Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.

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!"

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

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com