4 ms·

One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned. It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of the revenue comes from "wha

One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned. It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of the revenue comes from "whales", users that buy large quantities. In a game targeted at children, who themselves don't have income/credit cards, it's unlikely that the "whales" are in the target demographic. Rather, it is likely most of the "whales" are adults who are spending large in order to use the in-game currency to exploit interactions with others. Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing their business model. Their business model is essentially structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children over mobile platforms. On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even worse. It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the same way.

1234letshaveatw 4y ago
I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens (and their parents)
- tristor 4y ago
  $2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale. To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a pathological amount of money. GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.
telchior 4y ago
Correction here -- Roblox largely does not have whales. Most of the long-time successful games just rely on quantity of players (with logged gameplays reaching into the billions). That may change / be changing but among Roblox devs you still don't see the "target the whales" mentality of, say, mobile game devs. It's also an absolutely wild assertion to say that a platform with in-game currency is encouraging pedophiles by design. I think Roblox is seriously screwing up here, but the way you're phrasing it, that's an inevitability rather than a series of mistakes and bad judgment.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Yes. Roblox absolutely is an amoral system to draw money from children, but it's not particularly focused on whales. Rather, their current big initiative is convincing parents to sign their kids up for a Robux "allowance," which is a monthly subscription that gives the kids a certain quantity of Robux per week or month so they can "learn budgeting." Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.
  - telchior 4y ago
    Well, prepare to be surprised, I guess. A big chunk of revenue doesn't come from whales (for almost all games, I can't speak for all but know a fair amount about the average platform success story). That's because of the history of the platform and how games were designed: in a lot of them, the only thing to buy was one or a few "gamepasses", which would unlock functionality. Once you bought the gamepasses, that was it, there's nothing else to buy. The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need, effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve, content that's actually somehow worth playing for that time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel meaty but actually give the player very little. That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of experienced professionals and very well understood principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in. Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are very different from anything else in the game industry, designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to playtime to conversion rate. More recently there are some games that are beginning to lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn guy for outreach" thing.

1234letshaveatw 4y ago

I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens (and their parents)

tristor 4y ago
$2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale. To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a pathological amount of money. GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.

telchior 4y ago

Correction here -- Roblox largely does not have whales. Most of the long-time successful games just rely on quantity of players (with logged gameplays reaching into the billions). That may change / be changing but among Roblox devs you still don't see the "target the whales" mentality of, say, mobile game devs. It's also an absolutely wild assertion to say that a platform with in-game currency is encouraging pedophiles by design. I think Roblox is seriously screwing up here, but the way you're phrasing it, that's an inevitability rather than a series of mistakes and bad judgment.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Yes. Roblox absolutely is an amoral system to draw money from children, but it's not particularly focused on whales. Rather, their current big initiative is convincing parents to sign their kids up for a Robux "allowance," which is a monthly subscription that gives the kids a certain quantity of Robux per week or month so they can "learn budgeting." Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.
- telchior 4y ago
  Well, prepare to be surprised, I guess. A big chunk of revenue doesn't come from whales (for almost all games, I can't speak for all but know a fair amount about the average platform success story). That's because of the history of the platform and how games were designed: in a lot of them, the only thing to buy was one or a few "gamepasses", which would unlock functionality. Once you bought the gamepasses, that was it, there's nothing else to buy. The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need, effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve, content that's actually somehow worth playing for that time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel meaty but actually give the player very little. That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of experienced professionals and very well understood principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in. Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are very different from anything else in the game industry, designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to playtime to conversion rate. More recently there are some games that are beginning to lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn guy for outreach" thing.