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
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
This headline is almost incoherent, I wish they’d stop teaching journalists about newspaper shorthand headlines. We’re not limited to broadleaf sized headlines any more, just put some fucking words in there so it makes sense.
I have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn’t my first language), but good to know that that’s not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn’t help. I just give up and let it go.
Staff members were told of GAME’s impending change to force staff onto zero hours contracts, first reported yesterday by Eurogamer, via mass video calls held on Microsoft Teams.
Are you paid to craft distraction posts? The headline and article are clear but your post (clearly upvoted by bots) is now the point of discussion (likely some responders are also the same bot accounts).
How much do you earn in service of corporate interests?
Who do you think is paying random Lemmy users to complain about headlines on news articles? Seriously, who do you imagine is behind such a ridiculous conspiracy? Where is the value in such activity?
Also, upvotes are public. We can see who upvoted him, and it wasn't bots.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then. Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then.
People upvoted him because they agree with him. Not that hard to figure out.
Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Because the headline is trash, hence the conversation at hand.
I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?
Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
But at the same time, it’s intuitively and entirely understandable.
Who? GAME staff
What? Discovered something
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call
Or, written together, the title up above. And that’s a completely normal sentence structure, it’s essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start (“Via a mass microsoft teams call…”).
Sure, but while I understand the sentence structure I still don’t know what it’s talking about without the article itself
I think the point they are making is that we use these short titles even though we don’t need to. It might be correct, but why not make better use of the medium
I just find it weird that you felt compelled to post an explanation for something that is “intuitively and entirely understandable”. It’s almost as if you knew that lots of people couldn’t understand it.
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.
You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.
As a noun or adjective it would be a derogatory term for gay men. As a verb most people would recognise it as disappeared in the UK. There plenty of other terms for the verb.
Pretty sure they’re referring to “poof” which is a derogatory term for a gay man in British vernacular. In any case, the context in which it was used clearly wasn’t intended as the derogatory term, rather to mean “suddenly”.
There is legitimate use cases for a zero hour contract. The vast majority don’t fit it.
If the zero hour contract minimum wage was £50 per hour, then it would be appropriate. This would still allow it to be useful to hire consultant, semi- retired experts and contractors and use PAYE, no additional companies, accountants etc. Very efficient and would only apply to employees with some power in the relationship with the business.
However, it’s used to exploit minimum or low wage staff. The company takes all the flexibility it offers and uses it to bully the employee into accepting the hours the business wants. They do this by treating to cut hours if the employee doesn’t agree. This makes it difficult to have multiple jobs to make up the hours.
eurogamer.net
Najstarsze