Submitted 7 months ago by chloyster@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org
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.
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.
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 saw the video posted by gamma on this thread and the general summary I got from the video is that:
It’s a very grey area that isn’t regulated well.
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:
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.
Surely they mean entirety as in “the entire monthly player numbers of every game on steam”, not “the quantity of accounts that’ve ever been created”
Yeah, indirectly abusing children for profit is such a gift smh
Nobody is forced to play their game, right? Why is this news
People Make Games released a decent overview of the child labor exploitation a few years ago
Unsurprisingly, people aren’t okay with that behavior. It don’t help that Roblox tried to pressure them into removing the video
So is the issue about Roblox taking too much cut? Or that they shouldn’t be allowing children to cash out at all because that’s child labor?
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.
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.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
“The children yern for the mines!”
AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
“Work will set you free.”