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 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:
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.
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 mean I suppose there are quite a few of those genres being made, but I for one certainly don’t hate it lol. Dead cells is one of my favorite games ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Plus this indie studio working on a prince of Persia game does not stop another studio from also working on a prince of Persia game. I mean we just got a metroidvania game in the series
I know I don’t hate it; I immediately imagined something that is more like Hades with a decent story and art, but even if you do find it unpalatable, with the breadth of indie games out there covering all genres (including brand new ones), there’s something for everyone—even the ol’ gaming curmudgeon. 😉
Why does it have to be more of the same shit that everyone hates now?
If everyone hated it it wouldn’t sell. There’s plenty of other things being made as well, I haven’t played Sands of Time but I would guess the God of War reboot is a similar genre.
There’s plenty of other stuff being made, and I’m pretty sure you either know that and just wanted to complain or somehow didn’t know, in which case it’s your own fault for not even trying to find everything else. There are always trending genres, that’s always been and will always be a thing. You don’t need to be a dick just because you aren’t a fan of the currently trending ones. You have literally all games ever made to play, nothing is forcing you to play only the most recent and popular ones. And a couple of years from now some other genre will be trending, maybe even ones you like. But as said, there’s plenty of good games being released in all genres and formulas, just look for what you like and you’ll find it, it’s really not hard.
Most recent update took away buddy features on my and my son’s phones. Between that, the lack of content, and no real reason to progress, I think I’ll be giving it up.
And they better sty that way for a while. More acquisitions will bring debt that will probably be gambled on, instead of trying to stabilize their portfolio.
The only ones who won with Embracer buying spree were studio owners and execs with their bonuses.
Embracer thinks that by buying studios, it could somehow magically make money. Embracer has no sense of the gaming market or who to sell what games? It has no sense about what projects to greenlight or not. It had already failed once, and it will fail again, most probably.
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