9 ms·

Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation

32 points by SLHamlet 3y ago

lordwiz 3y ago
I got started in coding via roblox, when i was below 18, but we had groups of people of our similar age collaborating together and forming game studios. We did commissions as well which were paid. So if we alter the perspective on that then anyone can call it a child labour. But mostly the kids here just enjoy the experience as a whole
- wobblyasp 3y ago
  Except for the ones who don't: https://youtu.be/n6PYj93SGxc?t=384 https://youtu.be/n6PYj93SGxc?t=384 The point isn't that some kids enjoy it. The point is kids shouldn't be involved in the capitalist machine because its inherently exploitive.
crims0n 3y ago
Can we not link to kotaku? The actual source is eurogamer and far less editorialized: https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making-money-on-the-platform-isnt-exploitation-its-a-gift https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making...
- dang 3y ago
  OK, we've changed the URL to that from https://kotaku.com/roblox-boss-kids-child-labor-exploit-indonesia-slum-1851387795 https://kotaku.com/roblox-boss-kids-child-labor-exploit-indo... above. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IncreasePosts 3y ago
Is child labor by definition exploitative? If it is then it is legal to exploit children in America, because child labor is legal in some circumstances, like a child working for a parent's small business.
- wobblyasp 3y ago
  There really isn't a comparison here. Allowing a 12 year old to work in their parent's shop part time with relatively strict hour limits (at least in Canada) is going to inherently be less exploitative then a child working for a "game development company" in which they have actual personal connection to.
  - kragen 3y ago
    this depends a lot on the parent in question, unfortunately. i'm pleased that you don't have any experience with that fact, and i hope that continues to be true, but it would be worthwhile for you to gain an appreciation of the diversity of other people's life situations
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      If your parents are shit they will be shit regardless of whether you're also working for them or not. Can't really get away from them unless you emancipate or something.
      - kragen 3y ago
        getting access to an independent income stream is vitally, vitally important in this situation, and getting away from bad parents is actually both considerably less all-or-nothing and more feasible than you are imagining, often
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  In America, you work, you get a paycheck for hours worked. At Roblox, you work, they take the majority of the proceeds and then your project has to make a decent amount of money or you NEVER get paid.
- burkaman 3y ago
  Child labor is a defined term that doesn't just mean kids working for a business, it only qualifies if the work "is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and/or interferes with their schooling". - https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm
crooked-v 3y ago
The "exploiting" part doesn't come from the ability for children to make money. It comes from the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money. It's all designed to get a huge amount of free labor, while hiding how outside of a lucky few who benefit from the network effect, the average would-be game maker ("slum kid" or not) would be financially better off just using a standalone toolkit to make their own app and selling it on Itch or Gumroad.
- modeless 3y ago
  Don't forget Apple accounts for ~30 of those percentage points. It's not as if Roblox actually gets 75% of the money.
- nulltxt 3y ago
  > 100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD Not much better but still a bit at 30,000 robux for $105 now
- SLHamlet 3y ago
  Well, both allowing kids to monetize and taking almost all the revenue are a problem. The wild thing is Second Life's 600K MAU players monetize better than Roblox's 350M MAU players -- both for the company (it's still not profitable despite huge revenue) and for the creator community: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-second-life-philip-rosedale.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-s...
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    I get the revenue split issue, but why is providing a platform for kid creators to make money a problem?
    - crtasm 3y ago
      Because the majority of people on the platform are kid spenders?
resource_waste 3y ago
Child labor has negative ideas because we think of coal mines with cancer, 0 education, and 18 hour working days. Or something like that. I looked at the education my kid was getting in K-5, and I genuinely think he would learn more at a company doing manual labor than he would in Music. But maybe we don't need to do such menial tasks. My kid could play with the HTML on a page for hours until it looks good. I used to pay people on upwork to do this... I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?
- wobblyasp 3y ago
  There's value in just being a child. Not everything is about min/maxing your life.
  - resource_waste 3y ago
    Then... don't make them sit in schools learning how to enjoy 'entertainment'.
- kragen 3y ago
  learning to enjoy music and literature is valuable to the person themself. learning html or manual labor can be valuable to the person themself, but more often it's valuable to other people, because it enables the learner to serve them. that is, most html is written in the service of other people rather than for personal enjoyment or as a form of personal expression, and in the case of manual labor i think this is even more true but why is it good to be valuable to other people? sometimes we justify this in spiritual or altruistic terms, but manual labor and html are, i think, usually done for paying clients. that is, having these skills that are valuable to other people is good not as an end in itself but as a means to the end of getting paid but why is it good to get paid? because the person who is paid can stay alive. but why is that valuable? different people have different perspectives on this, but a lot of them come down to survival as a means to possible happiness. among other things, this possible happiness often consists of enjoying music and literature so i think that they're both valuable, in incommensurable ways. enjoying music and literature is the ultimate end, or part of it, and learning html and how the world works is useful as a potential means to that end i also think, though, that work itself is enjoyable and produces happiness, and making other people happy makes us happy learning how the world works is sort of intermediate between these two. lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, managers, investors, et al., use their knowledge of how the world works to serve others, and many of us enjoy knowledge for its own sake, but the reason why pastry chefs and assembly-line workers need to know how the world works is neither to enjoy the knowledge nor to use it to serve others. it's so they can get paid. so it's sort of the link between serving others and using the resulting value for your own purposes
ncr100 3y ago
Roblox appears to profit from this situation: * CHILDREN spend a lot of time creating content for minimal return. The Developer Revenue Return is approximately 30%. Conventional app stores should return 70 to 97%, instead. * CHILDREN buy and build loot box systems (gambling, uncontrolled spending, emotional manipulation, focus on money over gameplay), and are financially and socially motivated to use their "Robux" (which they purchase from Roblox - gift cards, direct, or contests / promotions) on expensive virtual items :hat-with-sparkly-feather:. I believe humans take a long time to mature and need careful education to help moderate their tendency towards unhealthy biases once they become adults, and begin to directly impact the rest of us. * Generally, children may not fully understand the real-world value they're giving up in such unfavorable circumstances. I formerly developed monetization solutions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dukeofdoom 3y ago
I remember watching an interview with a deformed person talking about the circus freak show she was at being shut down. The people claiming to do it for her, trying to save her from being exploited, ended up just putting her out of a good living and actually making her destitute.and she actually liked her job. There was a long time ago when these things were more common i think in the 1920s.. Definitely some circumstances where a child working when parents are disabled, could be the only source of reliable income for a family in some places
grzeshru 3y ago
Gone are the days of simple, naive SC1/BW and War3 UMS mapping.
tschellenbach 3y ago
Bit of a weird take no? When I was 13 google ads was a great source of income for me. Learned a lot back in those days, definitely a foundation that enabled me to succeed in the future.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  I'm also trying to understand the pearl-clutching. Kids' entrepreneurial opportunities used to be lemonade stands and lawn-mowing. Now it's Etsy, TikTok, and Roblox.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    When kids have lemonade stands, mow the lawn, walk dogs or babysit, who is able to profit off of their labor? When kids are on Etsy, TikTok and Roblox, show is able to profit off of their labor? In the past when kids had "more opportunities!!!" in coal mines and garment mills, who was able to profit? Notice how the answer for the last two are similar and are dissimilar to the first. That is why.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      I'm too confused by the assertion that a kid opening an Etsy store in 2024 is the same as a kid being compelled to work in a coal mine in the mid-19th century to understand your point. My apologies.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related: Roblox Accused of Concocting Illegal Gambling Ring for Minors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924634
haunter 3y ago
And now Fortnite is going down the Roblox path too, sigh
calderwoodra 3y ago
The minimums exists as a roadblock to scammers and fraud right? YouTube and many other platforms have minimums too. I believe YouTube's is $100.

32 points by SLHamlet 3y ago

I got started in coding via roblox, when i was below 18, but we had groups of people of our similar age collaborating together and forming game studios. We did commissions as well which were paid. So if we alter the perspective on that then anyone can call it a child labour. But mostly the kids here just enjoy the experience as a whole

wobblyasp 3y ago
Except for the ones who don't: https://youtu.be/n6PYj93SGxc?t=384 https://youtu.be/n6PYj93SGxc?t=384 The point isn't that some kids enjoy it. The point is kids shouldn't be involved in the capitalist machine because its inherently exploitive.

crims0n 3y ago

Can we not link to kotaku? The actual source is eurogamer and far less editorialized: https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making-money-on-the-platform-isnt-exploitation-its-a-gift https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making...

dang 3y ago
OK, we've changed the URL to that from https://kotaku.com/roblox-boss-kids-child-labor-exploit-indonesia-slum-1851387795 https://kotaku.com/roblox-boss-kids-child-labor-exploit-indo... above. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

IncreasePosts 3y ago

Is child labor by definition exploitative? If it is then it is legal to exploit children in America, because child labor is legal in some circumstances, like a child working for a parent's small business.

wobblyasp 3y ago
There really isn't a comparison here. Allowing a 12 year old to work in their parent's shop part time with relatively strict hour limits (at least in Canada) is going to inherently be less exploitative then a child working for a "game development company" in which they have actual personal connection to.
- kragen 3y ago
  this depends a lot on the parent in question, unfortunately. i'm pleased that you don't have any experience with that fact, and i hope that continues to be true, but it would be worthwhile for you to gain an appreciation of the diversity of other people's life situations
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    If your parents are shit they will be shit regardless of whether you're also working for them or not. Can't really get away from them unless you emancipate or something.
    - kragen 3y ago
      getting access to an independent income stream is vitally, vitally important in this situation, and getting away from bad parents is actually both considerably less all-or-nothing and more feasible than you are imagining, often
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
In America, you work, you get a paycheck for hours worked. At Roblox, you work, they take the majority of the proceeds and then your project has to make a decent amount of money or you NEVER get paid.
burkaman 3y ago
Child labor is a defined term that doesn't just mean kids working for a business, it only qualifies if the work "is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and/or interferes with their schooling". - https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm

crooked-v 3y ago

The "exploiting" part doesn't come from the ability for children to make money. It comes from the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money. It's all designed to get a huge amount of free labor, while hiding how outside of a lucky few who benefit from the network effect, the average would-be game maker ("slum kid" or not) would be financially better off just using a standalone toolkit to make their own app and selling it on Itch or Gumroad.

modeless 3y ago
Don't forget Apple accounts for ~30 of those percentage points. It's not as if Roblox actually gets 75% of the money.
nulltxt 3y ago
> 100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD Not much better but still a bit at 30,000 robux for $105 now
SLHamlet 3y ago
Well, both allowing kids to monetize and taking almost all the revenue are a problem. The wild thing is Second Life's 600K MAU players monetize better than Roblox's 350M MAU players -- both for the company (it's still not profitable despite huge revenue) and for the creator community: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-second-life-philip-rosedale.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-s...
- CharlesW 3y ago
  I get the revenue split issue, but why is providing a platform for kid creators to make money a problem?
  - crtasm 3y ago
    Because the majority of people on the platform are kid spenders?

resource_waste 3y ago

Child labor has negative ideas because we think of coal mines with cancer, 0 education, and 18 hour working days. Or something like that. I looked at the education my kid was getting in K-5, and I genuinely think he would learn more at a company doing manual labor than he would in Music. But maybe we don't need to do such menial tasks. My kid could play with the HTML on a page for hours until it looks good. I used to pay people on upwork to do this... I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

wobblyasp 3y ago
There's value in just being a child. Not everything is about min/maxing your life.
- resource_waste 3y ago
  Then... don't make them sit in schools learning how to enjoy 'entertainment'.
kragen 3y ago
learning to enjoy music and literature is valuable to the person themself. learning html or manual labor can be valuable to the person themself, but more often it's valuable to other people, because it enables the learner to serve them. that is, most html is written in the service of other people rather than for personal enjoyment or as a form of personal expression, and in the case of manual labor i think this is even more true but why is it good to be valuable to other people? sometimes we justify this in spiritual or altruistic terms, but manual labor and html are, i think, usually done for paying clients. that is, having these skills that are valuable to other people is good not as an end in itself but as a means to the end of getting paid but why is it good to get paid? because the person who is paid can stay alive. but why is that valuable? different people have different perspectives on this, but a lot of them come down to survival as a means to possible happiness. among other things, this possible happiness often consists of enjoying music and literature so i think that they're both valuable, in incommensurable ways. enjoying music and literature is the ultimate end, or part of it, and learning html and how the world works is useful as a potential means to that end i also think, though, that work itself is enjoyable and produces happiness, and making other people happy makes us happy learning how the world works is sort of intermediate between these two. lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, managers, investors, et al., use their knowledge of how the world works to serve others, and many of us enjoy knowledge for its own sake, but the reason why pastry chefs and assembly-line workers need to know how the world works is neither to enjoy the knowledge nor to use it to serve others. it's so they can get paid. so it's sort of the link between serving others and using the resulting value for your own purposes

ncr100 3y ago

Roblox appears to profit from this situation: * CHILDREN spend a lot of time creating content for minimal return. The Developer Revenue Return is approximately 30%. Conventional app stores should return 70 to 97%, instead. * CHILDREN buy and build loot box systems (gambling, uncontrolled spending, emotional manipulation, focus on money over gameplay), and are financially and socially motivated to use their "Robux" (which they purchase from Roblox - gift cards, direct, or contests / promotions) on expensive virtual items :hat-with-sparkly-feather:. I believe humans take a long time to mature and need careful education to help moderate their tendency towards unhealthy biases once they become adults, and begin to directly impact the rest of us. * Generally, children may not fully understand the real-world value they're giving up in such unfavorable circumstances. I formerly developed monetization solutions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dukeofdoom 3y ago

I remember watching an interview with a deformed person talking about the circus freak show she was at being shut down. The people claiming to do it for her, trying to save her from being exploited, ended up just putting her out of a good living and actually making her destitute.and she actually liked her job. There was a long time ago when these things were more common i think in the 1920s.. Definitely some circumstances where a child working when parents are disabled, could be the only source of reliable income for a family in some places

grzeshru 3y ago

Gone are the days of simple, naive SC1/BW and War3 UMS mapping.

tschellenbach 3y ago

Bit of a weird take no? When I was 13 google ads was a great source of income for me. Learned a lot back in those days, definitely a foundation that enabled me to succeed in the future.

CharlesW 3y ago
I'm also trying to understand the pearl-clutching. Kids' entrepreneurial opportunities used to be lemonade stands and lawn-mowing. Now it's Etsy, TikTok, and Roblox.
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  When kids have lemonade stands, mow the lawn, walk dogs or babysit, who is able to profit off of their labor? When kids are on Etsy, TikTok and Roblox, show is able to profit off of their labor? In the past when kids had "more opportunities!!!" in coal mines and garment mills, who was able to profit? Notice how the answer for the last two are similar and are dissimilar to the first. That is why.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    I'm too confused by the assertion that a kid opening an Etsy store in 2024 is the same as a kid being compelled to work in a coal mine in the mid-19th century to understand your point. My apologies.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related: Roblox Accused of Concocting Illegal Gambling Ring for Minors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924634

haunter 3y ago

And now Fortnite is going down the Roblox path too, sigh

calderwoodra 3y ago

The minimums exists as a roadblock to scammers and fraud right? YouTube and many other platforms have minimums too. I believe YouTube's is $100.