform's economic system.
Isn't there a secondary market for Robux that then sells for much better prices?
that also has a cap, you're not getting more than $6 per 1000 robux there, which is a little under double the official rate but still only 2 thirds of what users actually paid for said robux. not including the risk of the platform banning you.
You're implying I can buy 1000 rbx for 10 usd. But I have been paying 5 times that in my country... So is the cash out rate also variable by country?
i picked the 10k robux for $100 package as the baseline - the grey market has never reached that ceiling. no, when cashing out, 1 robux is 1 robux, doesn't matter what currency you paid for it. an exception was if the robux was old, from the period where you could trade tix (free) for robux, but i don't think that applies anymore
What percentage of real-world money paid to Google goes out to Google SWEs?
(This is not to dismiss the roblox concerns, it's a "yes-and")
Yup, so many people focused on sexual exploitation that they ignore the traditional exploitation. Doesn't look any better when you realize ALL sexual exploitation is downwind of this financial one.
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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 in servers like Hypixel. It had 60K+ concurrent players last time I checked late last year.
There are almost definitely more people playing BedWars on Roblox than there are playing it on Minecraft at this very moment.
these days, Roblox BedWars averages 36K on weekends:
https://romonitorstats.com/experience/6872265039/
however, Hypixel seems to have overtaken it! last Saturday, it peaked at 39,000 concurrent players. i prefer the original gamemode anyway
Grow a Garden, a game on Roblox reached 21.6 million concurrent players.
That number is just insane.
For comparison - top Steam concurrent game is 3.2 million in PUBG.
I think it’s because of Kings Kids on their iPad playing this games vs being on PC playing a game on Miniclips or Ebaumsworld…
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 support Cracked Minecraft accounts for example.
Btw, this is also the reason why aternos is so popular within some communities because a free server which can have cracked option. Sign me up starts happening in bulk.
Me and my friends had an aternos server. It was truly something out of this world meeting them tomorrow after having 10 people together in a minecraft server.
I was the person though who spent way too much time and had less stacked gear lol in the end because some of my friends were like bandits haha, who stole my stuff from caves and in general, I have spent much of my time in minecraft during the starting (nothing -> diamond) then afterwards (diamond -> end/netherite)
Anyways my point is that we all could've definitely been on hypixel and something similar if Hypixel supported crack client. For example 11 of us or more played the game one time or another (not sure) within our single class of 50 people and only one of the guys had an minecraft account.
One of my friends literally got into some cash-app type stuff with a shady tetris to earn money app which showed ads to earn 25$ just so that he can buy minecraft to play on hypixel and the game fundamentally required something impossible and my friend felt so depressed at the time and he's one of the smartest people I know. A) people are easy to scam, B) he and many of us had so much desperation to play on hypixel in general.
You can get an alt (and I used to) for free or very cheap which would work everywhere unless on hypixel which had stricter rules and the difference between account prices could be 10x back or more that at that point its just better to make a minecraft account just for hypixel or similar. (I remember seeing accounts for 3$ or something that would work everywhere except hypixel)
I asked him if I should write a blog post to name and fame the company but he denied and he was truly sad that day :(
All of this combined can show how Roblox truly hits a jackpot with it being a free game. Most people might not pay but because of the perceived fame of the game and the number of people playing it. The people who pay would be more likely to pay and I see some people/kids who really look for ways to make robux online.
So with all of this, its easy to see how these (usually teen developers like us) can make something which can land 100k$ as unachievable that sounds.
one of my friends racked in quite a lot of money making 3d sprites in blender for these roblox people and in exchange used to have them buy blender extensions. Those extensions were truly a lot of money if he had to go buy them.
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.)
I would also add it's easier to download and set up than Minecraft. I still have nightmares about setting up various Microsoft and Xbox accounts and trying to help my kid play with her friends. IMO that Roblox doesn't have this friction is huge
In this day and age Prism launcher [0] will handle Minecraft and any modpacks you want to use. The only caveat is pointing it at your download folder so it can open the tabs for any mods that need a manual download and it will import them, but that's hardly difficult.
Minecraft (Mojang/Microsoft) have also made it clear that with them moving from OpenGL to Vulcan they're maintaining the ability for Minecraft to run on Mac as well as Windows/Linux, which is fantastic.
My bet is that the real different lies in mobile devices - iPads/tablets and phones are something that kids have more access to than laptops or desktops, and lots of people don't bother with parental controls.
[0] - https://prismlauncher.org/
Sure, but I still need a Microsoft account of some sort to play Minecraft? And parental controls still exists inside Microsoft or Xbox (is that the same account??). I spent a couple days just trying to make it possible for my daughter and her friends to be connected on Minecraft. And then you need to figure out what a launcher is, that Prism even exists. And you get a completely different experience on iPad where Prism doesn't exist. It's stil a hassle compared to Downloading free Roblox and start playing and having the same experience across devices.
I feel like parent post is maybe joking/being sarcastic? If not they are kinda proving the point.
My 9 yo has alt accounts I didn't setup, that's how easy Roblox is. I have MC/Microsoft account info for like 10 people, mostly family/friends kids, in my password manager because their parents were fine with them playing, but didn't want to deal with account management. Every sleep over starts with me logging everyone in on the various available devices, with their parents on standby to help with the multi-factor shitstorm that ensues.
Roblox is getting pretty bad though with age verification, and they will NOT help recover a lost/hacked account no matter how much money was spent on it. 5 year account, likely thousands of dollars in robux spent on it, kid clicked a bad link and it's gone. Roblox just responds they can't help, even though the original email address was verified, and used 2 factor auth through its history. They used to be helpful, they don't care anymore.
In a way I found sketchy/scammy aspects of Roblox helpful to educate my kid about that sort of thing. Early on a classmate scammed her out of some item on AdoptMe, nothing monetary valuable but it shook her and really caused her to think critically about online transactions and security. These days the friend group talks about IP bans and account bans so we did a good session about what IP addresses are, how they work, etc. She also did temper her expectations on how attached to get to the main account since it can get hacked or locked etc.
> 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.
That whole schpiel is why Minecraft isn't free. That people are willing to go through that. There's a lot of free games.
Roblox is slot machines for kids
Games are filled with loot boxes that drop exquisite items on chance. It's a repeated cycle of charging robux only to spend on another slot machine.
US regulation is far behind protecting children from such scheme. Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.
>Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.
Crazy to say this when they've basically pioneered and perfected gacha games.
Both things are true, though.
The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]
There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...
[1] - http://www.vg247.com/2012/05/18/kompu-gacha-freemium-systems...
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.
I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.
In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
I have called them casinos for kids elsewhere due to the bright colors, flashing text, and money counters going up, up, up on the screen.
And also because my kids can spend tens of dollars in minutes on it.
It’s not that bad. Sure, all the games allow you to spend money to rapidly get better, but the core gameplay loops work just fine without it.
Dunno man, when the “core gameplay loop” gets interrupted every 2 minutes with “do you want to pay to win?” Banners and 50% of the screen is covered in ads and trap buttons that pop up a purchase dialog when you press them accidentally (a given on mobile with touch controls), it’s fairly obvious the gameplay loop is the last thing in the developers mind.
> games allow you to spend money to rapidly get better
Audience is the problem here. It's obviously not a big deal if the platform is targeted for adults, but majority of users are underage. The platform can certainly implement guardrails for the vulnerable users if they wish to
Those guardrails exist. They’re called parents. My son doesn’t have a credit card and therefore doesn’t have robux. Having no robux, he can’t spend it on anything.
Interesting. You don’t think adults have the same problem?
Anecdotally, I have 3 nieces and 2 nephews and only the oldest has avoided Roblox
Every Christmas and birthday now is "I want Robux" and they are actively annoyed if they get anything else
This thing is bad for children
Pretty sure I was annoyed when I got anything but computer games. Which, I’m pretty certain, adults told me were bad for me.
Just because two things are "annoying", doesn't mean they have the same ethical problems.
The fun single player games only need to convince you they are a fun experience and you should buy them once.
Games with loot boxes are trying to convince you every day to spend money on them. Dunno about roblox, but often the items are visible, and "defaults" are often perceived as poor or noobs.
We can't be naive: It's a whole other level and companies are spending millions on manipulating kids to spending more and more money.
You guys were getting presents?
> the core gameplay loops work just fine without it.
Of course it's functional, it has to string people along for enough time to get them to start paying.
That doesn't mean grinding a system tuned to get you hooked enough to give up and pay is a 'just fine' as a game. It's openly deliberate malicious design.
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 night under my covers with a flashlight reading.
There is a big difference between games now and games then. E.g. an SNES game was made to be fun, but not to be intentionally addictive, you would never buy a new game if it was.
Many online games are designed to be as addictive as crack to extract as much revenue as possible. Our kid is in the typical video gaming age, almost every kid of her age is stuck in Roblox and some in Fortnite.
Setting limits helps, but more broadly, games that require a monthly subscriptions or buying in-game currency should just be outright forbidden for anyone under 16 or 18. Yes, kids need to learn to recognize and suppress abusive patterns, but these addictive games, together with social media, and Youtube Shorts is destroying their mental health and normal, healthy exploration of the world.
I think parents are also failing in general. It's insane how many use tablets as a pacifier, some give 2 year-olds an iPad to play with. Or setting bad examples like using phones themselves at the dinner table.
I’m a parent. Girls 7 and 4. I think you’re right about a number of parent habits.
Hard to impose a device limit on a kid if that kid watches you use your device constantly. I’m not some hero here - constantly reminding myself to be aware.
Now, I think imposing limits in the open world is a specific challenge. To your point, you’ll see kids at restaurants on iPads. Well, now your kid wants iPad. You don’t give it? They start a shitstorm.
I don’t think an outright device ban is so critical. But limits are important, and even more important is sticking to what you said you would do as a parent. With mine, they sense that moment of giving and almost instinctually rush to exploit. That said, flexibility is important too - knowing when you use it.
As for game, I set a rule on an iPad. No games with ads. Those seem to be the worst of them, and there are tons.
Now, I think imposing limits in the open world is a specific challenge. To your point, you’ll see kids at restaurants on iPads. Well, now your kid wants iPad. You don’t give it? They start a shitstorm.
Our daughter certainly did not have access to an iPad at that age. Maybe she could use her mom's iPad (I don't have one) once every few weeks for a brief period. The shitstorm only happens a few times, they get over it pretty quickly.
It got harder once she was 9 or 10, because most kids have access to a phone after school. Once she got a phone and a tablet, there have been very clear time restrictions. A lot of kids hang around on devices all afternoon, the rule here on weekdays is that she can have some screen time before dinner. (I remember that also being TV time for us when we were kids.)
She was allowed to play on the Nintendo Switch when she was 7 or 8, but only fun, non-addictive games (the typical Nintendo titles) and no multi-player.
Hard to impose a device limit on a kid if that kid watches you use your device constantly. I’m not some hero here - constantly reminding myself to be aware.
Yeah, that is hard. I think banning phones from shared moments like (the time around) breakfast, dinner, or when having a cup of tea together is an easy and impactful move. Those are moments when they are also not playing, so it's a good time to be together without distractions.
My kiddos don't have that access either. They do have their own iPads but not with unlimited access. Most common usage: flights, long drives. Otherwise, no weekday or weekend usage for the most part.
As for the shitstorm, yes, they get used to your rule and calm down. But that was my point: lots of folks overreact and create the vicious cycle. Your kid complains, you give the phone, they shut up. Repeat. Repeat again. Now your kid expects the phone. And now you believe they will only ever stay calm if you give them the phone.
Breaking the cycle requires you to stick to your statements, but also, in public, to not give a shit about embarrassment. When you worry if you're disturbing everyone else or you feel inadequate as a part that can't calm a kid, you might give in. You can't!
PS: multiplayer games in my statement -> multi-player with me. Not internet.
Kudos dad/mom, that's a hard job. I feel like getting them exposed to technology and the dopamine generator that is games as a younger kid can help you teach more lessons around managing habits that can become maladaptive. Our world is increasingly engineered for addiction, and having conversations about self control starting young can help develop maturity. I know plenty of friends (2001 baby) that did not have access to internet/games until the 8th grade when the school provided laptops, and they STRUGGLED to handle the intensity of that distraction because they were never exposed and weren't taught healthy habits around technology. Exposure therapy is a great way to manage that.
Yes - I think the general approach of collaborating on things with your kids is the way to go, though not always the path I choose (I'm a normal dad with my own pluses and minuses).
But if you only ever say no, or the reverse, and never explain or attempt to explain, you're missing some opportunities to chat with your kids. They of course need to sort some things on their own too.
I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.
I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.
The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.
TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.
I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.
(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)
Yeah, the games my SWE friends and I have played were completely free.
We set time limits on tablet and rules like getting your homework done first, but my 9 year old specifically begs me to let him have Roblox, which I think he is too young to play.
I told him he can play it, but he has to beat Chrono Trigger (tablet version) first. He didn't even get to the county fair and gave up, saying it was too boring, the nerve!
Anecdote here: I was given a computer at age 4, and I didn't really have any limits on how long I could use it. On the other hand, I wasn't allowed to register any accounts and I had to ask before visiting sites I had never been to before. >75% of my time on the computer at that age was spent on hacking with Scratch. I learned a lot and developed my love of computers at that age. I'm absolutely glad that I didn't have "screen time", but I can also see that if I didn't have the limits I did I could have ended up pretty badly.
I agree with the 'setting limits' bit.
But also maybe the parent post and you refer to kids of different ages?
I didn't have access to a computer until I was 9, and then also we didn't have tables and smartphones, so there computer was only available at home as well.
I think below a certain age the limit is fine to be set as 'not at all'.
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...
The computer games I used to play are nothing like the stuff my son is playing. Its not just a matter of how much time is spent. They are the same as social media, engineered for maximum engagement, contain ads or try to sell you something .
I have heard a number of parents saying their kids are "good behaved" when they are silently glued to a screen, while roaming outside, making noise and playing are bad behaviours, specially when they break things or get a bruise.
Worse still, they are so well-behaved, with their tablet and headphones on, watching YouTube or playing games.
My nephew (8) has a VR headset. Doh.
playing Roblox got me into game development, and helped to teach me the basics of general programming. i did have previous experience from Python etc, but Roblox gave me a breeding ground for actually doing something with those skills.
Best to be playing with acceleration than to be problem solving on video games... rightttttt
"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 communication/play is involved.
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.
Implying there's a simple solution that isn't being implemented because they weren't forced to by law. So what is that simple solution?
Children typically don't have any form of government issued ID. You can verify someone is a legal adult (you probably shouldn't, but the point is that you can) whereas you can't easily verify that someone online is a child.
I didn't say there was a "simple solution".
I said it would be an easy problem for the software services if they had a proper age verification service that was government sanctioned.
If it's an easy problem then there's a simple solution.
You seem to have glossed over my second paragraph. How is this service supposed to work for children?
Sorry, didn't respond to that.
All humans must be assigned digital identity by the government. You won't be able to use a connected digital device without assigning it identity.
Okay. That would indeed make it an easy problem to solve from the perspective of a service operator. However I don't think I'd consider that to be a "sensible reform". Rather a dystopia that must be avoided at all costs.
> It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.
What would these reforms look like?
For starters, get rid of Section 230.
Then getting over the collective fear of the government having a role in our online identity. They provide foe our physical identity so I don't understand why we're afraid of them providing our digital identity too.
I thought that sounded off, Wikipedia says it's half of all American kids.
It’s certainly more than half of all my kids.Also more than half of the kids I know in Japan.
I realize people may find this controversial, but from personal experience with gaming, I see all of these types of games as “predators” in and of themselves when they are “monetized”, because they are deliberately and explicitly exploiting the addicting nature of games in general, by being and manipulating a freebase of dopamine and serotonin just like the gambling industry does/used to.
If we survive this era with an intact advanced civilization, I believe people will look back on this period and “games” as an insane thing to permit, let alone facilitate and perpetrate upon one’s own children, the next generation, the offspring necessary for survival of a life form, species, race, society, or culture.
The ideal system as far as I'm concerned is one that regulates Roblox out of existence for a variety of sins.
At this point I'm just waiting for someone to dig up a name associated with Roblox in the Epstein files, because that's the only way I can conceive of how they've managed to avoid getting shut down this long.
Please don't make excuses for literal evil p*dophile megacorporations. There is plenty of low hanging fruit, and even if there wasn't, this issue is important enough that if they can't fix it they should go out of business.
1. They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts. Done. Problem fixed. Oh, but they'll lose money, won't they? That takes precedence over child safety.
2. The community is willing to help. You can find examples of independent actors uncovering tens of thousands of NSFW communities and accounts and submitting them to Roblox with detailed descriptions of the activities of each one, only for Roblox to perma-ban AND SUE the people doing the investigations, and not ban the offending accounts.
3. They can build an actual strong safety team. A $40B company can afford to throw a few million dollars per year to hire 200 people to do that same investigatory work. This is typical tech firm behavior, where they believe every problem can be automated away, and they're not willing to do the minimal amount of manual labor.
1. they have
2. they do (to the extent they can)
3. obviously they have a safety team. they have a dedicated page about it:
https://about.roblox.com/safety
1. Kids under 9 can use chat with parent consent, for kids over 9 don't even need that. After 13, there's no option to even disable it for parents [1].
2. Suing multiple youtubers who come to you with evidence of child abuse on your platform does not square with "they do" in any concievable universe [2] [3]
3. Oh, guess all is good then!
[1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/43611824582292-... [2] https://www.altmanllp.com/personal-injury/sexual-assault-vic... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox%E2%80%93Schlep_controve...
your own source quotes as following:
> To use Communication features like Experience chat, Voice chat, and Party chat, all users must successfully complete an age check.
your words were "They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts". which they have. all "non age verified accounts" cannot use chat.
i have never attempted to assert that Roblox is a completely safe platform, or indeed that their safety team is as effective as it could be - however, your flippant statements were provably untrue with any research.
as for Schlep - while i applaud his stated aims, he was effectively "baiting" predators, offering to move conversations off-Roblox through platforms like Discord to bypass the moderation enforced by Roblox. in general, i fundamentally hate the idea of predator hunters; it seems so strange to monetize justice in this way, especially when it seems they care more about the content than the outcome of their "cases"
I should've worded this better. By "non-verified accounts" I mean basically mean "accounts that haven't been verified by an ID check". This is the only means that I consider an actual verification, face/photo scan is a PR stunt and malicious compliance.
I assume I don't have to try too hard to convince someone on this forum how easy photo/video verification is to bypass. Look at Australia, it's happening en masse right now.
Most age verification systems guard against children pretending to be adults. If we're talking about social media, this is a fairly low stakes thing, and false positives aren't too critical - sure, a teen will bypass the Instagram age-check and use Instagram, big deal.
Here you're trying to guard against the exact opposite - adults pretending to be children. Not only are the stakes way higher as there's no legitimate reasons to try and bypass the system, you also don't have access to the only reliable method - government ID checks.
Edit: I can concede the point about Schlep, as what he does is dangerous and I could see someone "follow in his footsteps" and ge thurt. However you have to keep in mind that he's never the first to talk to these people -- there's so many of them that he's literally had dozens of them approach him. I was mainly thinking of Ruben Sim, who compiled a large database of NSFW accounts without any real world interaction, and was banned and sued for it.
Parent accounts require an ID [1].
Kids don't have ID. How would that work?
I think one approach would be that all communication features could be opt in, by parents. but, that doesn't actually "solve" anything, since predators just make child accounts for themselves, and opt in.
sounds like your solution would have to be "no children communicate on the internet".
[1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407282410644-I...
yeah, i agree with your points on age verification. ironically, the main backlash from the Roblox community was that they were even rolling out verification in the first place - not that it didn't go far enough! i'm sure you'll agree it's a tricky problem to solve - if communication is fully banned, then many children will simply move to lesser-moderated platforms.
i'm not a Ruben Sim fan. while his list of "ERPing" accounts is a good idea, and it's amazing to see real games implement blocks on these players, i find his opinions on the furry community strange and a bit obsessive
> Please don't make excuses for literal evil pdophile megacorporations.*
I hate Roblox with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns, and wish they and their business model to be utterly destroyed.
But allowing our emotions to override our objectivity is not the solution. It's important to be as fair and objective as possible if we want our arguments to be taken seriously.
> 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 allowance in Robux, so I can again see that's the branding
but this is largely a symptom of parents nationwide not paying attention whatsoever
I've talked to many parents, aunts and uncles, they don't know they're the central bank of Roblox of a currency that can be accumulated and cashed out, let alone that its a distributed set of third party experiences.
Roblox Corporation already has age gated talking ability on platform. What specifically should they be doing when everything happens in different communities and off platform?
>I run a studio that makes Roblox experiences and this is Discord's problem
Not really if Roblox is the one connecting the pedos and kids in the first place and I don't see how that is remotely controversial.
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking. If I understand the business correctly, the brands are inquiring to design specialized worlds in Roblox so kids can play in them and look at ads?
that's not my business, the economy is pretty vast with several key verticals
the experiences I'm involved with just have their own things to purchase as part of the game loop. it's much more akin to a vending machine.
never involved with any brand, at least that wasn't roblox native, and by roblox native I mean influencers that may as well be a brand of their own.
if you followed the "metaverse" concept from earlier in the decade, there was Meta's attempt, there were crypto and NFT based attempts, although that's all said to have died, the metaverse is happening within Roblox. the point if that if you had a grasp of what the metaverse was supposed to be, you can use that understanding to understand what Roblox is
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.
This doesn’t really make sense though. If half of all American children are on your platform of course that’s a prime target. That’s a volume issue, not something inherent to the platform.
I’m going to guess those numbers are still far lower than the number of times kids get messed up by a trusted adult.
Crazy that of all places someone here will say that the volume has nothing to do with the platform? The entire point of the platform is its size. The entire point of the tech industry is its size...
Parents haven't changed their behavior and the age gating is there now and the activity on Discord is still the problem
Not an excuse, not pointing fingers, as a betting man thats the actual answer and any other bet would go to zero, its what happening
It sounds like, from this thread, that it's Roblox themselves who are the predators.
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.
Please check this box to confirm that you do _not_ possess a government issued photo ID ...
Sorry, in order to use this service you will need to visit your local police station and have them verify that you are in fact a child ...
Yeah I'm not seeing how this is supposed to work. I don't think age verification solves very many real world problems. (It does mitigate some, such as alcohol consumption. Just not most.)
>Yeah I'm not seeing how this is supposed to work
You could verify the ID of an adult who vouches for the child they are a legal guardian of. That way, if it turns out that Brayden(M12) is actually Linda(F45) you know who to send law enforcement to to ask some very pointed questions.
That said, I don't think online ID verification is effective and even if it was, it wouldn't be worth the level of mass privacy invasion. If your goal is actually to help kids who are victims of abuse, your efforts are much better spent elsewhere. For example: making child abuse report hotlines/websites more easily accessible and widely known, fixing social services so that they actually provide better help when requested instead of making things worse, better education for children about what is and is not OK behavior even from "trusted" adults, and how to get help from someone who isn't a relative when you need it. "Stranger danger" hysteria catches all the outrage and public discussion, but is the least common source of abuse.
> fixing social services so that they actually provide better help when requested instead of making things worse
Agreed, and I wish more people would realize this. When I was a kid, one of my friend's brothers was accused of molestation. The accused kid was around 8 or 9 and the victim was around 5 or 6. The social services came in and immediately got the mom fired from her job (she was a school teacher), put the family through tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, utterly disrupted the lives of the entire family, got the accused kicked out of school and put in a special school for troubled kids (which itself brought a whole host of issues), and nearly ripped the family apart. There was no evidence at all of the crime, other than the word of the accuser (a 5 or 6 year old child). Fast forward a few years later and the accuser apologized profusely and admitted that it had never happened. Oh and also the accused was at a friend's house at the time of the supposed molestation, and the friends' parents had told the investigators that. Law enforcement dropped the case having determined it not likely to be true and certainly nowhere near the evidence for prosecution (in fact, there was evidence that the event never happened), but social services proceeded with all of the above anyway. So yeah, there's a lot of work to do to make anybody want to trust them to help rather than make everything worse.
Enforce parental control (with a verified adult account for the parent) for all child accounts.
The parent will input the real birthdate of their child, or it's their responsibility if the child encounters anything not age appropriate.
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?
> 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.
I feel like for a 11yo, you can't even explain the risks. Not just for lack of true comprehension, but also just kids shouldn't have to worry about that stuff, and just be kids.
Wut? If they’re using the internet they should be aware of that stuff. That’s what ‘just be kids’ means these days. Just being a kid isn’t a static state of being.
It's no longer safe for children to be unsupervised on the internet.
So then they shouldn’t use the internet. I’m not going to fill my kids mind with all the dangers in the world when all they should be thinking about when they’re 8 is academics, friends and personal pursuits and achievements.
My son has had the local police do a presentation to his class/preschool/daycares about online safety every year since he was 4 so it's pretty drilled in by this point.
Getting them to accept the normalisation of surveillance while they're young?
And then people wonder why authoritarianism is on the rise...
Getting watched by your parents is far different than getting watched by the government. It's no different than parent watching out of the window on kids playing in backyard
> And then people wonder why authoritarianism is on the rise...
It's on the rise because of utter failure of progressive govt to do what people want them to do. People want country to be more prosperous, not to have bleeding heart activists import immigrants or other leftist bullshit. Authoritarian turn is knee jerk reaction to that beacuse they are only ones promising the country for the citizens of the country. If you want less of that, make left that cares about country's people
Still, at some point you do have to give some privacy to your kids. I know the trend is helicopter parenting but it's not helping the kid to be overprotecting.
Getting watched by your parents is far different than getting watched by the government. It's no different than parent watching out of the window on kids playing in backyard
Maybe it's a cultural difference, but after age ~8-9 or so, we would just roam around our town/village without our parents knowing where we were. You just had to be back home at 17:30 for dinner.
Yes, there was some mischief (we were kids), but you had to own up to it if you got caught and there weren't smartphone cameras around everywhere, so if you did something dumb, it would not be on the internet the next day.
The problem with modern games and social media is that they are like giving crack to a 10 year-old. They are made for dopamine hits that leads to addiction. Kid's brains are not fully developed until well after 18, so they have limited capability to recognize and deal with addiction.
People want country to be more prosperous, not to have bleeding heart activists import immigrants or other leftist bullshit. Authoritarian turn is knee jerk reaction to that beacuse they are only ones promising the country for the citizens of the country.
Oh my...
This is ridiculous. She 11, take the damn tablet away from her.
I hate it. What a waste of a perfectly good generation.
The generation that's going to enter adulthood in the age of unchecked climate change and AI taking over their careers?
I say let them enjoy themselves while they still can.
The generation that's going to enter adulthood in the age of unchecked climate change and AI taking over their careers?
You forgot the part where they also became addicts to games that only exist to funnel money to tech feudalist overlords.
Reminds me of when kids were doing the same on MySpace
https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20070917/SUB/709170352...
https://mixergy.com/interviews/andrew-fashion/
Or RuneScape.
I just laughed out loud. My friends and I LOVED RuneScape in middle school. I'll meet yall in the wilderness to trade armor.
Maybe every generation feels this. But I really think ours lucked out. We were shielded by childhood from the worst of the early times and then bolstered with past success for the worst of the later times.
I was big into the WC3 custom maps community back in the day, the idea that you could make money doing any of this was silly. The point when I was growing up was two things:
1. Make something fun to play
2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio
I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.
I love the comeback of old school RuneScape! The good kind of nostalgia.
So true. A member of the clan I was in was operating a proper hedge fund, taking in investments from the clan and using it to flip on the Grand Exchange. Iirc he was even doing sorts of arbitrage, market making, and other advanced stuff.
Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol
Used to sell cooked lobbies to friends for cash back in the first few years of RuneScape. Good times
RuneScape millionaires?
There were dozens of ways to make money off of RuneScape back in the day. Selling bot scripts, running bot farms (this is still very lucrative to this day), running gambling rings, bulk buying gold and reselling, the list goes on.
The ecosystem was incredible and it was basically a crash course in Anarcho-capitalism, I'm pretty immune to any kind of scam because of having been in that environment.
I made close to 20 grand as a 16 year old through some bug abuse, over the course of 2 weeks if I recall. But alas, I blew it pretty quickly because easy come, easy go.
I probably lack imagination, but how would gambling work in this game?
The whole game is basically one giant random number generator, so there was a lot to gamble on.
E.g., two players put one million gold pieces in their inventory, equip no equipment (so no attack bonuses), every hit on each other is now an RNG roll with identical odds for each player. Battle to the death and voila.
That one's quite basic but there were more elaborate games such as flower poker. The game had a flower seeds item which when planted would spawn a flower on the floor. The flower would be of a random color (e.g. red, blue, white, ...). People would bet on which color flower would pop up, or plant plant five flowers sequentially and try and get something akin to a poker hand (e.g. three of a kind, full house).
Quite silly, in retrospect, as I'm typing this out.
Quite imaginative, too... thanks for answering :)
RuneScape private servers used to bring in tons of money. I helped manage one when I was in my early teens, and I can confirm the owner (who was only a few years older than I) was bringing in mid six-figures annually.
Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.
Staking was a built in feature of RuneScape in the duel arena before it was removed. They did not "invent" it themselves.
They did run a dicing clan as well, FWIW, although I doubt they were the first to do it.
I had swim teammates who made at least hundreds of thousands minting and selling autominers on eBay. I assume if I knew a couple who did that well some made millions.
I admittedly harbor a bunch of resentment towards Roblox for the predatory way they have encircled my childrens' friends, and my children as well, so take my feelings with a grain of salt.
I didn't get far in this article.
It feels like the modern equivalent of "there is a kid named LeBron James who is only 19 and will be make millions in the NBA." Roblox Millionaires might be true, but feels like an anomaly, and in this case, causes serious harm IMHO. Lebron James actually has used his wealth and prominence to make a difference in the world, and if he encouraged kids to get active, it feels like on balance a good thing.
I just don't see a good/happy career path for anyone becoming a Roblox Millionaire no matter whether it is true for even one person. Maybe it isn't the point, but if it isn't, why even celebrate it?
My youngest has played Roblox half her life, but is very angry about recent decisions like requiring ID to chat in-game.
Still, if she's anything like other players, she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games, and we've spent a few $100 on Robux gift cards over the years.
> she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games
It sounds like you disapprove, or at the very least recognise it’s not harmless, so I’m struggling to understand why you allow and incentivise it (by pouring hundreds of dollars into it).
Would you expand on that? I have no intention of judging you as a parent—if you say you approve of her time on Roblox, that’s that. I’m only asking because it seems you might not.
You know, just as a thought, if you have engaged with her like taking her outdoors or other activities, she wouldn't spend so much time or money on a stupid online video game.
Telling parents how to raise their children, while also making baseless assumptions of their life as well, is an approach with which you'll only antagonize people.
The parent comment does not appear to be supportive of what's happening regarding Roblox ("mindless").
If they are not interested in making the situation any different, but just want to vent, I think it's a waste of everybody's time.
> antagonize people
You can potentially antagonize anyone in any situation on an online forum even with the nicest words. I don't see how it matters. If the person is not receptive, I couldn't care less.
> You can potentially antagonize anyone in any situation on an online forum even with the nicest words.
True. But the nicest words are less likely to be taken as antagonist than the nastiest words. That’s why we should still strive to use the nicest words when we can, assuming the goal is to have a chance to change the other person’s mind.
> I don't see how it matters. If the person is not receptive, I couldn't care less.
It matters because we don’t yet know if the person in question is receptive. Maybe they are.
Or, meet halfway. Talk to her ABOUT the games. At least attempt that.
Reminds me of a family member who complained about his oldest playing Minecraft. He said “I don’t understand it” - guy is 49, grew up in Montana, shot guns as a teen. Very different upbringing.
But I never saw him attempt to understand. My daughter is not stuck on games at the moment but when she does play I do my best to talk through with her.
Multiplayer Switch games on TV help!
I wonder why? Why was there not a point at which you said no?
I hope she is 30 because playing Roblox half your life for anyone under 18 (which means you started at 9) does not sound healthy.
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.)
Is there some other platform where ideas aren't copied?
I think game ideas can get copied everywhere but it happens much faster on Roblox and there is almost no recourse for the smaller developer who got copied.
The platform doesn't care when someone makes a copy, there's no way for players to push back and actually hurt the developer making the copy (unlike Steam where trying to do it will get you bombarded with negative reviews and buried by the algorithm), and superficial visual quality and marketing attracts players more than actual gameplay quality.
Depending on what is copied.
If we are talking about game mechanics, they get copied all the time, of course. If it's about superficially reproducing a game including the assets, I don't think any big players on PC or consoles steal ideas from indie/smaller developers. That is despised and likely not allowed by the platform, if not challenged in court.
(I have no idea about what happens on mobile platforms)
Curious, how does the game monetise, do you have loot-boxes in-game or something? Or is it enough that people play it? What kind of game mechanics are possible to build around?
Did you you have previous game making experience? I've toyed with the idea of trying to make it a small project for me and my kids but I thought it might be a bit beyond them (and then ultimately become just my project)
i had experience, mainly with web development; that being said, Roblox Studio is very intuitive for building and UI design, as is Lua (specifically Luau).
my advice is to just start building something. the Toolbox has thousands of 3D models which make the initial experience easier and more fun, and there are hundreds of YouTube tutorials teaching you the basics of Roblox scripting.
also use the excellent DevForum, which has thousands of explainer posts:
https://devforum.roblox.com/c/resources/community-tutorials/...
what does a decent residual mean?
enough money to cash out via DevEx, Roblox's developer program, every month or so ($110). it's absolutely not a salary - there are barely five people playing at any given time - but given i've done nothing in a year, it's appreciated.
edit: looked at the old stats online. a few years back that game was pulling $1,500+ with no effort each month
The one place where Lua coders are valuable.
Balatro was made in Love2d which is Lua!
Oh wow, I would not have guessed that
Factorio! The factory must grow! (And it must be modded in Lua).
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.
It's location-based like Pokémon Go. If you play it at the right place you can definitely make a living wage from it :)
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 assets
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...
> Today, at 19, he’s collecting $400,000 a month for his creation... In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby.
Lol if he waits like half a year he should have plenty enough to go make games as a hobby.
Roblox games have a shelf life of days, getting to a month or more you either have to produce days worth of content in less than a day - it's extremely exhausing.
ah interesting, thanks for adding that context.
>Founded in 2004, Roblox paid out $1.5 billion to game creators last year. On average, the top 1,000 developers — individuals or companies — earned $1.3 million, according to the company.
So 87% of payouts go to the top 1000 developers.
>https://archive.ph/6V4RI
Archive.ph made me solve 5 captchas before I gave up. VPN isn't even on. Anybody got a different link?
> Archive.ph made me solve 5 captchas
Are you sure you haven't been DoS'ing a random website?
https://au.pcmag.com/news/116045/wikipedia-blacklists-archiv...
I clicked the link. That's it.
Same problem. Moved to Chrome from Safari and that fixed it.
Seems possible that MMO's will have a resurgence once the Roblox generation comes of age.
The traditional Bloomberg money worship.
> But the platform’s more successful game makers say they don’t have complaints.
Imagine being a journalist and just accepting this and ending a paragraph with it.
> “In Amsterdam we did get a VIP table at a club overlooking everyone,” Zirschky says. “But we always make sure to try McDonald’s in every country.”
Blind consumerism making up for a lost childhood? Yikes, even for Bloomberg.
I remember how hard I had to lobby to get my parents to agree to ~$12 a month (that I paid for with 2 weeks of my allowance) for EverQuest.
This is so far out of the realm of what I do with computers that I'm not even really sure what Roblox is. I guess sort of a virtual game world? Seems crazy that there's so much money in it.
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 massive amount of money raked in by some free to play mobile phone titles. For example, Playrix has a revenue comparable to Ubisoft, but their main products are a series of match-3 type games for phones.
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.
It's so large now that most of that famous "Apple Services Revenue" is just their 30% cut of mobile game payments.
I thought they included Google's payout in that category?
In even simpler terms it's the current "shut the kids up" tax that parents pay.
It's not to shut the kids up, it's to shut them in so that all the Karens that rat your ass out the minute your kid is spotted outside on their own won't be able to kick off an investigation based on a phone call that it's illegal for you to even see the complainant of in the report.
Society basically expects you to hide your kids if you can't watch them every second, the externality society imposes on parents is the costs of boarding them up inside.
It's basically a litmus test for whether you have kids or not at this point. The age at which kids become aware of Roblox from their peers is getting younger and younger in my experiences anyway. Before I had kids, I had very little idea either, and I consider myself fairly well acquainted with PC gaming.
The solution is to give them a taste of better built (specifically competetive) games and they will never like roblox.
The solution is to give them a taste of better built (specifically competetive) games and they will never like roblox.
In my experience, this doesn't work. The primary reason being that most of their friends are playing Roblox and if they are consuming any content on the internet, much of it at their age is related to Roblox.
Our kids have never been allowed to play, and it still comes up somewhat regularly despite all the various games and consoles they have available.
Agree 100% with the sibling responses here. This almost never works in my experience. Kids want to play what their friends are playing - I remember feeling this way a long time ago too.
Mine rejected a Nintendo switch 2 in favor of more robux...
Roblox is a game engine and social platform. The basic idea is, you create a game in their engine, using their development tools (such as Roblox Studio), and then you market/promote the game on their website for others to play together with their friends. The game runs on their servers, and you don't have to worry about your own infra if you don't want to, in exchange for the money players spend on Robux (their virtual currency, and now the only one), which they can in turn spend on developer products and other paid items that you set up in your games. Then once you make enough Robux from player purchases, you can cash it out through a process called Developer Exchange which essentially makes you a W-2 employee of Roblox (or whatever financial partner they use, Tipalti?)
The idea is that people like playing with their friends and when they can take their friends and make new friends across hundreds of thousands of games they stay for a long time and (they or their parents) make lots of purchases. The social features of Roblox are a huge part of the appeal, even though I was mostly interested in the engine.
And how does it differ from Second Life?
Second life is trying to be a metaverse in the style of snowcrash; it’s one big world. Roblox is more like Newgrounds, where you have a bunch of distinct games or experiences that you select from a menu, but skins and currency and whatnot are portable between the games.
Easy to dev for. Runs on a potato. There are many maps and modes.
Kids in current year like it
The main difference is there that Roblox games are fun.
> The travel offers him a fresh perspective. It shows him that his work “isn’t that big a deal. It’s not the end of the world because ultimately there’s people walking down the streets of Sydney right now who don’t care about my Roblox game performing 50% worse.” > Colley has indulged, just a little. Last year, after the Roblox developer conference, he took a private jet to Las Vegas with some friends. Did he place any bets? “I’m not old enough,” he says, “but I had people gambling next to me.”
Honestly it's encouraging to hear that some teenage millionaires have some very reasonable views, it certainly goes against the stereotype of young wealth. I hope these aren't the exceptions that prove the rule.
Do you know that in roblox you go into games and you just walk over something and it prompts you to buy stuff to "beat the game" or "level up". It's an exploitative "game" that targets kids.
I mean, I don't understand why those young teens can spend that MUCH money on it, does their parents allow this virtual spending thing?
Consider how much money used to be spent by children in aggregate at suburban shopping malls.
What used to go to local business as kids and teens spend time out together, it now goes to a single company on the other side of the world.
What a boring civilization
"In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby."
Kid is making $400k PER MONTH...and he wants to do this for 10 YEARS before he is comfortable retiring. Apparently his FIRE number is $40M.
Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
If you’re planning to not work at all, $1 million is approx. $35,000 per year in salary.
At $5 million, we’re talking more $200k per year. I’d likely still work.
At $10 million, we’re seeing more like $400k.
At $40 million, you can can early at least $1 million/year. This kind of puts you in a new bracket for things you can blow money on.
If you quit working entirely, you will become not very employable so you need to consider that.
Traffic for his game has declined by 90% from its peak already though.
> Apparently his FIRE number is $40M
> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living
I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.
You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.
But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.
FWIW, the 4% rule is for safe withdrawals for around 30 years of retirement, as in, you retire at 65 and you hope to live until 95, and even then it has a non-zero chance of running out of money. It's not a percentage you should use if you want to retire at 40.
At $4 million, GP might have been hand-waving a 4% annual rate of return and keep the principle intact.
4% is the standard number that's quoted by pretty much any financial planner. It's based on backtesting and assume that there's be large downswings along the way.
You have a lot more flexibility around those downswings at 40 than you do at 80. For example you could retire but continue doing work that brings you joy and also happens to make money. A lot of people in this situation start lifestyle businesses or do consulting work, for example.
At $4mm in a market account (not 401k), you also have the option to take out margin loans at shockingly low interest. This gives you untaxed cashflow without touching your principal. 160k untaxed is a lot more cashflow than the same number in salary or retirement distributions.
It's very rational to overshoot in that situation. If you build your lifestyle and then FIRE, you are derisking your budget while you still have income.
But wanting to change your lifestyle when you retire is incredibly risky, especially if you're young without life experience.
Any misstep costs you a fraction of lifetime earnings, and there's no way to recover it.
well you certainly could get the lambo, it would just be 10% of your net worth, which is already far less (ratio) than what most Americans pay for their car...
If he thinks he can get that with a ten year grind, why would he stop short? 10 years isn't long compared to most careers so maybe he should go longer and get a bigger house or something. Of course roblox will probably fall out of fashion and stop being so profitable by then.
Milk that cow for all it's worth.
We all die in the end. At some point, an additional dollar is not improving your life.
A ten year grind, starting as a teen no less, leaves you with a lot of life left to live. And it's not like he won't be able to live a little while in the middle of that grind.
Honestly the people criticizing the kid for this are probably just jealous of his self-made opportunity.
Someone thinking they need 40M to escape the "anxiety about the cost of living" is not just a personal decision. It is either extreme greed or delusional. He makes money doing Roblox he is the "laptop class". If you make 400k per month and can't afford to live something is wrong with you. Let's not conflate parents struggling to support their families with whatever this kid is doing.
For reference a worth of $40M puts you well within the top fraction of one percent of all Americans, nevermind the world. If anything given his age it is probably more likely his wealth will become a liability for him rather than an asset. The trope about people who come into that much wealth that young and it creates problems for them exists for a reason. Staying at his desk cranking out more Roblox products might be the best way to keep him away from becoming the victim of his own success.
Anyway good for him. You're right there is a lot of anxiety out there. On some level he should rightly get as much as he can. But let's not pretend you need millions and millions to be safe. We should be working to change that anyway, not merely celebrating massive outliers. I assume since you care about struggling families so much you support his taxation so some of that money can go to people or communities that are struggling? Or since you seem open the idea he needs 40M to survive perhaps you think the government should keep their hands off?
> Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
I am teen and I think that FIRE has many terms but This still is like a really really FAT fire.
At some point though, I think that what my generation might forget is that even with Fire, you still live a normal life or you would need tremendously more money if your lifestyle is lavish, something which we see in social media (sometimes even on paid money)
If you want to buy 100k$ watches and 1 Million dollar or more lamborghinis, probably even this money would not be enough for you.
But if you want to live a normal life like you do. even 2-3 years of sustained could be MORE than enough even for some slightly expensive side hobbies say horse riding or minor watch collecting even. But if you are online and you see people flexing their 1 million dollar watch, you are gonna add 12 more years of life on a project to get to that level
I'd say its more of an expectation/comparison issue and I am not even sure if 10 years can satisfy that
My personal Fat Fire number is more like ~2 million and I don't even want Fat Fire particularly because I would be happy doing a job that I might like so more of a lean FAT which can be around 300-500k even.
maybe this changes into what is affordable or not within the more western hemisphere though as things feel even more (unaffordable?) but even that doesn't really explain why he might need 40M from my perspective.
To be honest, it can very well be ambition. Might as well make 10 years of money if possible because then the number feels so absurdly large that I can do anything that I want and then I will make my own game. Not realizing that you would only need a fraction of 40M to realisticly achieve that same goal and we are discounting the fact that 400k is even sustainable in a such long period of time.
As someone who been a teen long time ago, I can’t imaging someone in this age responsibly planning their retirement.
I’d 100% blow out all money on some useless crap.
If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.
> you are going to have a really bright future as an adult
Or waste their most fun years slaving for the man.
Signed: Gen-X
> Or waste their most fun years slaving for the man.
For what its worth, even I don't know my future so it's a real possibility. But one of the quotes I really like from Witold Pilecki is that, "In the hour of death, I feel joy rather than death" so although there is no such thing as no-regret life but I would hope to try to have less regrets overall in life in this context.
At some point, it boils down to having a job or not. Maybe my first job's gonna be really slaving as you mention. It's hard to know but I pray for a decent job/college hopefully that's got some good work-life balance hopefully.
> If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.
Thank you for your kind words!
I think that chasing a high paying job in FAANG and if I am dissatisfied with the work there or my impact on the world through that and I am still doing it for money, then, its to a degree similar problem to the roblox kid that we talked about.
Wishing for large amounts of retirement money through FAANG to then go what I would wish to do in life with Tech would be weird going through decades of my life into something when I can try to find what I wish to do in life in general and I had thought about it and the answer was tech-related as I felt like an individual can really make some impact through tech (And later I discovered hackernews)
I am frugal as well. Although I don't want to limit myself by saying I will never pick FAANG because maybe situations change and I can change too but money only motivated me in prospects of retirements to then do what I wish to do, so when I had the idea that I can actually do what I want to do (Now-ish) and not have to have a decade or two of my life doing something I might not enjoy/like in agreggate.
(and I have written about it and I will link it here as well on why I picked Tech and not finance)
One of the passion projects I want to take a deeper look during college hopefully if I don't take drop/go to college this year is into creating a small consultancy firm where I can suggest people which infra is nice and cheaper (Hetzner/OVH) and migrate people from either closed solutions like slack or whatever their company might use to an open standard while being cheaper and my idea is that I might charge them just enough even with consultancy fees and helping them migrate over and managing it for them that its more profitable for them
I even bought the domain for this (Actually it was I stumbled on domain accidentally which gave me this idea) https://use.expert [Nothing is in here]
I even made a logo of it myself within paint basically (https://files.catbox.moe/9t5hgw.png) with the tagline just use.expert but I think that quite frankly, I am not an expert right now as in I got to learn way more about all of this too.
So I think that I am motivated by these things more than FAANG company. Right now, I have to work within finding a decent college and that's rough for me because to get a CS college, you have to give an exam that got nothing to do with CS and also which includes chemistry and chem is something that I struggle with (quite a lot) and there are days where I procastinate about it too so I myself don't know what's my future gonna turn out and how I get into decent college.I envy not having too worry about college and my friends who didn't really care about other things and get excellent marks as I used to be quite good too. It's just one of the things I struggle with and I think that I definitely get frustrated by my brain at times too. I think I just hope that I am able to somehow bump it and just get into college somehow wheter by taking drop year again or similar this time solely focused within studies primarily. I just hope that I can make it really. Another thing I wish is for me to be more humble in life as I do feel like Sometimes, I drink too much of my own cool-aid or self-importance and that's not really good. It has to be careful balance and something I wish to improve in my life hopefully. I think I just write in HN because I have forgotten how I used to act with only some memories of my life7-8 years ago and so I don't wish to forget how I am now, a decade later too so most of comments I write are usually for self-preservation sort-of.
I actually got an english exam tomorrow, so wish me luck as I need it :)
Another FOMO article. Bloomberg may as well start reporting on lottery winners.
Ugh, they're just gonna blow it all on e-bikes for them and their crew and broccoli hair maintenance product
The U.S. has no economy, it is a joke. I cannot believe this BS counts into our GDP.
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