It's not breaking any laws, even though it was literally sexting.” “He kept encouraging it and saying it was OK to make these jokes. “He was the one who started taking the inappropriate jokes in the DMs first,” the 12-year-old girl said. He's accused of sending the underage girl sexual messages. Smith covered one tragic story about a 12-year-old girl who started working for a Roblox fan game creator in his 20s. “But the moment you choose to take that Robux off the platform, if you choose to withdraw it, only at that point are your assets devalued.”īeyond money problems, critics say the platform gives space for abuse without any oversight from the company itself. “If you have a huge payday because you made a successful game, you're a sort of virtual millionaire on Roblox,” he says. This system disincentivizes young entrepreneurs from taking their earnings off the platform, Smith says. Roblox buys Robux from users at a lower rate than it sells them: Buying 100,000 Robux costs about $1,000. If a user makes 100,000 Robux, that translates to $350 - and that’s where things get confusing, he says. However, Smith’s investigation of the company’s financial records found that developers take only 17 cents off Roblox for every $1 that goes into the platform. But Roblox says it gives 25% of sales to developers and takes the remaining 75%. Video game publishers take between 11% to 30% of a game’s total sales and the developers get the rest, Smith says.
In the end, Roblox pays young developers a fraction of the industry standard. “But it's only if you hit the minimum withdrawal amount of possessing 100,000 Robux that you're allowed to withdraw them into your real-life bank account, at which point they get substantially devalued.” “As you make sales of your game, hopefully, you get more and more and more Robux,” he says. Users can sell games they made or items like clothing on Roblox, but in exchange, they receive the platform’s virtual currency, Robux. “Even though Roblox says to encourage you to actually make games, the likelihood of you making a successful game is basically zero,” the developer said.Ī decade ago, individual developers were making successful games that boosted the platform’s popularity, Smith says, but now teams of multiple people make games of a higher standard. Smith interviewed one 11-year-old developer who soured on Roblox after his first game flopped. “Some of the developers I spoke to dropped out of school aged 16 to pursue a career - rightly or wrongly - making games for Roblox,” he says. But now, tens of thousands of young developers make a profit creating games on the platform, he says. Kids couldn’t earn money when Roblox launched nearly 20 years ago. “And it's also kind of an interesting case study in why the metaverse might not quite be the sort of glittering dreamland that some tech entrepreneurs make it out to be.” “It's arguably the world's most successful example of the metaverse,” he says.
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The company’s vision is to allow kids to play games made by other kids using the platform’s free tools, setting Roblox apart from other similar sites, he says.
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Anyone can sign up in a matter of seconds - and two-thirds of American children ages 9 to 12 have accounts, says Quintin Smith, a journalist at the outlet People Make Games who investigated Roblox in a series of YouTube videos. Roblox is a cross between a videogame and a social media platform. But critics say the company doesn't adequately protect kids from harassment and abuse, and that it doesn't share enough of its income with the young developers who made the platform so successful. Roblox allows its users, often children, to create their own avatars and jump into games designed by other players. More than 200 million people play on Roblox every month, making it the most popular video game platform in the U.S. (Leon Keith/AP) This article is more than 1 year old. The gaming platform Roblox is displayed on a table.
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