Yep, exactly that. There are laws that say if you work more than a certain number of hours per week, you’re entitled to benefits like pension, paid holiday, etc. Zero hours contracts let companies get away with not providing those, as they’ll keep each individual staff member below the required hours, because there’s no guarantee of a minimum number of hours in their contract.
It’s absolutely atrocious, but the government spins it to make it sound like a benefit by saying you have extra time, you can lead a flexible life. What it means in reality for most people is that they need multiple jobs and still get no benefits that a full time job would provide.
We have part-time jobs as well, but those usually come with a minimum number of hours. Zero hours contracts were brought in to bypass those rules. Since zero hours contracts came in, part-time contracts practically disappeared.
my local one closed recently. Looks like they were carrying tons of preowned, and new games etc. But had a large section for board games, trading card games. At one point had warhammer.
Seems they tried to branch out and failed. iirc they said they’re no longer accepting trade ins?
Yup, killed the one reason I had to go in there apart from the Pokémon codes.
Merch is overpriced, they won’t part-ex anymore. They closed stores and moved to crappy corners of sports direct and what not. It’s dying. It’ll be an online portal where kids send links to grandparents at Christmas soon.
It seems like they’re not just profiting on children, they’re setting up a system in which work is exchanged for a roblox company scrip and then charging them that same scrip to advertise their game. They also take a cut. So if a game gets a little traction but doesn’t immediately blow up, there’s a built in incentive to put the money right back into roblox.
Shady. Is it not enough to brush uncomfortably close to child labor laws with an army of child modders creating your value? You really have to turn around and loop them into an exploitative model where you get paid like 3 times before they see a cent? And even then they hold their money hostage until the kid manages to save $1000 rather than spending it on ads and more roblox stuff, that or they need a premium subscription so roblox gets paid 4 times.
Like, it’s illegal to have child labor so therefore it’s a foregone conclusion that whatever you’re doing won’t be child labor, so you might as well do some crazy shit that an employer could never get away with?
Honestly tracks with modern-day capitalism.
That said, like, it would have been cool to learn lua scripting when I was 12. Maybe if it weren’t for the obsession with constant growth we could have the nice thing without the shitty thing that supports it.
Can we eventually learn this lesson please and move on as a species? It’s literally the problem in every news story.
If it was a “gift”, Roblox would be nonprofit and the children would get a larger cut. What they’re doing is called, by any reasonable standard, exploitation
I do find it weird how much of a fuss the second video makes about the pseudo-NFT marketplace in Roblox considering Steam has had every single one of those features in place for a while.
These are good videos, as usual for PMG, and they do highlight relevant issues, but I'm sometimes frustrated by these things in that they mix genuine, dealbreaking concerns with things they flag for this example but not when they surface elsewhere and with things that are legitimately either standard practice, long term gaming-wide concerns or... just fine, actually.
Which is not me defending Roblox, to be clear. Roblox is a mess and it's crazy how successful they are at keeping a low profile about some of the stuff they do compared to other successful games and platforms and relative to their size. For an American company it's insane how little they are on the spotlight for some of this stuff. But "some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These videos run the gamut.
It’s not because one is forced to play their games, it’s because of abusing childs (in terms of work and money). And this is newsworthy, as we speak about over 200 million users, with a lot of them being underage.
I saw the video about a year ago, the one posted by gamma on this thread and the general summary I got from the video is that:
For the immense time and expertise these children are putting into the game, they get a very small cut. And their social life and education will probably suffer so hey!
A job comes with security and rights. These children get no rights as they are not on contract.
There are predators on Roblox which the company is overlooking (as they are making huge games there, like the Sonic the Hedgehog Roblox game).
Was it the People Make Games video? Because there was a follow up to it. Am going to link both for anyone that wants a deep dive into how scummy Roblox is:
boasting monthly player numbers of over 200 million - close to double the entirety of Steam
No? It’s not the entirety of Steam, it’s also monthly active user on Steam to compare to. Last time Steam mentioned the monthly active user was 120 million in 2020 and 132 million in 2021. Steam reached milestones and records every year and broke them multiple times. So it’s fair to “assume” the monthly active users grew, not at last because of Steam Deck. The Roblox numbers (if they are correct at all), are nowhere the double of Steam monthly active users, let alone the entirety of Steam. The entirety of Steam is much bigger: “The billionth Steam account was made on April 28th, 2019.” I know that not every account is a human, but not every account is a bot either.
JFC what kind of terrible human do you have to be to say something like
"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.
“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’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.”
is the same argumentation about stars. 1 in 10’000 people get this status (I just threw random numbers, don’t quote me on that) and the other remaining 9’999 are exploited. So he is justifying exploiting 10k people by gifting one person.
Yes indeed. The PMG video they mentioned in the article dives into that aspect. Highly recommend watching if you want details on how fucked up Roblox is. They also did a follow up video that is great
I am actually ok with micro transactions in multiplayer competitive games for cosmetic skins.
I am not saying that most games that do this aren’t extremely toxic in their design but the idea of players of a popular competitive game continually paying small amounts of money to artists to create new riffs on the same player models and weapons that those players can use to express themselves is potentially a wonderful direct connection between 3D modeling artists and players that continually values those 3D modeling artists far after the initial game development is over (and a game company could potentially have no work for a 3D modeler when just maintaining a multiplayer game with small updates).
The problem is that the type of people who are most likely to spend money on loot boxes are exploited heavily, and then shamed by everyone around them into not revealing how much they spent on video game call of duty mobile skins.
None of this even remotely works when you talk about singleplayer games though, basically nobody dresses to the nines to just go for a walk in the woods where nobody can see them… the direct link between 3D modeling artists and players expressing themselves in view of other players is gone. Players may spend hours dressing their singleplayer character and enjoy that part of the game but it just isn’t the same thing as your multiplayer competitive game character you have spent countless hours playing in multiplayer matches interacting with countless people with. It is the difference between taking a freeing walk in the woods and taking a walk in a city in view of a crowd of other artists.
I guess what I am trying to say is that micro transactions are really only okay when they are “micro” because they are a direct interaction between a player and an artist in the way buying a single song from an album might be.
Of course, my entire point is subsumed by the fact that most of the big companies probably treat the 3D modelers making their skins like trash and are probably going to replace literally all of them with AI as quietly but as quickly as possible in the next couple of months.
If they want to sell skins that are purely cosmetic I don’t have an issue with that. Some people have money to drop on stuff like that and it helps fund the game.
Loot boxes on the other hand can absolutely get fucked. It’s gambling, plain and simple. It has no place in games.
Except Bethesda is also one of the few companies that releases full on expansions to their games. Horse armour was the worst (and thus cheapest) of Oblivions addons, but Shivering Isles was an entire new full area and plotline.
Nuance exists. And ignoring it allows a lot of good to get caught in the crossfire
Real good take, I couldn’t agree more. I also sold a dota2 skin that I got randomly for a couple hundred dollars like 8 years ago and it funded my PC purchases for a couple years so I might be biased 😉
In my comment I attempted to point out that yes the profit from micro transactions never really goes to the artists and developers, but if it did in theory I would actually be really supportive of artist run cosmetic stores for multiplayer competitive games.
I want 3D modeling artists to be valued, and competitive multiplayer games providing a canvas in which artists can continually express themselves and create outfits/skins for players and items in game is an incredible opportunity to reaffirm the value of the labor of 3D modeling artists.
The opportunity is currently totally captured and subverted by shitty corporate control, but in theory it is still there.
For singleplayer games, no horse armor crap is lame, I just want developers working on expansion content.
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Aktywne