Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
matthewball.co
matthewball.co
I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.
As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices. I imagine they can hide behind the fact users are making most of the mini games, and they are just providing a platform.
The games are like you say, and there's some that are indeed the model of what I expected: games that kids and amateurs made with their tools. Car jump games. Simple platforming. Basic shooters. But then there are games that seem like they're some dark pattern mobile devs side projects lol Games where you do nothing but collect stuff or pets and there's lots of gratification devices happening and suddenly there's just a literal pay wall. Just the worst of f2p gambling addiction built right into player built roblox games over and over and over again.
But on to the adults, my favorite example was joining a 'shooter' game that was really just a shooting gallery of sorts but it had voice chat enabled and wtf there's some eastern european accent going off on gay people and talking about how the targets should have sombreros so 'we' can shoot "lazy" Mexicans.
That experience was replicated through a few games and I just wrote Roblox off completely as infested with people trying to help kids find hate based ideologies or get them addicted to gambling. I warned their mother, she didn't listen til she got her credit card stolen.
There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes. I feel that, in order to buy this, you must accept that there are a surprisingly large number of assholes, much larger than I want to believe.
Are the number of racist idiots just much greater amongst Gamers™? (To be clear, I play a lot of video games myself. I prefer to believe I am not a racist.)
I'd love to say that there are a lot more young people playing video games, and they're just trying to be edgy, but I had a chat with some guy who was talking about getting his appliances repaired by "lazy [racial slur]" people. That's probably not a fourteen year old, right? I've seen that a lot.
I understand that it probably just takes one or two people per game to make the chat unbearable, but if I'm on a team with six or eight people, and I consistently get at least one of these fucking idiots per match, isn't that still an uncomfortably high percentage of the population?
So there is a natural mechanism that tends people towards some level of civility when they're in meat space with each other.
Incivility towards the other not present is then about fitting in via tribalism. After all, those others could be dangerous so we had better make sure our tribe is all on the right page about mistrusting them.
Incivility towards the other who is present is then about an attempt at social dominance. "Don't mess with me because there are others like me who will avenge me." Perhaps.
Online there is only reputational harm and emotional harm. And when anonymous there is only emotional harm.
When the fear of an unexpected stabbing is truly removed we see the true heart of our fellows. Alas, not the most aesthetically pleasing view.
What consequence is there for saying crappy things online, in a video game, especially playing with kids? At best one would get banned? Then go to some other site/game and repeat the same bad behavior.
The truly nicest people are those who are nice even when there is no one around to watch them.
I don't agree. HN is one of the best examples. We're as anonymous as we can be here and still this is one of the most friendly online environments I know. Clearly community culture plays a big role too. And it keeps offering refreshing content, I learn new stuff here daily, unlike in the commercial bubbles.
Same on Libera chat. Didn't turn into a cesspool. In fact the former freenode suddenly did but the community immediately turned their back on it en masse. It was beautiful to see.
Also, the early internet.
It helps to remember that for every college professor level person there is someone out there for whom tying his shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person out there, there is someone who is cognitively incapable of meaningfully participating in society.
The bell curve is a bitch.
An aspect of the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory is also the level of exposure behavior gets in an online context - so very many more people are present in a way that invites sharing and comment that just doesn't exist in a grocery store. Think about how unusual it would be for me to reply in depth to an offhand comment like this (that was not directed to me) at a bar. Or how many people you might socialize with in a tf2 or l4d lobby over the course of an hour compared to in a grocery.
There is also a component of self selection when it comes to the spaces you are comparing against; you probably wouldn't want to go to bars and groceries where that behavior was present well before you actually got to live examples.
In my experience individual communities can also have very different feels. For example I used to play League of Legends and eventually switched to Dota2 because it felt very consistent that at least one person would behave in an awful fashion in the league lobbies. Whereas when playing Dota that sort of behavior was the exception.
Why? The theory is that they become assholes, not that they started that way. The microphone is corrupting.
I knew he did some bad stuff and spent a long time behind bars, but I didn't see that coming.
Also, if you go to any YouTube video that involves a non-white person committing a crime, the comments are stuffed with thinly veiled, or outright, racist remarks. People are just garbage.
With that said I think the percentage of assholes by percentage of population is always going to be higher in video games with voice chat simply because it becomes a outlet for a certain type of person.
The same reason that many on the internet are toxic.
You have clearly never read the comments on newspaper websites back when they still had them. Sturgeon's Law applies to human beings in general.
Would members of an uncontacted tribe clutch their pearls all the same?
So tired of one cultures anxiety being made the norm everywhere to serve the hallucination 300 million Americans the other 8 billion don’t need should be special.
Americans have expropriated other nations labor and resources and rely on their slave labor without batting an eye about it. Really sick of holding them up as some shining beacon of freedom and dignity.
You rely on worse to survive but omgurd wurds hurt so much as someone else’s back and knees after digging up others food, and their lungs after testing vapes, and their hands after sewing together your Nikes.
The elders are right about my peers; oblivious and entitled. Just parrots of cognitive dissonant TV memes like “Do your own thing. Drink Sprite like the rest of the group we’re showing. Engaging in norms of your society like everyone else is unique!”
Americans are an insane and dangerous people; temporary meat suits convinced of their permanence and righteousness while carrying on about being above biases and exploitative behavior.
Sure you may miss the 5% of chat that is actually tactical and relevant to the game, but it's a very small price to pay in order to avoid edgelords and other toxic people.
Here's a chat log from a game I played yesterday: https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/7902208511/chat
Some wholesome banter and that's about it.
You get these people everywhere.
Considering how much you said your kid has spent, that money could’ve been spent on buying copies for all their friends and you’d still have plenty left over.
From the amount of money sunk into this one game it sounds like there are already weird money dynamics in his social bubble.
Couch co-op is the way to go.... but as the dad be prepared to lose control of your living room.
I mean, I'm fully grown and I still get together with friends and play Mario Party and Smash. I just bought extra controllers and boom, good to go.
If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.
But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.
Some other, more expensive, activities (e.g., tennis lessons together, when the family of one of the BFFs isn't affluent) are harder for more people to do this, but video games are relatively inexpensive.
lol well this certainly depends on how it's done. Walking up to them in a trench coat and handing them a disc? Probably creepy. But you could also just, like, send them a gift key on Steam...
Given the current state of gaming and where it’s heading I would love to ban gaming altogether but I feel social pressure from other kids makes it very hard.
I've gotten into various sports mostly done in mountains and some additional filler training like weightlifting and running, my quality of life and satisfaction from it skyrocketed. Obviously you get much more healthier, attractive and happier as side effect, but over time your mindset also changes a lot.
These days, displays in our home are kept to the minimum since content is mostly toxic and made as addictive as possible (as mentioned all over this thread). As time progresses we will gradually ease it off, but games will be last thing on a long list. There is not much skill to learn so they are not missing out, clicking all around can be done by infants.
It helps that we are surrounded by people where such approach is the norm and mark of good invested parenthood, and letting kids get addicted to various dark patterns online or in gaming is seen as on cca same level as being absent alcoholic parent or similar fail. Not that I don't see it often ie when traveling, kids glued to screen to me looks very sad while their parents often look like epitome of laziness. Physically and mentally weak, socially awkward, stuck in eternal dopamine kick chase, largely defenseless from sophisticated actors milking their parents credit cards.
Also, buy a Nintendo console. It solves 99% of all problems. I haven't seen these dark patterns in any Nintendo title and personally I think it's the best gaming environment for kids.
The way I was raised we understood that most kids do things that come back to bite them later and we could choose to be better than that.
I don't feel guilty for teaching my kids to avoid drugs and alcohol—the friend groups that would actually fully exclude them from aren't worth their time anyway. I feel the same about Roblox. It's a dangerous drug produced by an intentionally exploitative company.
If refusing to participate causes a particular friend group to become inaccessible, that says something about the amount of time that friend group spends on the drug and therefore says something about the utility of the time my kid would have spent with them anyway.
Beyond limiting infinite amount of paying by not giving the kid infinite amount of money, you can limit their time in the app or on tablet by rules like "max X hours per week".
I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.
How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?
Like strict zero money after buying the game. Not on custom skins not on early access characters. We just don’t .
Just don’t give the money and don’t argue about details.
Alternatively, that one custom skill gets unlocked after getting a good grade at the end of the year or for birthday/Christmas/whatever.
Maybe fix that?
I Do this for young relatives.
Ive been shown WhatsApp threads of the young teens who play the DRM-free games i upload - my google drive ID is effectively referenced as some kind of deity lol
Side benefit: No online play or interaction with the outside world, only with your own group (usually)
But I have to keep telling myself those kids or parents wouldn't have paid for them anyway.
Maybe consider buying a few copies at least in the future?
Now, if we're talking AAA titles from companies who will post record profits at the same time as record layoffs, while also giving the C suite a bonus bigger than the GDP of a small nation... Then yeah, sail the high seas. Those same companies thoroughly don't believe buying is owning, so I'm fine to call piracy polite borrowing.
At least this example is limited to a neighborhood.
I personally got a Miyoo for my kid but ended up getting one for myself. The fun and nostalgia are there.
That started at a certain moment in history, when paying online became trivial, so everyone who didn't produce pay-to-win was leaving a lot of money on the table. You need to find games that are older than that.
Some of the good old games are free, for example Starcraft or Wesnoth. There are many cheap games on Steam, but you need to review them first, or maybe find a review on YouTube. If the game is sufficiently cheap, for example up to $5, you could simply buy 5 copies and tell your kid to give donate 4 of them to his best friends.
It'd be cheaper to buy games for his friends to play than to support his robux addiction.
Because if you held game companies responsible for deliberately fostering addiction in their customers to earn a profit, we'd have scores of industries behind them in line to be brought to heel the same way and the stocks for tech companies, game companies, tobacco companies, casino companies, alcohol companies, etc. etc. would all implode.
There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds, and that's been status quo for so long that I sincerely doubt there's any way to actually change it.
Not if they have good lobbyists. In the US we still have beer ads on TV though tobacco commercials have been gone long enough to barely be remembered.
That doesn’t make sense as a concept. The point of the slap on the wrist is that it’s ineffective/insufficient punishment to change behaviour. You’re essentially saying they got a big small penalty.
Everything that a business of that size does is legal because if the authorities actually wanted it stopped, it would be stopped.
And on some level I agree. We shouldn't hold companies accountable for raising our children. Simply mitigate their ways to target them And exploit their data (something Fortnite got dinged hard for).
"We" did? Who's "we"? I certainly never agreed to this. Citation needed.
Who gave to your kid the money to spend on Roblox?
Moderation used to work well, because relatively small communities (forums and game servers) included moderators, who were users that also actively participated in discussion. That model is incredibly rare today. Instead, we have a tiny coalition of corporate giants who own (monopolize via copyright) the overwhelming majority of discussion content and interaction platforms. On these platforms, traditional moderation has been replaced with corporate censorship and automation, which in turn are driven by corporate goals (advertising) instead of genuine participation by moderators.
It's my assertion that this is a natural outcome of copyright itself. Copyright demands that content be exclusively owned and profited upon; therefore interaction must be siloed and incentivized accordingly. Even free (as in beer) interaction must bow to this pattern eventually.
Right around the time of the mobile phone gaming took a very, very sharp turn to pure sociopathy. It had always been flirting with it, but now the mbas are full on putting as much sociopathic addiction rigging, social bullying, and manufactured demand as possible.
This feels like an example of the phenomenon highlighted in another recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
It's pretty cool to get shareholders to pay your employees so you can be called "operating cash flow positive" as if their comp isn't an expense.
This is a point that's sometimes less obvious with cash flow games. It's possible to have positive cash flow even with negative unit economics, _even when no economy of scale can sufficiently improve those unit economics_ [0], so long as you have enough growth and a good cash flow situation.
That's one of the criticisms Uber has had over the years; are they capable of sustaining their apparent pre-reinvestment profits if they cut out that spending? It's potentially a bit different from the Amazon situation because most of the money is going straight into speculative bets, acquiring competitors, ads, ride subsidies, and other activities designed to lock in the market, and it's unclear if that will give them a meaningful moat, as opposed to, e.g., capital investments in a fantastic, in-house distribution and shipping mechanism.
Can Roblox actually become sustainable by cutting spending somewhere?
[0] Imagine a product with -50% unit ROI. For every dollar in revenue you have two dollars in guaranteed costs. However, suppose the product is paid for fairly early relative to those costs (e.g., the business offers a steep discount on yearly subscriptions if you pay up-front, the costs are incurred linearly throughout the year as the subscription is used, and there's a till-the-start-of-next-month plus 30 days lag on billing for computing resources used). You haven't actually used enough resources to be in the red till 6 months after the subscription starts, and you're not actually on the hook for that last payment till 7 months have elapsed. If you're also able to hit a 2x annual growth rate in your paid subscriber count (not realistic for large companies, not uncommon for a few years with good product-market-fit in gaming or some SAAS products), you've paid for the year's losses before the year has ended and still have an extra month at the end where the money is sitting in your account. As your company doubles its subscribers, your coffers will continue to double as well, even if you have indefinitely negative unit economics.
In the real world you usually have smaller numbers being considered (smaller losses, less growth), allowing the game to go on for many more years.
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
(I learned about it from HN here a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855)
I read this in a book over 10 years ago, and now 2 articles about the same trick within the same week.
They had lot of profit-less years of growth and they have captured a big part of the market share.
If he'd bought stock then, he'd have ~10x'd his money in that time, whereas the S&P500 has ~3x'd.
I would have bought stock myself back then, but I was a broke college student.
My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer.
I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when it's worth trying" at this point.
Reddit is allowed too. imgur, snap, etc.
I assumed you're fine as long as your raison d'être wasn't porn and the content was user generated / supplied.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
(regardless of the content of 18+. Don't know how mobile has had 15 years to do granular content warnings based on decades of other medium but app stores still assume 18+ = porn).
On Twitter you can find actual porn straight up.
Google Search is different yet, since they aren't the primary host.
Why was a perfectly fine Unicode Blackboard X filtered out of my post.
I don't have an iPhone, but I know that you can access it via the official app from Google Play.
“To start, Roblox is not a single game. It's a platform that hosts millions of user-generated experiences, such as historical roleplaying games or virtual labs to simulate physics experiments. Because of the diversity of content you'll find on Roblox, we use the term experience to refer to what you play on Roblox.” https://create.roblox.com/docs/education/resources/frequentl...
From the epic trial, Apple addressed why it allows them in a pretty tortured manner: https://www.polygon.com/22440737/roblox-metaverse-game-exper...
I think the best argument is that you’re a single player across games, kids speak of “playing Roblox”, there are portals between worlds, etc. This comment makes the point that all games feel the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287780
It’s pretty different from what Epic wanted to do by offering completely separate games in their App Store without paying apple commission.
>“I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft,” Kosmynka said. “These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.”
Wow. The damage control was even worse than I thought. So I guess the new UE Fortnite Network would be approved no problem since "it's not a game, it's a UGC platform" (not that Epic cares about app stores anymore). Because Epic isn't making the games anymore. Just offloading the labor to others a LA VR Chat.
Here's a key part of this: Executives also have kids and they want to play Roblox on the go!
If you want any part of any government to investigate, shouldn't you suggest some agency that's supposed to be working for consumer welfare or so?
not all undisclosed arrangements constitute securities fraud - only those whose intent is to defraud investors do.
As for anti-competitive measures, the investigation ought to be from the consumer protection agencies, like the FCC, or from the justice department regarding anti-trust.
ANY publicly traded company that relies on the Apple AppStore for a significant portion of its revenue has an implied ‘so long as Apple continue to allow us to do this’ caveat hanging over their revenue forecasts.
Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and streaming games but Roblox does not qualify because it is not HTML5 and not streaming. Many people have had their businesses destroyed for far less serious violations of App Store policy.
I believe there are also other rules against putting an app store inside your App Store app. Clearly Roblox is an app store for games, with its own currency. Apple has not been reasonable on this point with other companies: they originally didn't even want to allow cloud game streaming apps to play multiple games in a single app. Their ridiculous plan was to require a separate Apple App Store listing for each game that a streaming platform supported, and they only relented under pressure after Microsoft went public with their complaints: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/11/21433071/microsoft-apple-... And after that debacle they explicitly added exceptions to their policies for game streaming apps. They have never done so for Roblox-like apps, which are still plainly forbidden under their publicly posted policies.
One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.
There are Lua scripts intended to run on the "client" (such as camera scripts) but I was under the impression (I could be wrong) that even they were converted by a server into instructions sent to the client, not run as a Lua scripts in a local Lua interpreter on your iPad.
I think you're onto something. All of the nieces and nephews of mine that play Roblox do it on an iPad.
You're reasoning as though the policy is for Apple to follow. No. It's for developers to follow. Apple can put whatever it wants on the App Store, the policies are guidance for developers to give them a fighting chance that their apps will be accepted. If Apple wants an app, it'll go on the store. If they don't, it won't.
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
Addiction triggers and reward center abuse. This, to me, is no different than bright slot machines.
The insane spending sprees/binges shrink a lot, when they are expressed in "how much vacuuming and floor washing am I willing to endure?"
Have you ever read "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn? He states that rewarding for the things you mentioned inhibits the desired behavior in the long run.
When I was younger and still played online games regularly, I was initially stoked about cosmetic micro-transactions in (competitive) online games. Not because I wanted to buy them, but because these would fund the continuous development of my favorite games without affecting their integrity (no "pay to win" mechanisms).
Later I found this was a Faustian bargain. It turned these games and communities around them into something that I don't want to participate in.
These days I don't mind as much. Because among the sea of predatory, tacky or otherwise low quality crap there are way too many high quality, original and interesting games (typically made by small teams) that I will ever be able to play.
I don't know anything about Roblox specifically. On one hand the comment above is tragic, but on the other hand my understanding is that motivates kids to play around with Lua. If that's the case, then I'm all for it, because for me and many others that kind of thing is how we found our way into our profession as developers.
Tons of really great stuff in eastern work culture that I miss now back in europe. But that "results-first and call it a systematic right" thing never sat well with me.
There's a reason everyone isn't driving a Honda Civic.
Everyone has their thing. I'm sure you spend money in ways that are just as puzzling to others.
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
Easy.
Step 1: Find where your parents leaves their wallet lying around because they don't expect their child to attempt credit fraud.
Step 2: Punch in the numbers on the card into the appropriate boxes in the app because tech companies really don't have a interest in putting up any real barriers to prevent kids from spending money.
Step 3: Profit!
1. My parent was careful with money. every transaction would be tracked, so anything unusual like Robux would show up quick.
2. 99% of the time a CC would be in a purse or bedroom. Both strictly off limits unless permission was granted (or emergency)
3. I was on general pretty much only allowed to use any allowance (which wasn't much) for food or the occasional school supply. Anything else would require permission. Money given was for necessities, not leisure.
It could just be the outliers popping up in news. But I just can't imagine so many social barriers breaking down over a video game.
these are gambling mechanics... if I just pay $1 more I can make it to the end! if you pay $5 you can be better than everyone else! if I buy just one more lucky box it will have the rare item!
arcades had this, but they also had additional friction as a physical location... now little timmy can sit at home every waking hour badgering mom for another quarter to put into the machine and there's the social pressure of bobby and mary having the exclusive $10 youtuber hat
all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
short rant over
My main criticism right now is this idea of jumping on the LLM buzzwagon. It’s sad that they don’t understand that their success is 100% human-driven, and that using LLMs beyond QoL stuff will be their downfall. The moment we get fully AI-generated games and worlds, it’ll be over.
All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others.
Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it.
The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it.
I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
----
As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
Why are people OK with this? Because there's a place to spend "money" inside this virtual space?
The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
These kids arent' making anything, they're aphids.
Because like it or not, this space has basically become a "third place" for many kids. In that regard it has to compete with console games about as much as a lonely arcade machine in some old bar does. They aren't coming for the games alone.
>The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
Yup, but as we know from growing up and seeing the rise of social media: the best, sleekest solution isn't always thr Victor. It's all about network effects.
Like, a framework for building first-person FPS-ish game modes and handling all the asset management, sync, etc, like GMod being built around Source does and just letting developers build the game modes without worrying about the annoying tricky stuff.
> allowing you to own everything - unlike Roblox, Unreal/Fortnite, and Unity.
makes me worried it's not in the same spirit that GMod is in. Specifically the use of the word "own" there.
Or placed in a less snarky way, capitalism spoils ideals.
Everything popular seems to start as a clone of non-Roblox games, and then goes off on it's own direction from there.
Not Roblox's fault, but it's not a good place for kids to make friends; any kind of contact information must be censored. They can play there with friends made elsewhere.
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.
Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.
Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.
On the other hand, as a Roblox-father also, I do enjoy some of the more polished games, but I almost always fail to get my son to be excited about them enough for us to spend our shared playtime in them instead of the other crap. No free lunch I guess.
Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.
>Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
20220707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 (Problems at Roblox)
> Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents.
75% may be too high, but comparing it to say Steam’s 30% cut for distribution only is a grossly imbalanced comparison.
> 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
And that 75% math is how much you earn, not a minimum or whatever you’re talking about. If players spend ~$1,000 of Robux in your game, you get paid ~$250.
In addition to being mostly pay-to-win the platform has a pedophile problem.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...
I was surprised reading the article that Roblox already spends 28% of revenue on Safety and Trust. Maybe Roblox is just that gigantic a platform to where that's still not sufficient.
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
I do like Roblox from a creator perspective (I'm not a creator) since it's rather easy to guide your children into building games rather than "just" consuming them. Something which is very hard with basically everything else they do digitally.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Roblox employee, but speaking only on my own behalf, and don't work on anything related to age guidelines.)
Sometimes a game is shown and when kid tries to access it he gets a “this game isn’t allowed by your age category” or some such. This is an unbelievably dishonest way to tempt kids into content that’s not for them. If the content is not usable for them it should just not show, period.
If you work at Roblox maybe escalate the fact that content filtering by age category is totally worthless and could use fixing.
I'm not calling you out for making a typo, I'm simply amused at how much punch (no pun intended) it loses when spelled "right". I guess it's true that Ks are Kool.
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Don't worry, though, your iPhone will soon be your own to do whatever you want with, thanks to the DMA. It already is, if you live in the EU.
Lucky you that the EU actually does stuff to big tech.
Lmao.
Microsoft tried that and failed. Amazon tried that and failed. The market has enough room for iOS and Android and nothing else.
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
I posted this in another comment, but the deferred revenue recognition was forced by the SEC [1].
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-sec-told-roblox-to-chan...
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
If all you’re doing is characterizing it as a 3D engine, you’re missing pretty much everything about the platform that makes it work. Nobody looks at VsCode and asks why it’s hard to program that, or Facebook, or Unity, or MMOs, or Stripe. This platform is all those things in one. And I may be wrong on some of the details, but the stuff those devs get to work on is undoubtedly more difficult than the React apps 90% of developers do in their day job that they also had to grind leet code for.
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
Roblox took the scummy approach of monetizing child labor and taking a cut.
I am so glad, despite the other bad things Microsoft has done with Minecraft, that they haven't taken the Roblox path.
And it was more fun to run the server than play the game
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-sec-told-roblox-to-chan...
Which is why large companies are so ideally positioned to do internal ZIRP funding of growth…except they are often culturally unable to do it.
And how is this Roblox better than the (pre MS) Minecraft?
Which large corporation is paying anything close to 4% for credit card processing? Based on what's available to me in my small business, I'd be astonished if anyone doing any significant volume was paying as much as half of this percentage.
I can imagine there are a lot more problems with kids' spending on Roblox, which would bring the processing fees way up.
There are numerous polished games on the platform, but the most of the players are younger kids on hand-me-down mobile devices, so the most popular games tend to be easy to run casual games. Here are a few examples of what you're looking for:
* Frontlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA71d3O1ID0
* Primal Hunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lenB5MTTU
* Riotfall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E0kEFxBTEM
It's a hard problem, though I agree there is some low hanging fruit that Roblox seems ignorant to. I think the biggest reason for its success is an extreme lack of competition. Nearly every time someone makes a good enough (use friendly) sandbox engine, they wrap it in copyright and market it wholesale; and that makes decisiveness (polish) a high priority.
2018 but its still worth listening to.
https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/when-the-platform-is-y...
The width of the text seems odd. It's too narrow on a medium viewport but too wide on a large one. Around 75 characters per line is usually the sweet spot for legibility. The font sizes also seem to be quite peculiar, being done with seemingly unneeded complexity: `font-size: calc((var(--normal-text-size-value) - 1) * 1.2vw + 1rem)`. Not quite sure this is necessary?
My computer also seemed to really struggle rendering the page as it stuttered constantly while scrolling or resizing.
Additionally (and this is moving into nitpicking territory), the navbar strikes me as a bit busy and overwhelming with its 15 items. Perhaps some culling or drop-down menus are in order. I can't say I'm a huge fan of what looks to be a distorted AI-generated header image either.
>Find good games through reddit recommendations
>Play the games, most are novel and remind me of WC3 customs
>Show our non-gamer friends the quirky games
Its pretty cool, but there is soo much garbage to get past.
"New"? Roblox came out nearly 20 years ago...
It went from "cult classic" to "viral phenomenon".
The best times I've had at startups were when we were lean, and profiting >50%. The business was easier, we had more flexibility for decisions, morale was great... But then they all seem to grow into 0-10% profit corporate behemoths where each employee can't even tell if the job they do is worth their paycheck, it just becomes awkward, slow, uninspiring work.
And then you find yourself robbing more single parents checking accounts than anyone on earth, but not even profiting. How depressing.
Once you grow, and it becomes clear you have a viable market, competitors move in and prices start to get ground down.
They took the exploitative practices of microtransaction based games, targeted them at children, then decided to use child labor to create content inside an expoitatively taxed monetization system, then decided to abdicate all their responsibility for responsible community management to protect these children by shutting down their own forums and pushing everything to Discord. Now we have children working for unvetted strangers with no labor protection and no oversight.
I guess if your costs are high enough, you can eat any amount of profit.
They clearly need to get their expenses under control (if they care about generating an actual profit). There's only so much you can grow once you get to a certain threshold, and they must be getting near it.
Spending 2b on opex seems kinda crazy (3.2b revenue vs 1.2b income). Most games are opex-light, capex-expensive. Their capex is definitely not cheap either, though that seems to be a tradeoff they choose to have.
Of course, this all presumes the people running the company care about generating a profit (by no means a guarantee!). I'm sure all of the employees are making out like bandits, based on other commenters, and if management is happy to spend the money, well, that's all there is to it. It would be hard for anyone to argue with their success in growing their userbase, if nothing else.
1) Make tons of cash.
2) Invest the cash back in the business.
3) Record this investment on the financials as an expense.
4) The expenses inflated by investment spending means you declare no profit and probably pay no tax on that profit you just hid.
The alternative is:
1) declare profit
2) Pay tax on it
3) Reinvest what's left after the taxman took a cut.
Which would you choose if you were raking in loads more money than it was costing you to run the business and you had growth opportunities?
Should this be a choice?
If not, how would you "fix" it?
Is that the main source of income? How do game makers get paid?
Wow. I've never though about this before, but this is an awful second-order consequence of the high app store fees set by Apple and Google. It essentially incentivizes App makers to treat users as products not customers!
(Not too surprising for Google, but certainly goes against Apple's public stance).
It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
Get money from your users: 25% platform tax
Get money from advertisers: No platform tax
At this point it’s safe to assume Roblox is as popular as Apple so they don’t have the problem of discovery. Distribution yes for which they can pay the listing price.
The DOJ needs to crack down on Apple and Google.
I had to web search for what this thing was, apparently a game for small kids? Why should "everyone" know about video-games addressed to children?