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3 weeks ago
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Roblox, if you weren’t aware, is much more than a game. It’s a platform where anyone can make games, and then other people can play those games. It’s even possible to earn money from those games, if they’re popular enough.
A simple enough concept we’ve seen before in games, though none have been as successful as Roblox, which is one of the biggest games/gaming platforms in the world, with millions of users.
Roblox is also a very controversial platform, because as it’s been pointed out by People Make Games and other reporting, Roblox’s model looks a lot closer to child labour exploitation and a lack of moderation that make it an extremely dangerous place for kids to be, and a vast majority of its user base are in fact kids.
Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza has however refuted the child labour accusations, because the money that creators can earn from their Roblox games are actually, a “gift,” as he calls it.
In an interview with Eurogamer during GDC, when asked about the accusations of child labour, Corazza said “I don’t know, you can say this for a lot of things, right? Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income.”
“So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life. There’s always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratised – and in this case, also with a younger audience.
I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there’s people that are teenagers – and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.”
Corazza continued to say that the younger “teenagers” Roblox has hired don’t “feel like they were exploited. They felt like ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”
A PR person from Roblox then stepped in to add that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18.” Which is to say, it can’t be child exploitation, because they’re technically not kids.
Which, if that’s a distinction you have to make, doesn’t exactly put you in the best starting position. Corazza talks about the potential earnings Roblox creators can make, but there’s a wide gap of reality in between the ideal Corazza proposes and someone starting to work on a Roblox game today.
You don’t directly earn money from your game, you earn Robux, which can be cashed out once you earn 30,000 Robux. From that 30,000, your cash out is about $300 but once Roblox takes its cut and after fees, you’re actually left with about $105.
It should also be noted that it’s not exactly easy to make a popular game on Roblox, it’s a lot of dedicated development work that, outside of the Roblox ecosystem, is just regular, difficult game development work.
Also, as it is in the rest of the games industry, it’s not as easy as just making a good game. Creators have to spend their Robux just for a chance that their game could be listed on the main “Discover” page on the platform, which in no way is a guarantee they’ll actually see dividends from their spent Robux.
All of this is information People Make Games, More Perfect Union and others have already reported. PMG and More Perfect Union specifically have also spoken to Roblox developers about how it’s incredibly difficult to earn enough Robux and actually cash out. Most never do, because it never seems to be worth it.
Roblox is available on every major gaming platform, PlayStation included, but even Jim Ryan was at one point hesitant to bring Roblox to the platform, fearing that it would “exploit” players in the PlayStation user base.
The fact remains that every single game, from the most popular to the newly published on Roblox are all made by its users. The games that kids come back to the platform to play, the games that make it a valuable platform, don’t come from Roblox.
At this point, Roblox is so big it’s likely here to stay, for good. But to try and skirt around the issue of child labour exploitation by saying that most of those who earn money from the platform aren’t kids, still doesn’t address the ‘exploitation’ side of the phrase.
And even if it’s not the majority, that still leaves a number greater than 0 of kids who are being exploited for their labour on Roblox.
Source – [Eurogamer]
