Roblox - Modern Child Exploitation in Disguise

Roblox is the most popular video game in the US and Europe today, played by around 200 million mostly young people every month. Roblox is more of a creative platform than a game, though; it’s a downloadable portal to a staggering quantity of multiplayer games of all different genres, that are all just a little bit floaty and janky. That’s because anyone can download Roblox and use its free tools and free hosting to start making and monetising games, and an astonishing number of people have done just that. Where today Steam has almost 55,000 games, Roblox hosts more than 20 million experiences, which is what Roblox calls games because, legally speaking, the company can’t admit to selling games within Apple’s app store, as that would make it a game shop within a game shop. But these 20 million experiences do not make Roblox a better platform or company than its competitors. For reasons like exploitative behaviour which no one sees because it’s hidden in plain sight. But to understand why you need to start with their business model.

The developers making all of these experiences earn a cut from everything they create, but that cut is shockingly small. To put it in perspective, Steam catches heat from developers for taking 30% of each sale while Epic and Microsoft’s PC store take 12%. Roblox claims that developers receive around 24.5% of any sale, although, in reality, they get even less.

The tools of Roblox actually let you skip the traditional learning curve associated with 3D modeling which is a really good thing. It also handles the moderation of your players for you. But people using these tools to just get creative doesn’t make Roblox money, it actually loses them money because servers are expensive. This is why the moment Roblox’s core player base of 9 to 15-year-olds start playing, they are submerged in this idea that they could be an entrepreneur. After all, it’s impossible to play Roblox without making other Roblox users richer, because you’re buying passes for their experiences, you’re buying their cosmetics.

Roblox’s website heavily advertises that you can make stuff and earn money from doing so, going as far as saying “Earn serious cash” which has since been removed. In general Roblox’s PR department loves shining a light on the game’s younger success stories. The official Roblox tutorials and the game’s support website both assume you want help with monetisation. And if you go to education.roblox.com which hosts lesson plans for educators, one of the lessons is how to earn money in Roblox. So are any of these kids really “Earning serious cash”? Well, while the average indie game on Steam makes several thousand dollars, the vast majority of “experiences” on Roblox earn their creators zero dollars.

Making a game in Roblox is easy. It’s when you want other people to play it, to reach the millions of players that Roblox promised, that your journey will start heading uphill. If you want to figure out what to play on Roblox, it only shows the thousand or so games out of its 20 million that have the most players right now. So if you’re a kid trying to make games for Roblox you have two choices at this point. You can hustle and try and get your game in front of streamers or YouTubers... or you can pay Roblox to advertise it.

Back in the day, Roblox’s central proposition was straightforward. Individual kids could play around with tools, and make games for other kids, and maybe make money. But as Roblox has gotten more players, the most popular games on the platform have been making more and more money, which means there’s more and more competition to be among the popular games that Roblox users actually play. This means today, less and less of the games on Roblox are the work of just one person. Mostly, the popular games are made by whole teams of people who are improving the scripting, modeling, the sound, and are churning out updates to keep people playing. And this is Roblox working as intended. During the keynote at the Roblox Developer Conference in 2018, CEO, David Baszucki predicted that in the next five years there would be a game on Roblox developed by a company of 100 people.

To Roblox Corporation, better games, made by bigger teams, are a sign of the platform’s success. But what this means is that Roblox Corporation is still using the language of, “Hey kids, come get creative and make games”, in a way that parents are always gonna be cool with, but in actual fact, the reality is significantly more complicated. Everyone’s okay with kids making games for Roblox because its games and tools are designed as an allegedly child-safe environment. But the bigger Roblox’s development teams get, the less work is done in these environments. Today, more and more people who want to take their Roblox development career seriously develop marketable skills like animation or programming for Roblox, and then leave the platform to sell their skills in a totally unregulated cluster of virtual communities, mostly Discord servers. Signing contracts, or worse, having no contract at all, with bosses who might have no experience in management and might be a child themselves. And Roblox does not moderate anything that happens out here, because technically, it didn’t happen on roblox.com.

There are examples of real-life incidents where a child working on a game with a bunch of other people were slowly pushed out to work as an employee and worked on a salary, eventually demotivating and forcing them to work harder to the point where they quit. It is also a culture in the Roblox community to keep quiet about such events because if you have a bad reputation with the community you’re gonna have a harder time getting job offers, or even offering people jobs.

Let’s imagine someone actually made a game that beats the odds and becomes a small hit, and now the game has thousands of players who are making in-experience purchases with Robux(the in-game currency). Roblox takes a 30% cut of every transaction on their platform, and then you actually get paid the rest in Robux! Which of course isn’t real money, you can only spend it in Roblox. If you wanna get paid you wanna withdraw that money as actual cash. But, if any Roblox user wants to take Robux back out of their account and put it in their bank account as actual currency, the minimum withdrawal amount is 100,000 Robux, valued at around $1000 USD. And you can’t withdraw any money from Roblox unless you’re also paying Roblox for a monthly premium subscription ($5/month). In making the minimum withdrawal amount so high, Roblox is increasing the chance that you won’t hit that cap and so will just plow their Robux back into Roblox. Lots of Roblox developers even use their Robux to pay other Roblox developers to work on their games. And if they’re not smart about how they pay these developers, Roblox will take a cut of that paycheck, too.

Supposing someone got a 100,000 Robux and wants to withdraw, there’s another twist. Roblox buys Robux from users at a different rate than it sells them, valuing 100,000 Robux at $350. If your assets in Roblox become substantially devalued only at the moment you take them out of the platform, why not keep them on the platform in case you need them one day? And so tons of Robux don’t ever make it out off the platform, instead of going round and round, with Roblox taking cut after cut. And so, while on paper developers get 24.5% of a game’s sales, in reality, it is even lower.

Roblox has recently gone public on the stock market and has been valued at a high of 75 billion dollars, higher than any other gaming company. Being a public company also means it has a legal obligation to maximize profits. And kids working too hard with unreasonable expectations isn’t bad for the company. And this is the heart of Roblox’s success.

If Roblox was actually operating with care for its young audience, it could just be a great thing for the games industry. Free tools to get kids messing around and making stuff, that their friends can come and play with, also for free? That’s awesome. But that’s not what makes Roblox money. What makes Roblox money is empowering kids into workers with unreasonable expectations of what they can achieve on this platform in a way that would be illegal if it wasn’t happening online.

All of this information is hard to acquire and heavily censored. What hope do most parents and politicians have of understanding exactly what their kids are doing on Roblox, or with who? Or the many and varied ways that Roblox Corporation is profiting from them? Nor does Roblox have any inclination to help parents and politicians understand exactly how their business works, because right now, Roblox is making money hand over fist, and they’re not going to wanna do anything that gets in the way of that. No matter how many young people shout that this is not a platform that values their well-being.