Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Normally we'd change the URL to the original source but I think most HN readers probably prefer to read a summary even if the article is cribbed.
This part seems pretty indefensible. Like yeah to a certain extent all online content platforms have a gate like this, but I've never heard of one that high. YouTube e will pay you as soon as you make something like $20 iirc. And the fact that they pay you in their gated currency which they then allow you to spend but only within their system seems like am obvious self-serving money grab.
Free content maybe, but not free labor exactly IMO.
I feel like the exchange there is not about labor...
Now, you might argue that this does not feel like labor because it's more voluntary than labor usually is. Which is totally correct and exactly why this industry is so lucrative.
YouTube givea you "free" labor by hosting your video.
This is the reverse of the Hollywood TV model where you paid creators first and then tried to monetize the content you owned. It's certainly still labor to create it. The only things that have changed are the ownership, licensing, and payment stream.
Same for every video game that allows mods, custom levels, and so on. The only difference is that Minecraft users make no money at all for their efforts. How terrible! Poor children!
Either that, or people just enjoy being creative, making things is fun, and it's okay for kids to just enjoy making things and sharing them with each other, even if (oh, gasp!) the business that built the engine benefits from it. And being able to make any money from this at all is just a nice bonus.
Minecraft dev. here, not strictly true. We have a pretty bustling marketplace full of paid and free content (maps, skins, etc.) but the process to release such content right now is pretty hands-on and not suitable for non-adults.
However, YC does not charge people to play HN in the way that Roblox charges for that game. No one is counting my minutes on HN and sending someone a payment, or a bill. There is no direct monetization of my UGC.
Mod.io is a gaming add-on (for mods) that also has no in-platform direct monetization of UGC assets. Of course, the games that use mod.io do it because having UGC at all brings the right kind of players and those players do pay.
So it is possible to make money, have UGC, and not be exploitative. I don't think Roblox can say that's where they are right now.
Isn't it $100?
Source: happened to me via a Minecraft channel I used to run over a decade ago and essentially abandoned around 2013.
When you make a video and upload it to YouTube, that creation is entirely the result of your own hard work and ingenuity. YouTube doesn't need to exist for your video to exist.
When you make a game in Roblox, you are combining some amount of hard work and ingenuity of your own with a larger amount of hard work and ingenuity by Roblox Creation.
If you want to keep all the money, then you need to do all of the work.
I’m not sure why anyone would defend a dollar amount above $1. If you have money in you should be able to get it out immediately IMO.
To be honest, when I think about it that way, you're not going to get that far under $1000 no matter what you do. There's tax forms at the very least, and probably extra stuff to do with dealing with minors, plus generalized legal risk of being sued or investigated anyhow... we need to be dealing with more than a few bucks here before it's worth Roblox's time & risk. Some of this is the cost of protecting minors, too.
The person you're responding to isn't even talking about the cut. It's the threshold at which you may take money out of the ecosystem. Both YouTube and Roblox take a cut, but with Roblox, even after the cut, you need to have made a substantial amount of money before you can see a penny of it.
In reality the relationship between these platforms and the creators is a necessary and mutually beneficial relationship. The exchange in value between these parties should be in a format useful to both sides: cash.
YT probably does need to exist for many creators to get the kind of distribution that enables them to monetize their content including the operationally managing the scale of the site, the brand they've built and the ad network. A highly viewed piece of content is generally much more valuable than unseen content. Which isn't to say you can't monetize video outside of YT, just the YT is providing a very valuable service and it isn't clear to me that is qualitatively of less value than what Roblox provides its content creators.
It's even worse than that. They sell robux at one rate and cash them out for developers at a very different rate. That $1,000 worth of Robux becomes $350 when you go to extract it. So they're taking cuts twice, once on the actual sale and again whenever you try to turn it into real money instead of their scrip.
https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313090-Can-I...
“the following will make you ineligible for a Cash Out:” “attempting to exchange Robux for real currency other than through DevEx”
They take 3.5% of fee when you are transfering it to USD. (Sellers)
Buyers are charged charged a 7.50% transaction fee with a minimum of US$ 1.49 and a maximum of US$ 9.99 per transaction
------ The current spread on Lindex (SL Forex) is :
BUY: L$242 / US$1.00 (L$14,816 Remaining) SELL: L$249 / US$1.00 (L$29,411 remaining)
Knowing nothing at all about Robux I’m not sure I follow. When you say “$1,000 worth of Robux” here you mean $1,000 USD, right? And not 1,000 units of Robux?
So if I’m a developer on the platform and I’ve earned however many Robux equal $1,000 USD and I initiate a transfer then my actual cash receipts will be ~$350 USD? Am I understanding that correctly? Because that seems nuts. Especially when they’re targeting kids as their primary “developers”.
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but it's also important to note that not all Robux is equal. There's more information at https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005718246 under section 3.B.
Also note that there is a comment in the video that you need to be careful how you spend your Robux for buying development, because if you are not then a cut gets taken, which maybe relates to 3B for the person you are paying?
Yes, ignoring any tax requirements because I'm not a tax attorney. You have to have 100k Robux (Rb) to initiate a withdrawl, that 100k Rb costs 1000 USD (ignoring any bulk deals they may run) to buy if you just purchased it from Roblox, but when you sell it to Roblox for USD you get 350 USD. So depending on how you look at it it is worth either 1k or 350 USD. The article was using 1k as the frame and it's what it would cost you to get that much buying directly so to me that's the most accurate.
Though I do concede... the catalog is filled with a lot of garbage.
It doesn’t matter if you’re creating digital experiences, you must pay people with money, not company tokens.
It would be hard to argue Roblox is paying anyone in exchange for work.
You can thank modern accrual accounting for this.
Roblox will be allowed to move money from liability to revenue based on a schedule using some sort of historical trends supporting the method. The higher the threshold, the higher their liability but also the more money that goes back to them long-term.
The "it's just for fun!" argument does cut both ways - then why introduce real money into the ecosystem at all? - but has an obvious "because real money is needed to make the product and ecosystem exist" answer. Is taking this much real money necessary? That seems like a much harder question. You could say it's a bit like college sports - playing a game with your friends and there's some institution that's taking all the money, and then, yes, if Roblox is rolling in huge profits and distributing a penance, they deserve some pressure on that.
That is not necessary.
Looking at the numbers they made around $46 billion in the past three years.
Do we know how much of those 46 billions went to creators?
YouTube videos are also very different from video games, one can easily make 30 YouTube videos in 30 days, video games require weeks (if not more), it's easier to give up.
The incentive is very different.
Paying for low effort content posted frequently rewards consistency, YouTube needs their creators to keep making fresh content, not their best content, new is enough.
Video games not so much, they have to be at least appealing and a higher threshold could be better to keep creators focused on finishing their work and/or maintain an higher quality of the product, instead of cashing out quickly by making very cheap games just for the 50 dollars of payout.
Maybe throwing more manpower at the problem will let them reduce the minimum rate. Or they could work on altering their infrastructure to support a more automated system, possibly eliminating the minimum rate entirely.
Err, wat? This check could trivially be automated, and in fact I'd be very surprised if it wasn't already. All they have to do is maintain a separate (hidden) counter of "cashout-able" currency in their account, which only increases when the money comes from an eligible source (and decreasing so that it never goes above the visible "real" currency).
If Roblox claims this is a manual check, well, that's very probably just a bullshit lie.
[1]: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/the-robux-exchange-rate-and-mo... [2]: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/the-robux-exchange-rate-and-mo... [3]: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/holiday-schedule-for-the-devex...
It really depends on how you define “exploiting”. It doesn’t seem like you _need_ to buy the ads. A kid could make a game on any platform and would encounter similar barriers.
Would it be better if the kid played Call of Duty rather than creating something? Even if the chance to profit is low does the kid get something else out of Roblox?
To my knowledge kids aren’t dropping out of high school with hopes of being a Roblox millionaire. They may dream about it but I don’t think they act on it. I dreamed about being a pro eSports gamer in high school and I’d argue my time was much worse spent doing that.
If it's meant to be educational it shouldn't be marketing itself as a way to make money or charging kids to promote their app. It would have better ways to surface new applications instead of only showing the top N that already have to have over a thousand users.
Roblox takes 75% of each sale. This means the developer needs to make 400,000 in Robux sales before the developer accumulates 100,000 Robux for cash withdrawal.
If 100,000 Robux is sold for $1,000, and 100,000 Robux only nets the developer $350, then the double dip gives Roblox a net 91.25% of developer sales. This excludes any applicable taxes or app store fees.
And presumably you have to pay for the premium account before you withdraw, so you are investing real cash for a chance of a payout?
User spends $100 USD to buy 10000 robux. User buys item for 10000 robux in a game. Developer of game gets 7000 robux (dip #1). Developer of game withdraws to USD. 100000 robux = $350 (dip #2) so developer gets $24.5 USD.
Overall 24.5/100 = 24.5%.
In reality the numbers don't always come exactly to this, because robux can cost different amounts to buy depending on the amount, and there are PayPal/wire transfer fees when withdrawing.
Still not sure how I feel. On the fence but leaning more good than bad. The thing I cant get past is “what else would a kid do with their time?” Even if its not a great way to make money, it seems like a better use of time than what I did. It just seems like it still provides a strong learning opportunity.
I think there may be a different argument about whether it exploits developers generally and not just kids.
Learn a programming language and write small games in Unity/Godot/whatever? Make levels in LittleBigPlanet/Dreams?
To be fair, those options can get exploitative too, but Roblox feels on another level. The only time I played Roblox, I distinctly remember thinking "the only people who would put money into this are kids who don't know any better".
Once money is in the equation, all of the incentives change and it’s not about “learning opportunities” or fun.
He has a great time, he's not chasing $, he just wants to have fun. It works great for that.
As soon as you try to stand out and chase money, yeah it gets HARD. Just like streaming on YouTube... or just getting noticed online for your blog.
But what's the alternative here? That's a question of scale. Just not let kids even have a chance to make money?
I talked about it with my son.
"Yup there's lots of people making games, it's hard to make games as elaborate as everyone else."
And then you just make them for fun ...
The fact that kids try and fail at this is not a bad thing IMO.
If kids out there can't control themselves (they're kids...) I gotta wonder what if any parental involvement there is. Let's say they ban kids from creating content ... kid who can't control him/herself will just go make an 'adult' account too and do the same thing. Roblox can only do so much.
I disagree completely here - they encourage kids to create games by giving them an easy platform to create games and letting them play games other kids have created.
A kid who sees that other kids their age are able to actually make a video game is far more likely to want to learn to do that themselves.
Whether I dis/agree with the practice or not, I find a separate standard for children to be disingenuous if we are talking about a common practice
1. Revenue could be shared more fairly. The money that Roblox is keeping from kids is going into corporate pockets. There's no way around that.
2. The advertising could be more honest. If it's only for devs to make money, then mention that part only under the dev pages where 1% of the people will find them. For everyone else, advertise playing and creating for fun.
I don't think the $1k minimum payout is crazy either, as the overhead of paying 10s of thousands of kids $11.32 would kill margins (leading to Robux having to take a higher %age). I'd have to think most kids are in the same boat as mine - if their games ever earn them any Robux, they'll turn around and spend those Robux in another game, because that's what they want to do with it anyway.
I do feel a bit bad for the older kids that put real effort into it, but I don't see how it's much worse than trying to start a youtube or twitch channel and failing. At least with coding they're getting some valuable experience.
All that said, the way they sell "Robux" is absolutely predatory. We've had to have several talks about what is reasonable to spend money on. They even let you pay with Amazon. Payments via Amazon are on by default for Amazon accounts and don't require re-authentication, so a kid who clicks on a link in Roblox on a computer that has already authenticated with Amazon can drain their parent's account.
I'm not trying to be mean to anyone, but if you look at all of the complaints through the filter of someone who wants to a) learn to make a video game, b) learn some programming, and c) make a cool game to share with his friends, then Roblox is a really fun, free, and easy way to do all of the above.
If your filter is a kid who a) wants to make a game that goes viral and earn a bunch of money off of it, then yeah - some of these are legit complaints.
I highly doubt the amount they take as a cut is necessary.
You basically seem to advocate for a world where it is ok for platform developers to double maybe tripple dip on transactions that only exist because of the hard work of others. I for myself don’t want to live in a world where this is par for the course. It should be called out and people should be made aware of injustice. It’s not about becoming rich or famous yourself but just realizing unfairness if you see it and ideally taking action on it so that the world may become a better place for all.
At the end of the day I think the only worthy argument is whether or not the revenue sharing arrangement is fair.
If it were aimed at adults, but kids wanted to try, too, like Youtube... I don't have as much problem with that. But the target audience of Roblox ads is kids and always has been.
It doesn't seem at all fair to trap kids into this ecosystem, sell them the things they need to get rich and famous, and then also give them a worse cut on their games than Steam, Apple, Google, etc.
or maybe don't pay kids whose work attracts people to your platform in your in-game digital currency. pay them, like, actual money that they've earned.
"Adults can make money but they don't let kids who create content make any money!"
This seems like a fine state of affairs to me.
But even if you're sure you're being 100% fair, you have to be incredibly clear with those kids about what's going on and how it works, and you should probably also make their parents very clear on it, too.
If you can't commit to that kind of fairness towards someone who can't legally sign contracts because the law recognizes that they don't have the life experience to do it fairly on their own, you shouldn't do it, and you definitely shouldn't base your business on it.
What does the industry give indie devs whose games aren't popular?
Most of these kids are just sharing games with fiends on a platform.
If they want to go pro... welcome to the world / every platform where scale / getting attention is hard?
Better they have a learning experience now because they made a roblox game.
If it's manipulative of kids then it's manipulative of adults too.
Given the current state of stupidity in the US, I think there are a lot of children in adult bodies. No, I don't think it's reasonable to have different expectations for users.
That's what parents are for.
[0] Twitch pays out at $100, if anyone didn't know.
However, the comparison isn't entirely fair for several reasons. First off, those platforms don't restrict releasing the content on other platforms. If I'm unhappy with Spotify, I can move my music to Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even my own website. This isn't ideal, and doesn't excuse bad practices, but it is possible. Roblox games only work in Roblox, and if I want to move my games elsewhere, I have to rebuild it entirely from scratch.
Secondly, all of these services have various tools that enable discoverability, without requiring any payment. These tools are obviously not ideal, but I can become successful on Youtube without giving Google a single cent, and without advertising outside of the site. It's unlikely, but it's possible. Roblox requires you to spend money for any chance at discoverability, and even then there are no guarantees. Roblox doesn't even let you cash out unless you have an active subscription.
Finally, all of these other services pay me in actual money, not their own fun bucks. The conversion rate is also ridiculously bad for creators. According to the video linked in the article, you can only cash out when you have $1000 worth of Robux, which then only returns $350 back to you. Combine this terrible conversion rate with the fact that Roblox takes an additional cut of basically every transaction, and the actual percentage of money going to creators is potentially as low as 17%, which is way worse then any other service I know of.
So yeah, I would say this is more exploitative then someone trying to make it big on other platforms. And we should call out these bad practices specifically when we see them, instead of brushing it off under "all platforms are bad too."
That's false.
"YouTube will run ads on smaller creators' videos without paying them"
https://www.engadget.com/youtube-ads-on-small-creator-videos...
Requirement for YouTube partner is 1000 subscriptions.
In the case of Robox, they are still getting paid for all those small games that make less than $1000, and meanwhile the creators get scrip.
> I have been impressed by the number of real world economic and business issues that Roblox is exposing my younger son to, both in the experiences and the larger ecosystem. There is a lot of thinking in terms of effort, reward, and risk.
"You seem to be ignoring the thesis of the video. For the vast majority of their creators, their is very little reward, and mostly a lot of exploitative business preying on children."
> I am disagreeing with the thesis of the video. Roblox provides opportunities previously unavailable; it is up to the individuals to decide if they are worthwhile to invest time in.
If the most legendary game developer of all time thinks Roblox is fine, are you sure he's mistaken?
FWIW, he's the CTO of a 30% app store trying to also break into the Roblox business (their Metaverse talk/Facebook Horizon).
So rather than Roblox only taking 40% and giving 30% to Apple, Facebook will potentially be in position to take the full 70% (or more due to getting children to pay for ad spend) of the child labor.
When Carmack tweets something, it's because he believes what he's saying is true.
Searching for the most charitable interpretation of your argument, the only thing I can think of is "Maybe Carmack's view was contaminated by his time spent as CTO of Oculus." But he joined Oculus long before Facebook acquired it, and before the policies you mention. Carmack may be legendary, but he likely had no say in those policies.
He's still simultaneously the CTO of Facebook's Oculus division, which runs their 30% app store and is building the Roblox-aesthetic Facebook Horizon "metaverse":
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Facebook-W...
https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
He's separated out his AI work as his own thing.
I don't think he's claiming it's not exploitative behavior, but rather values the experience for the real world lessons.
For the creative side, there are other options. Play Minecraft, Trackmania and Super Mario Maker.
He may have a point, but him being 'legendary' doesn't make his arguments any better (or worse).
Most parents on this HN thread seem to agree.
> I'm honestly not a fan as a mom but it's a very fluid marketplace for games and gives people an opportunity to make their own video games and make money.
Given that this opportunity to make money scarcely exists in reality (it's equivalent to my opportunity to make money by starring in a Hollywood film as a random Seattle engineer), seems like parents don't really have a clue what's going on.
From my own experience from when I was a kid, it would seem to be true that parents don't have a clue what their children are actually exposed to on the internet, unless they take extreme and draconian measures.
Unfortunately, parents have a strong interest in protecting their image as that of a good parent, so it's rare for them to admit to not knowing such things.
Isn't this an argument from authority? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Furthermore, the video made the argument that Roblox tries to mislead kids into thinking they can make money. In other words, an individual might be wrong in thinking the opportunities are worth investing time in due to the manipulative practices of Roblox.
But such arguments also happen all the time. For example, if you join a company as a junior developer, most people would trust an existing senior developer.
I was about to write "I think it's fine to mislead kids into thinking they can make money." Then I reconsidered.
After reconsidering, I think it's fine to mislead kids into thinking they can make money. Lemonade stands and lawnmowing for neighbors are examples of this. They may make a little bit, but unless they're exceptionally lucky, no one would be under any illusions that it would become their full time profession.
Why does his C-programming ability have more weight than his obvious conflict of interest weighing in here? He may be being geniune, but since he works in this exact area, it is too tainted by that to take at face value or especially to take on authority.
But, like you, I do think it is inherently a flag that suggests other inputs are necessary. And that all opinions that solely reference the authority are equally lower weighted until additional inputs are found to match, or further negate.
Oh boy. I think we've all heard that many times before. Every exploitative business will use this line as its defense (see e.g. every controversy about employee/contractor status in the gig economy), so taken alone it isn't much of an argument.
For example, individuals can be mislead as to whether the opportunity is worthwhile to invest - with enough trickery and unsophisticated target group (e.g. Joe Random Uberdriver who never before calculated depreciation of their car), the business can exploit people for many years before they wisen up as a group.
I would think contractor status can make sense for a small portion of people in the gig economy, but for a lot of people it would not.
If he was the most legendary game _designer_ sure, but in that area he hasn't been very relevant in a while, as a programmer I don't see what special insight he has.
He seems like a nice guy and he is obviously one of the best developer ever, but I don't get the near cult he has
When you talk with him about a technical idea, you come away feeling that whatever Carmack said, it was plausible. So you start questioning your own assumptions.
I’ve learned to trust his thinking. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think for myself. Quite the opposite; I don’t think anyone else in the AI scene insisted to him that it was crucial to have a loss function.
But in matters like this, where he’s clearly given it more thought than I have (see tweet) and has more experience than I have (see son), I am perfectly content to outsource my thinking to him.
I’ll wager you $500 he’s right. (The problem with such wagers is that it’s hard to define the terms precisely. But, if it were possible to make it precise the way a mathematics formula is precise, I would happily bet you the $500.)
he's learnt Lua, object orientated programing client side/ server side distributed programing (and how to optimse the speed)
he's also learnt that the people who run the platform will screw you over in many different ways (he's learnt a few tricks to semi counter this)
he's learnt that advertising can be useless and costly,
learnt people are extremely fickle, there's a far amount of people who have money to throw around
learnt that doing good graphics is harder than it seems. (also learnt how to use blender)
also that game dynamics and subtile changes can have big real world changes to peoples experiances
also that UI and UX are important
also to train other (kids) how to program - for money
I'd say as a learning platform it has been fantastic, he's not made much real money, but has earned a far amount of robuks (platforms currency) that's he's spent in game
Yes, this is how business works, but this is also why child labor laws exist. Roblox is treading a fine line between game development for fun and game development for work.
The absurd vast majority of people will never make any money via Roblox, or any of the major app stores for that matter. I have a few apps on both Google Play and the App Store.
I'm never going to see a dime. If anything I like that Roblox is encouraging kids to learn game development, later on they can always move on to Unity or Godot( I'm not really an Unreal fan since the editor doesn't run well on my computer). Then they can also enjoy making no money on Steam ! It's very very rare for indie game devs to make money !!
That said, maybe if these young developers learn first hand why digital sharecropping is bad at an early age they can avoid being chewed up and spit out by the "AAA" game development machine and instead focus on creating and promoting games on a platform they have control over.
There is nothing any platform can do to have more items in their top 200. That’s just not possible. It’s not a problem in the platform that you didn’t make it to the top 200.
Back in my day, we made mods for fun, and then we used the skills we learned to get jobs doing something corporate.
Back in your day, ID etc weren't profiting off of the mods you made. They were shared freely in other fan spaces.
Apples, oranges.
"Dude check out this crazy game, you can SURF around, kill people, and level up your character for crazy new powers" was the reason I bought CS Source after seeing it at a friends house...
1. https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...
While he can't cash out his Robux, it turns out not to be so bad for him since he likes Robux. On his last birthday his biggest as was for Robux.
As far as gaming development platforms, it is probably the best I've used. I'm not a pro game developer, so I've used simple stuff like Unity. But I have found Roblox to be a really easy platform to get started with.
It would be interesting to see the company's reaction to a completely free, hobby Experience becoming the most played (and unpaid) game on the platform. It's unlikely, but fun to imagine.
I don't feel exploited by my time with other game toolkits because the expectations and outcomes were clearer.
I think it's a bit ludicrous that the company is pushing that as a marketing point towards children, that the payout-threshold is so high, and that they take multiple cuts of that payout, but at the end of the day; aren't all monetized products aimed at children kind of a scam built on exploiting people who can't recognize they're being exploited?
Kind of egregious, but also just the same principle as many other platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Spotify, Medium, Google, etc.
I was sorely disappointed - I'm as perplexed as you are how they became so successful. It is indeed a total mess.
But you can jump from game to game quickly.
Many of the games are similar-ish to popular games but the barrier to entry is low, share assets, games are easy to jump in and out of together with your friends.
Once you write a game or create a world, you can click and publish it for anyone to join.
My niece was about 300 dollars into this game before my sister got involved. She was using 'oh get me itunes gift cards' from relatives so mom would not notice. She was using all of the tools of an addicted person to use that game. Her sister on the other hand got bored with it and gave up on it.
Roblox developer business model should be renamed Dickensian Development.
What is the cut. They say it's worse than other platforms, but nothing stops them from actually saying what it is.
edit: the cut roblox takes for themselves is 30% at transaction time, and 65% at withdrawal time.
i am omniscient