Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreyfan | Hacker News Reader

This is no more exploitative than someone trying to make it big on Youtube, Twitch, or Spotify and gaining zero traction. If the content someone creates on these platforms doesn't capture an audience, the hosting platform doesn't generate any revenue and neither does the creator. It's completely free to produce the content (minus your time) and the platform hosts it for free, even though 99% of it never receives any views/plays/listens.

At the end of the day I think the only worthy argument is whether or not the revenue sharing arrangement is fair.

View on HN

For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids and they haven't got the life experience to see these problems coming or deal with them appropriately.

If it were aimed at adults, but kids wanted to try, too, like Youtube... I don't have as much problem with that. But the target audience of Roblox ads is kids and always has been.

It doesn't seem at all fair to trap kids into this ecosystem, sell them the things they need to get rich and famous, and then also give them a worse cut on their games than Steam, Apple, Google, etc.

What then? Just don't let them make money on the platform?

uh, yes? if your business model relies on exploiting children, you shouldn't be allowed to operate as a business.

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.

I feel like we'd then have the same article:

"Adults can make money but they don't let kids who create content make any money!"

kids can still make money from their creations. just pay them with real money instead of roblox digital currency (and remove the ridiculous minimum of $1k).

One could argue that this would fall into child labor laws, which exist for a reason.

That's how it works in minecraft right? Kids can design and build a minigame within the context of minecraft, but minecraft doesn't provide provide some minecraft diamonds to USD conversion service that allows players to bring real money into the game, or to cash out game money for real money. (Some third party servers might provide this, in violation of the Terms of Use.)

This seems like a fine state of affairs to me.

If you make money from the work of kids, you must be 100% fair with them. Giving them a worse cut than the parts of the game industry that are already under fire for not giving a big enough cut is not fair. Setting false expectations for them is not fair. And forcing them to earn $1000 before they can pull money out is not fair. Someone else mentioned that Second Life only requires $10 as their minimum.

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.

>Giving them a worse cut than the parts of the game industry

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.

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

Although I can't prove it, I suspect there wouldn't be a lot of kids that would stop making games on roblox for an enjoyable day in the coal mine with their friends.

Honestly the only thing I find really disingenuous about this is the implication that it's realistic to get rich and famous on it, which is a quality shared by a lot of "creator" platforms. Also college.

> For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids

If it's manipulative of kids then it's manipulative of adults too.

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

> I think it's reasonable to have different expectations of children vs adults.

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.

> For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids and they haven't got the life experience to see these problems coming or deal with them appropriately.

That's what parents are for.

Well yeah, streaming services also suck for creators. That doesn't excuse the practices of Roblox.

However, the comparison isn't entirely fair for several reasons. First off, those platforms don't restrict releasing the content on other platforms. If I'm unhappy with Spotify, I can move my music to Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even my own website. This isn't ideal, and doesn't excuse bad practices, but it is possible. Roblox games only work in Roblox, and if I want to move my games elsewhere, I have to rebuild it entirely from scratch.

Secondly, all of these services have various tools that enable discoverability, without requiring any payment. These tools are obviously not ideal, but I can become successful on Youtube without giving Google a single cent, and without advertising outside of the site. It's unlikely, but it's possible. Roblox requires you to spend money for any chance at discoverability, and even then there are no guarantees. Roblox doesn't even let you cash out unless you have an active subscription.

Finally, all of these other services pay me in actual money, not their own fun bucks. The conversion rate is also ridiculously bad for creators. According to the video linked in the article, you can only cash out when you have $1000 worth of Robux, which then only returns $350 back to you. Combine this terrible conversion rate with the fact that Roblox takes an additional cut of basically every transaction, and the actual percentage of money going to creators is potentially as low as 17%, which is way worse then any other service I know of.

So yeah, I would say this is more exploitative then someone trying to make it big on other platforms. And we should call out these bad practices specifically when we see them, instead of brushing it off under "all platforms are bad too."

> the hosting platform doesn't generate any revenue

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.

Yeah, I'm reading this and thinking it is pretty similar to the situation on twitch. I'm the world's lamest twitch streamer in a category with paltry viewership, so it took me over 600 hours of streaming to get a payout[0] and I had to hit arbitrary milestones for affiliate in the first place. I have no idea how discovery even works on twitch, but I have to imagine it's the same as everywhere else: popular stuff gets more popular and everyone else languishes in obscurity. How else could it work, really?

[0] Twitch pays out at $100, if anyone didn't know.

Twitch isn’t amazing at it in total but it does recommend smaller streamers to people.

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

Twitch has a "Recommended Smaller Communities" section on their user frontpage now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com