Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation | Hacker News Reader

Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation

eurogamer.net

32 pointsSLHamlet60 comments

The "exploiting" part doesn't come from the ability for children to make money. It comes from the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money.

It's all designed to get a huge amount of free labor, while hiding how outside of a lucky few who benefit from the network effect, the average would-be game maker ("slum kid" or not) would be financially better off just using a standalone toolkit to make their own app and selling it on Itch or Gumroad.

> 100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD

Not much better but still a bit at 30,000 robux for $105 now

Well, both allowing kids to monetize and taking almost all the revenue are a problem.

The wild thing is Second Life's 600K MAU players monetize better than Roblox's 350M MAU players -- both for the company (it's still not profitable despite huge revenue) and for the creator community:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-s...

I get the revenue split issue, but why is providing a platform for kid creators to make money a problem?

Because the majority of people on the platform are kid spenders?

I expect the vast majority of Roblox players to be under 10 with low spending power. In contrast, someone still playing Second Life has more discretionary income.

With one kid just becoming a teen and other kid being half the age - I'm somewhat biased.

I know a dozens of early teens (friends/classmates of my kid, kids of friends/colleagues ...etc) that are (still) playing Roblox.

I even know one of those older teens (friends kid) that is earning enough money from Roblox games - that it doesn't make sense for him to do a typical Dutch teenager job of stocking shelves in stores/markets.

From ages 6/7 and higher it's common for kids to say to each other "Don't need toy type of birthday present as I would prefer Roblox (or once they are a bit older Fortnite or other similar) gift card".

More than once our kid got so many that we had to "throttle" their "use" over weeks/months.

Anyway - yeah developers getting only 30% and Roblox keeping 70%, especially with all the fuss about the likes of Apple/Google/Unity getting into trouble for 70/30 split the other way - doesn't make sense.

Sure - there are bigger operational costs for Roblox actually running game servers (instead of just the store) - though not that much bigger, right?

I feel like that's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison, given that Second Life's going to have a, by comparison, massive lean towards well-off older adults with long-term investment in the SL social ecosystem.

If anything I would look at VRChat for comparisons instead (a young demographic, especially on standalone headsets, and an ecosystem that's still very Wild West in many ways), though measuring numbers there would be much, much harder since most of the creator ecosystem happens outside of the app itself on Gumroad, Booth, etc (content subscriptions through VRChat itself are still only in beta).

If they wanted to really step up the shitty behaviour, they could do like Google Adsense and ban your account the moment you reach the threshold to cash out. Even if they apparently didn’t have a problem with you during the many months it took to get there while they were profiting from the ads you ran.

Don't forget Apple accounts for ~30 of those percentage points. It's not as if Roblox actually gets 75% of the money.

> would be financially better off just using a standalone toolkit to make their own app and selling it on Itch or Gumroad.

Arguably not, because Roblox offers distribution. It's like selling on Amazon or Etsy — you give up an onerous-seeming cut to the platform, but people do it because a percentage of something is more than 100% of nothing.

Itch offers distribution, for no charge. Gumroad's 10%. (These, your original examples, are more relevant to this market than Amazon and Etsy.)

>It comes from the company taking 75% of profits

I know nothing about Roblox, but this YouTube short (from Pirate Software) came up for me recently, and made it seem like the revenue cut is a bit more nuanced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkihEtuVliU

His pinned comment also goes into a bunch of detail.

Can we not link to kotaku? The actual source is eurogamer and far less editorialized: https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making...

OK, we've changed the URL to that from https://kotaku.com/roblox-boss-kids-child-labor-exploit-indo... above.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I got started in coding via roblox, when i was below 18, but we had groups of people of our similar age collaborating together and forming game studios. We did commissions as well which were paid. So if we alter the perspective on that then anyone can call it a child labour. But mostly the kids here just enjoy the experience as a whole

Except for the ones who don't:

https://youtu.be/n6PYj93SGxc?t=384

The point isn't that some kids enjoy it. The point is kids shouldn't be involved in the capitalist machine because its inherently exploitive.

Bit of a weird take no? When I was 13 google ads was a great source of income for me. Learned a lot back in those days, definitely a foundation that enabled me to succeed in the future.

I'm also trying to understand the pearl-clutching. Kids' entrepreneurial opportunities used to be lemonade stands and lawn-mowing. Now it's Etsy, TikTok, and Roblox.

When kids have lemonade stands, mow the lawn, walk dogs or babysit, who is able to profit off of their labor?

When kids are on Etsy, TikTok and Roblox, show is able to profit off of their labor?

In the past when kids had "more opportunities!!!" in coal mines and garment mills, who was able to profit?

Notice how the answer for the last two are similar and are dissimilar to the first. That is why.

I'm too confused by the assertion that a kid opening an Etsy store in 2024 is the same as a kid being compelled to work in a coal mine in the mid-19th century to understand your point. My apologies.

Is child labor by definition exploitative? If it is then it is legal to exploit children in America, because child labor is legal in some circumstances, like a child working for a parent's small business.

There really isn't a comparison here. Allowing a 12 year old to work in their parent's shop part time with relatively strict hour limits (at least in Canada) is going to inherently be less exploitative then a child working for a "game development company" in which they have actual personal connection to.

this depends a lot on the parent in question, unfortunately. i'm pleased that you don't have any experience with that fact, and i hope that continues to be true, but it would be worthwhile for you to gain an appreciation of the diversity of other people's life situations

If your parents are shit they will be shit regardless of whether you're also working for them or not. Can't really get away from them unless you emancipate or something.

getting access to an independent income stream is vitally, vitally important in this situation, and getting away from bad parents is actually both considerably less all-or-nothing and more feasible than you are imagining, often

In America, you work, you get a paycheck for hours worked.

At Roblox, you work, they take the majority of the proceeds and then your project has to make a decent amount of money or you NEVER get paid.

Child labor is a defined term that doesn't just mean kids working for a business, it only qualifies if the work "is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and/or interferes with their schooling". - https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm

What part of that is true for kids who do "child labor" on Roblox?

I have no idea, I don't know anything about Roblox. It's possible some kids are spending so much time making content to sell on the platform that it interferes with their schooling.

It's a bit beside the point though - "child labor" is a term that the Roblox CEO brought into this discussion to defend himself, possibly because he knows it's too strong a term that doesn't really apply here. As far as I can tell the major critics used the much broader term "exploitation" (https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-exploiting-young-game-devel...), and obviously there are many ways to exploit children that aren't child labor. The main accusation is not that they use child labor, but that they entice very young kids into making content for the game with the promise of money, but almost none of them are successful enough to actually get paid.

The reality is that children are dumb. Or at the very least very easily fooled/exploited. With parents that's (usually) not a problem because the parents are already responsible for watching out for their child's best interests. That's not the case for other employers, and certainly not the case for a multinational like Roblox.

I remember watching an interview with a deformed person talking about the circus freak show she was at being shut down. The people claiming to do it for her, trying to save her from being exploited, ended up just putting her out of a good living and actually making her destitute.and she actually liked her job. There was a long time ago when these things were more common i think in the 1920s..

Definitely some circumstances where a child working when parents are disabled, could be the only source of reliable income for a family in some places

Roblox Accused of Concocting Illegal Gambling Ring for Minors

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924634

Roblox appears to profit from this situation:

* CHILDREN spend a lot of time creating content for minimal return. The Developer Revenue Return is approximately 30%. Conventional app stores should return 70 to 97%, instead.

* CHILDREN buy and build loot box systems (gambling, uncontrolled spending, emotional manipulation, focus on money over gameplay), and are financially and socially motivated to use their "Robux" (which they purchase from Roblox - gift cards, direct, or contests / promotions) on expensive virtual items :hat-with-sparkly-feather:. I believe humans take a long time to mature and need careful education to help moderate their tendency towards unhealthy biases once they become adults, and begin to directly impact the rest of us.

* Generally, children may not fully understand the real-world value they're giving up in such unfavorable circumstances.

I formerly developed monetization solutions.

Child labor has negative ideas because we think of coal mines with cancer, 0 education, and 18 hour working days. Or something like that.

I looked at the education my kid was getting in K-5, and I genuinely think he would learn more at a company doing manual labor than he would in Music.

But maybe we don't need to do such menial tasks. My kid could play with the HTML on a page for hours until it looks good. I used to pay people on upwork to do this...

I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

There's value in just being a child. Not everything is about min/maxing your life.

Then... don't make them sit in schools learning how to enjoy 'entertainment'.

learning to enjoy music and literature is valuable to the person themself. learning html or manual labor can be valuable to the person themself, but more often it's valuable to other people, because it enables the learner to serve them. that is, most html is written in the service of other people rather than for personal enjoyment or as a form of personal expression, and in the case of manual labor i think this is even more true

but why is it good to be valuable to other people? sometimes we justify this in spiritual or altruistic terms, but manual labor and html are, i think, usually done for paying clients. that is, having these skills that are valuable to other people is good not as an end in itself but as a means to the end of getting paid

but why is it good to get paid? because the person who is paid can stay alive. but why is that valuable? different people have different perspectives on this, but a lot of them come down to survival as a means to possible happiness. among other things, this possible happiness often consists of enjoying music and literature

so i think that they're both valuable, in incommensurable ways. enjoying music and literature is the ultimate end, or part of it, and learning html and how the world works is useful as a potential means to that end

i also think, though, that work itself is enjoyable and produces happiness, and making other people happy makes us happy

learning how the world works is sort of intermediate between these two. lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, managers, investors, et al., use their knowledge of how the world works to serve others, and many of us enjoy knowledge for its own sake, but the reason why pastry chefs and assembly-line workers need to know how the world works is neither to enjoy the knowledge nor to use it to serve others. it's so they can get paid. so it's sort of the link between serving others and using the resulting value for your own purposes

These are mandatory classes. The kids are not enjoying anything of their free will.

yes, i understand that, and i think that's a really bad feature of the so-called educational system (which is really a form of ritualized child abuse). however, it's completely irrelevant to what i was saying, which is about the relative value of the different skills you were discussing, not about the degree to which the system succeeds at developing them or about the experience of being subjected to it

I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, porcelain, etc., etc., etc.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences: the art of legislation and administration and negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other arts. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

-- John Adams

Yeah I'll take Plato over John Adams.

Not really sure why we are going out of our way to corrupt our children with fables and poems.

They can learn that stuff on their own time. Why codify it? Why does a child need to learn about Box Car Children rather than a biography of an actual person who lived such a life?

Anyway, seems normal to get push back for removing entertainment classes in K12. People are more conservative than they let on.

plato is a bit slippery, but as i understand it, he was opposed to his students learning skills that would make them useful to others; he believed that the liberal arts, those befitting a free citizen rather than a slave, were things like music and literature

You do not understand it.

He specifically disdains these entertainments because they pretend to be what is real, obscuring what reality is.

Anyway, so you read something online and repeat it, and you think its going to contradict someone who actually read Plato.

I just don't get it.

i'm not sure you're right, but i'd be interested to find out. i've found a lot of stuff in plato that contradicts what you're saying, although you're partly correct. did you want to refer to any particular passage in support of your point?

Plato put all writing in the same category as poetry and believed that only person to person dialogue could transmit truth. He didn't have a special animosity toward poetry. He would say that a biography was as useless and dead as a novel.

Could just as well argue that the poetry, architecture etc is the foundation of politics. It defines a culture around which these political groupings are formed in the first place. Things aren't so neatly divided.

As someone who has worked in tech my entire career... Music and literature.

> I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

You're missing something huge here - how does the world change if it worked like this?

Immediately, there becomes an incentive for children to do as much productive work as possible. Immediately, you create a world where companies that are able to use child labor are able to make things much, much cheaper, and win out economically. Immediately, you create products and services which are reliant on the labor of children.

It's not about the actual worth of education, it's about what is incentivized and how that impacts society as a whole. If you don't believe me, look at prison labor - the exact same thing happens there.

This actually sounds great. We might enter into a golden age.

Consider that we got to our current age by having a well-educated populace and that developing countries are copying this model to improve their economic prosperity as well. Rolling that back doesn't seem like it will lead to a golden age.

Where was the proposal to roll it back?

The proposal was to eliminate entertainment education and replace it with real world skills.

You know what defines a "golden age"? A flourishing of the arts and sciences. I've never heard anyone associate that term with an abundance of manual labor, or "real world skills" as you put it.

Change the topic after defeat?

I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

The former, because that is what makes life worth living. The latter is just for meeting existential needs.

Passive entertainment being 'what makes life worth living' sounds like some Nietzsche Last Man tier stuff.

Value is subjective.

Music/lit teaches you "how the world works", but you can do both.

The minimums exists as a roadblock to scammers and fraud right?

YouTube and many other platforms have minimums too. I believe YouTube's is $100.

Gone are the days of simple, naive SC1/BW and War3 UMS mapping.

And now Fortnite is going down the Roblox path too, sigh

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