Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
People Make Games
Views: 1388363
Like: 120814
With Roblox Corporation now being valued at more than $45 billion, we ask whether the kids making the vast majority of its content are being taken advantage of?
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Written and presented by Quintin Smith:
Design and art direction by Anni Sayers:
06.01.2022
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I haven't seen the rest of the comparisons with scrip payments and Roblox's insidious use of taking kickbacks for every type of transaction. What you haven't touched on is the same practice being used by top stock video, stock photography, stock audio sites that only take their own internal currency that you have to buy with real world money. I play a game via Steam called NOVA Empire which also only uses its own "Game Equivalent Currency" (GEC for short). Not that different from arcades that had or have token machines, or like Dave & Busters that uses paper or digital tickets for stuff like that. So does Roblox really have as many games or "experiences" as it claims?
Who actually owns the rights to the games their exploited child laborers create? Can kids take screenshots of their programming efforts as a means of backing up their data to maybe find alternate uses of their work? Like offline, on some other service, or adapt it to normal game development software? Generally speaking if it can be seen or heard it can be backed up (bootlegged depending on what you're doing).
I got a Roblox ad on this video..
YouTube.. no.
If I ever got any children, I hope they turn out to be like Emil. What a sweet boy
Modern form of child slavery.
I tried to use Roblox Studio as a kid, I couldn't. Just like the in-game Portal 2 Creator, but I can use Hammer. This is because of more customizability, unlike Roblox and the in-game Portal 2 Creator. This video needs to get to all young developers. My message is this: your game popular is hard on it's own, Roblox just is the worst, and actual skills that companies would employ you for cannot be gained through Roblox. This is roughly what you stated in this video
As a dev I can say that it is hard to make money because of the cut and the fact very often people won’t notice your game because people are always playing adopt me, Arsenal etc. so you have to spend money to advertise and usually you have to spend a lot for people to see it.
Honestly if you don't have high expectations or just like making games for fun that's great! But if your one if the many few who do want to make a living off Roblox or you want your game to hit 10k players, I would quit making games on Roblox and start making games for Steam, Epic, Apple. Any of those could make you a ton of money. Indie developers are selling their game for only 5 dollars and having 10k people buy that game with only a small amount taken away from you. They are making thousands, and then you could even go higher and hire other people to help you. All I'm saying is just don't have the highest expectations for Roblox. Thank you.
Sinister company. It’s like when Bitcoin mining became a business for professionals only. And it looks like this is now for professionals only platform. Disgusting. Parents who let their kids on this platform are failing their children.
It is difficult to run child labour camps in third world countries now. But it's super easy to run child labour camps in 1st world countries thanks to Roblox.
ehh idfc abt all this shit. me and prob millions of ppl play the game for fun
I swear I got a roblox ad on this video
The "video-cam girl" depicted in the first episode of Squid Game looks eerily like she was born here…
Tem millionth comment.
30%… It should be 40-45%
3:49
so I've been playing roblox for years
my friend has gone through so many accounts since then all because he develops games
they aren't anything big or anything special but it's something to kill the time
but every. single. time. roblox deletes his account for stupid reasons (the recent most being that, no lie, he made a game titled "warzone" as the map was an ancient warzone. well roblox decided to deleted his account, no warning, because of CoD:Warzone having the word "warzone" in it as well)
he's done given up on developing by now as roblox kept discarding him over and over
me, I want to develop two specific games but I know that I lack the knowledge to make them and don't want to risk losing my account
That scrip mecanism mentioned at 11:10 made me think about the "Haciendas" and the "tienda de raya" during 1900 in Mexico (it was the exact same concept).
I just found this channel, and I am glad of that. Very good content and well explained information
It's really up to your opinion on making a game or not like. If you want to go on a diet or not
idk the complete procedure but surely i can file ftc reprot against roblox, or spread this vdo to my friends. Thanks for this vedio
SORRY BUT YOU ARE WRONG!!!!!!!!!
about the developer cut-
roblox:
-free hosting
-free datastores
-comes with avatars, animations and some physics
-provides you with advertising service
-easy monetization
unity/unreal/steam:
-need to pay for servers if the game is multiplayer
-need to pay for datastore
-game uploading fee ($100)
-developers on unity and unreal usually work for free and from my knowledge they dont do as much commisions as we do on roblox
Children are learning early how employment works.
that video was the most scummy and dirty thing you could do you had a small kid clearly reading a script about how its really difficult to develop games and then start talking about how roblox enslaves young developers into creating games with low wages, you clearly made this video so you could make money on Roblox’s expense I know exactly what your doing and it’s not right
4:10
Yoooooo, it's another Emil!!!!!
Roblox is an allegory for this "hell" of materialism the internet has become.
I think there should be an option where developers could choose to get money from their games in robux or in real life currency
I got tricked out by this system, but I never made a game that was good, even for roblox standards. The games that I have made have been so simple with no monetization features to help them make any robux.
Ik about this but like my brother just makes games for fun if thats a good idea to you and just likes to see players having fun and doesent care about robux so I think thats ok right? because he just wants players to have fun so it must be ok right?
Bro this is actually bs, kids make games because they want to do it for fun they won’t expect a million dollar pay check on the first day
Wow! I don't know who I'm more disappointed at. Roblox for being greedy bastards or the kid's parents for letting there kids run wild on the computer so they don't have to pay attention to them.
That was an excellent video.
“developer dream” sounds like a scam to me. Shame that they are using this pitch on child audience
I knew Roblox was a dumpster fire waiting to explode back then but I never knew it was this bad
Roblox is worth 7 Ubisofts? That's more serious than anyone realizes
Ever since I have watched the two videos he made on roblox I have gotten at least one roblox add in each video I watch :}
heres me seing -15% decline in their stock this month. glad i didnt buy that.
about the developer cut:
roblox:
-free hosting
-free datastores
-comes with avatars, animations and some physics
-provides you with advertising service
-easy monetization
unity/unreal/steam:
-need to pay for servers if the game is multiplayer
-need to pay for datastore
-game uploading fee ($100)
-developers on unity and unreal usually work for free and from my knowledge they dont do as much commisions as we do on roblox
Kind of wish you guys had linked Emil's game ("experience") so anyone who's watching this and has Roblox could give Emil some exposure and play time
roblox doesn't even need the money from the ad revenue, they are already making thousands of money out of cosmetics
– make game
– becomes hit
– earn millions of robux
– extract as cash
– buy weed (:
im sorry but is this man dumb?
about the developer cut:
roblox:
-free hosting
-free datastores
-comes with avatars, animations and some physics
-provides you with advertising service
-easy monetization
unity/unreal/steam:
-need to pay for servers if the game is multiplayer
-need to pay for datastore
-game uploading fee ($100)
-developers on unity and unreal usually work for free and from my knowledge they dont do as much commisions as we do on roblox
Maybe I'm wrong, but It's starting to become obvious to me… Capitalism is now reaching the point in its evolution where it's purely about exploitation. You can see this everywhere: electronics, games, online services, cryptocurrencies, nfts, but even goods… I can't even watch the whole video, it's just disgusting and demoralizing. I hope that it's a bubble that will blow up soon, otherwise, we are pretty much doomed.
2:00 You mean no government entity looking out for their health… This is the parent's responsibility. If they abuse their children, we have laws for that. This isn't an argument unless you are saying we should replace parents with government, which in many contexts is already happening.
Now ROBLOX is a 60 billion dollar company and it has the worst connection
Roblox gives me an easy way to create a 3D game with an accessible multiplayer framework. Without Roblox, I wouldn't be able to make multiplayer games, because there wouldn't be servers dedicated to my game, and, even if there were, there'd be nobody on those servers to test it out to begin with. And there's a huge amount of customization that Roblox allows for your characters, among other things that would take AGES to create on your own. I think that Roblox has a lot of positives going with it when it comes to game design. I wouldn't be able to share my cool programs if not for Roblox, because I'd have to create them in Unity, make a (limited) character, then upload them somewhere, ask someone to download it, and then I wouldn't even be able to play it with them or walk around in the world with them unless I dedicated a server to it. Roblox is what spurred me to learn computer programming, because these key factors that I'm mentioning were essential to my motivation when it came to programming.
I don't think comparing Roblox sales to Steam or other platform sales makes sense, because Steam and Activision are selling games either hosted on their own servers or not hosted on servers at all. Roblox games are hosted on Roblox servers AND you're almost never selling access to a game, you're making a microtransaction within a game. It's unfair to compare Roblox to Steam or Activision, because they sell games, and they don't take a share of the profits from within the games themselves.
Is there FTL music in the background??
This kid is going places.
What if someone were to make an open-source version of the Roblox engine, so people could in fact port their games to other platforms?
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