Too bad they exploit young game developers by taking a 75.5% cut of their earnings. Big yikes of a red flag for me. https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/roblox-is-allegedly-exp...
Successful games subsidize everyone else, which is not comparable to Steam or anything else.
Collectible items are fine and can't be exchanged for USD, Roblox can't arbitrate developer disputes, "black markets" are an extremely tiny niche. A lot of misinformation.
It's annoying to see these videos brought up every single time Roblox is mentioned anywhere for these reasons. Part of the blame lies with Roblox for one of the worst PR responses I have seen in tech, I suppose.
You have successfully made the case for a 45% fee and being considered approximately normal, or a 60% fee and being considered pretty high still. 75+% is crazy.
It helps that seriously marketing a Roblox game costs < $1k USD always, usually < $200 USD. It's not easy to generate a loss, even when including production costs. That's the tradeoff.
I don't think anyone objects to adults making that choice over say, using Unity or Unreal, and targeting other platforms.
In practice, explaining to my son who is growing into an avid developer why I won't a) help him build on Roblox, or b) fund his objectives of advertising and promoting his work in Roblox (by spending Roblox company scrip) on the platform has necessitated helping him to learn and understand what exploitation means and how to recognize it.
It's a learning experience for him, and a challenging issue for me as a technically proficient and financially literate parent who actually owns and run businesses related to intellectual property. It's got to be much more painful for parents who lack in any of those three areas.
In any case, what's the alternative? To teach your son how to build the game from scratch in Unity, spin up a server infrastructure that won't crumble with more than a few concurrent players (not to mention the cash required for this), figure out distribution, and then actually get people to find and play the game? That seems quite unreasonable for most children/parents.
If this were easy, a competitor would have come in and offered the same service with significantly lower fees.
If it's a reasonable decision for an adult to make because the trade-offs might be worth it, doesn't that mean that it would also be reasonable for a child to make the same decision for the same reason?
It's either exploitative or it isn't, the age of the developer doesn't alter the trade-offs involved.
The question should not be posed to a child, that is the law for child labour, and why we do not have children gambling on roulette wheels.
If there are, then it's a great lesson about looking outside of one's immediate circumstance and striving towards something better.
I know there are lots of child actors and plenty of household situations that make enjoying childhood difficult for many youths - but just because we're already bad at a thing doesn't mean we should let it get worse. Child labour laws were some of the first steps of regulation in the industrial revolution because inflation works in such a way where opening the door up to child labour can put significant financial pressure on families that choose not to participate when demand adjusts to that participation being normal.
>"As there are no discoverability tools, users are only able to see a tiny selection of the millions of experiences available. One of the ways boost to discoverability is to pay to advertise on the platform using its virtual currency, Robux."
(Note that this "virtual" currency is real money, bidirectionally exchangeable with USD).
The sales pitch is "get rich fast":
>"Under the platform’s ‘Create’ tab, it sells the idea that users can “make anything”, “reach millions of players”, and “earn serious cash”, while its official tutorials and support website both “assume” they are looking for help with monetisation."
I agree that this doesn't really look like a labor issue. That's distracting and contentious tangent; it's easier to just label this as a kind of consumer exploitation. (Most of the people involved aren't earning money -- but they are all paying money). It's a scam either way.
Edit to add: lazy people downvote.