Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza says that the game doesn't exploit children, and is instead "a gift".
  •  Vodulas [they/them]   ( @Vodulas@beehaw.org ) 
    36•1 month ago

    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.

    •  thingsiplay   ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 
      24•1 month ago

      Also:

      “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.

  •  Admetus   ( @Admetus@sopuli.xyz ) 
    25•1 month ago

    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:

    1. 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!
    2. A job comes with security and rights. These children get no rights as they are not on contract.
    3. There are predators on Roblox which the company is overlooking (as they are making huge games there, like the Sonic the Hedgehog Roblox game).

    It’s a very grey area that isn’t regulated well.

  •  thingsiplay   ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 
    8•1 month ago

    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.

      •  MudMan   ( @MudMan@fedia.io ) 
        2•1 month ago

        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.

    •  thingsiplay   ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 
      16•1 month ago

      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.

  •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) English
    2•1 month ago

    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.