“In the good old days, kids as young as 5 could work as they pleased, from textile factories to iron smelts. Yippee hooray!”
Recent of late, accusations have mounted that Roblox‘s play-to-earn system is exploitative, specifically of players under the age of 18, flouting child labor laws. Stefano Corazza, the current head of the Roblox studio, has fired back, however, stating that the system is “a gift” for players under legal working age.
Roblox has long had creative features; it does bill itself as a game where users can “make anything you can imagine,” with that “anything” potentially being viewed by 66.1 million users worldwide. They also boast having over 3.1 million Roblox developers.
The problem, of course, is the playerbase. Roblox skews younger than most online games. And those vaunted creative elements have caught them some heat in the past, notably when they added 17+ content to the game. But aside from that, while there are good user-created games in Roblox, for every one of those, there are hundreds of bad actors who’ve created highly exploitative “games” that are designed to siphon Robux (the game’s paid-for-with-real-money currency) from player’s digital wallets.
Which dovetails nicely with today where, in a recent interview with Eurogamer, Corazza attempted to shut these accusations down with the following response, taken in full below:
“I don’t know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?” Corazza said. “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. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life.
“There’s always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratised – and in this case, also with a younger audience,” he continued. “I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there’s people that are teenagers – and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.
“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.”
Stefano Corazza, in an interview with Eurogamer
A Roblox PR rep also clarified with Eurogamer that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18.” That said, that statement also might lead to the interpretation that there are some undisclosed number of their developers that aren’t. Another representative sent the following to IGN, in addition to a link to a blog dedicated to supporting developers in the Roblox community:
The Roblox platform serves a broad community of creators People of all ages and backgrounds start creating on Roblox for many different reasons – to learn to code, to share their creations with friends, or simply for the joy of building. For many, using Roblox to build a game or virtual experience or virtual item is a form of creative expression. Much like other forms of creative expression, such as learning to play a musical instrument, or filming and uploading your own videos to the internet, for many it is a hobby, for others it may eventually turn into a career.
Our developer and creator community includes individuals with a wide spectrum of professional capabilities and team sizes, ranging from young students and independent hobbyists, all the way to full-time studios. Roblox is also an educational tool and education has been part of the company’s DNA since day one. Today, educators around the world harness the platform to create immersive learning experiences that inspire creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. We are proud of the positive difference that building on Roblox, with free tools available to all, has made in the lives of many in our developer community.
A recent survey into the reasons the creator community builds on Roblox found that the primary motivator for most creators is not monetary gain.In a survey conducted by Roblox and completed by more than 6,500 Roblox creators in Q4 2023, when asked about what motivates them to develop experiences on Roblox, having fun ranked 4x higher than monetization. For the subset of the creator community who wish to pursue monetization, Roblox offers a unique value proposition. As a user generated platform (UGC), the economics on Roblox are different from other gaming platforms. Roblox levels the playing field for developers by offering frictionless infrastructure, global distribution and development technologies at low upfront cost to developers.
For instance, unlike other platforms where developers incur expenses for app store fees, payment processing, storage, hosting, infrastructure, moderation and safety features – this is all covered by Roblox. You can learn more about the economic value proposition for developers and earning on Roblox, and the percentage breakdown of the Roblox share, here. As our platform has scaled, our monetizing developers and creators have enjoyed meaningful earnings expansion over time through the Roblox Developer Exchange (DevEx) program, which is the means by which creators monetize their games and experiences.
You can see how our DevEx has increased over the years in our supplemental materials, page 11.
In 2023, we delivered more than $741 million to the creator community through the DevEx program.
We are always looking for more ways for developers to earn on the platform (read Our Vision for Roblox Economy). For the experiences that monetize, the majority are created by developers who are aged 18 or older. Of the creators who are enrolled in the Roblox Developer Exchange (DevEx) program, the overwhelming majority are over the age of 18. The average age for top earning and/or engaging developers is around 25 years old. In 2023, more than 90% of the top 1,000 experiences by hours engaged in were owned by developers who were at least 18 years old.
Roblox has continued a slow, steady platform expansion over the years. As of now, it’s available on most of the modern platforms, including Xbox and PlayStation, in addition to some of the top VR platforms. This likely ensures that it will only grow bigger as time goes on.
Source: IGN
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