Excellent write up. Reading a thorough, detailed and open postmortem like this makes me respect the company. They may have issues but it sounds like the type of company that (hopefully) does not blame, has open processes, and looks to improve - the type of company I'd want to work for!
> the type of company I'd want to work for!
I recommend watching the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
The first video reveals a more general issue that is not specific to Roblox: child labor in the marketplace of monetized user generated content. There are plenty of under-18 YouTubers. It's not even just online content: these questions came up in the entertainment industry a long time ago, but in that industry at least some safeguards were put in place.
> There are plenty of under-18 YouTubers.
...I guess I always assumed that the ones who were monetized had parental involvement. Does Youtube allow minors to do that themselves?
I don't understand how the stuff Robox does (and maybe Youtube?) doesn't run afoul of child labor laws...
I'm not sure either. Particularly how, even in the presence of any policies, they could police the system: Does YouTube send someone around to check on the Ryan's World kid and the work environment?
Even with child labor policies it doesn't seem like platforms would be much better at managing them than content moderation.
Well, which is why I don't think Roblox should be allowed to pay children at all.
That seems like it would be far worse for the children in question than the current situation.
A partial solution might be that games by developers without legal age verification can't utilize real money transactions via the Robux currency. That way Roblox isn't rewarded directly for it either.
Your solution to children who want to sell things on Roblox getting exploited by unscrupulous middlemen agencies is to make it impossible to bypass those agencies?
But do those other places pay the creators such small percentages, and also do everything in their power to avoid paying real $? As far as I know Youtube doesn't have their own currency.
Do those other places host creators' applications for free regardless of scale, and without injecting ads into your entertainment?
Youtube doesn't have their own currency simply because they don't have to, not because they are kind. Their major source of income is ads and subscription. Neither of these needs their own currency. Highly unsure what your point is.
host creators' applications for free regardless of scale
Yes? Your Youtube video / livestream can have tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers across the globe.
> without injecting ads into your entertainment?
That's an odd complaint that hyper-specific to how Youtube monetizes content. Look at Steam, Play Store, AppStore, all those host your app/game for free, regardless of the scale, and only take a 30% cut.
> Highly unsure what your point is.
Fine, here's another way to explain it. The minimum amount to take out money in most places, including Youtube, is 100$. Why is it 1000$ in Roblox?
1. You are comparing interactive game servers to streaming service? Sure there are free CDN you can use, but are there free servers alternative you can use on the market regardless of scale and traffic? The pricing of these two services has fundamental difference on the market. If you know one of such service, name it. I would be glad to use it.
2. You are comparing Steam, Play Store, App store to Roblox? Are they providing free servers for multi-player experience? Does Steam let you host free servers? Sure they provide a way to download the app, but none of them provides free servers along with free network traffic. What makes you think they should be priced the same way when the services they provide are fundamentally different?
3. What makes you think $100 is reasonable, while $1000 is not reasonable? Every business has their own way for monetization. If you want to claim $100 is reasonable and should be the industry standard, what is your argument to support it? If Youtube is so kind, why don't they just not have any minimum take out amount in the first place, like most e-commerce companies do? Your questions are baseless in the first place by assuming there is certain non-existent rules that need to be followed. You can dislike it, but claiming $1000 limit it set to abuse child labor is completely un-based.
The % cut of $revenue is outside the main scope of my comment, which concerned child labor, a somewhat independent issue. It doesn't matter too much to me the % monthly revenue a 12 year old kid gets, I'm more concerned with the promise of unlikely riches encouraging kids to work long hours outside the oversight of traditional child labor laws. If that 12 year old is putting in a 30 hour work weeks then I think it's problematic regardless of the revenue with some minimal enforceable guardrails. I don't think parental signoff is sufficient either: the entertainment industry has plenty of examples of how that can go wrong, and also how some of those minimum guardrails might work.
This youtuber needs to make a living.
Roblox is great that it built up an ecosystem where people can contribute and get rewarded. It is a positive feedback loop.
Not like open source software, where the financial loop is broken. I am pretty sure the Bolt creator did not get anything from HashCorp for his work.
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...
The idea that these children would otherwise be making their own games is knowingly, generally wrong.
The solution is creating a competing platform and offering a better cut. You up for the task?
Edit to add: lazy people downvote.
This % includes cost of all game server hosting, databases, memory stores, etc. even with millions of concurrents, app store fees, etc. All included in that number. Developer gets effectively pure profit for the sole cost of programming/designing a great game. Taught me how to program, & changed my entire future. Disclosure: My game is one of most popular on the platform.
And that's a reasonable decision for an adult to make, and if they were targeting an adult developer community.
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.
Are you really suggesting that Roblox's cut should be lower purely because the target market is children? Why? If anything, the fact that a kid can code a game in a high-level environment and immediately start making money—without any of the normal challenges of setting up infrastructure, let alone marketing and discovery—is amazing, and a feat for which Roblox should definitely be rewarded.
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.
The problem is that robolox essentially lies to kids (by omission) in an attempt to get free labor out of them.
Yes, I agree that the deception is a problem, although I admit I'm not well versed in the issue. (I'm watching the documentary linked elsewhere now.) But the original claim was that they were exploiting young developers by taking a big cut of revenues, which I disagree with.
Does your son have other alternatives to learn programming and make money other than Roblox?
If there are, then it's a great lesson about looking outside of one's immediate circumstance and striving towards something better.
> And that's a reasonable decision for an adult to make, and if they were targeting an adult developer community.
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.
No, because a child is not deemed to have the necessary faculties to make these decisions.
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.
Western society says that some decisions are only able to be made by people who are old enough. If you think about other decisions like gambling at a casino, joining the army or purchasing alcohol, then it might help you understand where they're coming from.
Very cool, the Jailbreak creator! Do such popular games earn enough to be able to retire? (although you wouldn't actually retire, since working is more fun)
Pretty darn cool hearing from you! But yes, you're correct on both points :)
Congrats, I haven't made it that far yet, buy enjoy working anyway.
To add, there is a nice documentary here[1] which also has a followup[2] that show even more of the issue at hand. Kids making games and only getting 24.5% of the profit is one thing, but everything else that Roblox does is much worse.
[1] https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
[2] https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
The 24.5% cut is fine, you have to consider the 30% app store fees for a majority mobile playerbase, all hosting is free, moderation is a major expense, and engine and platform development.
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.
> The 24.5% cut is fine, you have to consider the 30% app store fees for a majority mobile playerbase, all hosting is free, moderation is a major expense, and engine and platform development.
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.
I can't think of any other platform with comparable expenses. Traditional game engines have the R&D component, but not moderation, developer services, or subsidizing games that don't succeed.
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.
Crazy compared to what? Nobody else is offering what Roblox offers, and building it yourself is a non-starter for almost everyone.
I have less a problem with the cut, and more a problem with how they achieve it. It harkens back to company towns paying workers in company credit that is expensive to convert to USD.
Or how about giving a free platform to get into games development for young people that otherwise wouldn't have become interested.
No matter what the cut is I think there are some legitimate social questions to ask about whether want young people to be potentially exposed to economic pressure to earn or whether we'd rather push back aggressively against youth monetization to preserve a childhood where, ideally, children get to play.
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.
By that logic, Dreams is "exploiting" developers by taking a 100% cut of their earnings. Making money isn't the point of either of these platforms.
I am naive about the reality on the ground when it comes to this issue, but doesn't this hinge on transparency? If they can show they are covering costs + the going market rate, which seems to be 30% (at best), then wouldn't it be reasonable? So is a 45% cut for infra ok or not seems to be the question.
More egregiously, they're (per your article) manipulating kids into buying real ads for their creations, with the false promise that "you could get rich -- if you pay us".
>"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.
Again, as across-thread: this is a tangent unrelated to the actual story, which is interesting for reasons having nothing at all to do with Roblox (I'll never use it, but operating HashiStack at this scale is intensely relevant to me). We need to be careful with tangents like this, because they're easier for people to comment on than the vagaries of Raft and Go synchronization primitives, and --- as you can see here --- they quickly drown out the on-topic comments.