[ Reading time : 5 minutes | Date : 7, February 2023 | Author : Teresa Brown ]
A video game colossus, ROBLOX has recently dominated the kids' gaming market and generated $454 million in revenue in the most recent quarter. According to a recent research, success is based on taking advantage of the young game developers—many of whom are kids—creating the game's content. Enjoy endless hours of gaming with RobloxPlayer.exe, the go-to application for Roblox enthusiasts.
As a platform, Roblox gives players the means to both build and play a virtually limitless variety of "experiences," such as scaling a huge staircase, managing a restaurant, or escaping from a prison. There are hundreds of times more games on Roblox's browser than there are on Steam.
Tens of millions of these games are available. 43 million individuals, primarily children, play those games every day. Some of the most well-liked activities have garnered billions of visitors and bring in millions of dollars for their creators annually.
A New Report
According to a new report, however, this model—which powers much of Roblox’s enormous success—may take advantage of young game developers. Published Thursday by People Make Games, a YouTube channel by independent games journalists, “How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers” takes a deep dive into the promise of “making it” on Roblox and alleges that the platform actually sets kid developers up for failure.
“Since becoming a publicly traded company, Roblox is now worth more than Electronic Arts,” producer Quintin Smith of People Make Games tells WIRED. The company was valued at $45 billion in a direct listing earlier this year.
“With most of the games on the platform being made by minors and a revenue split that's just one third of the industry standard, we looked into whether these young developers were in fact being exploited.”
(Traditionally, game stores have taken a 30 percent cut of revenue that publishers earn on their platforms, and hand 70 percent over to the devs. Roblox gives developers just 25 percent, plus payouts based on engagement.)
People Make Games’ analysis of Roblox’s economics highlights the chasm between Roblox’s promise as a way for kids to become game developers and the reality: It is very challenging to make money on Roblox, and Roblox profits from people trying.
Few things are more tantalizing than making bank doing what you love, and with the ballooning value of the games industry, it finally seems possible for young gamers: working for a game development studio, streaming on Twitch, competing professionally in esports.
Over the past decade, though, the games industry has reckoned with widespread poor labor practices—from 12-hour workdays at top studios to ludicrously imbalanced contracts with managers. Low wages and egregious workplace conditions are common. The furious, all-consuming passion gamers feel for their favored media makes them an easy target for exploitation.
Financial Success Developing Games
Roblox leans into the potential for financial success developing games in its marketing copy. The website for Roblox Studio, its developer engine, advertises the company’s three tenants for aspiring young developers: “Make Anything,” “Reach Millions of Players,” and “Earn Serious Cash.” On that last point, Roblox notes that top developers earn over $2 million a year through the platform.
Developer testimonials celebrate how Roblox set them free from the financial difficulties of being a college student or even tease the prospect of a lifelong career in games. Roblox’s YouTube channel also promotes mini documentaries glamorizing its most successful developers.
Across the internet, publications like Forbes and the BBC publish stories about Roblox developers paying off their parents’ mortgage or their college tuition.
Roblox provides a lot for its developers: server space, marketplace infrastructure, cross-platform capability. Roblox Studio is, like the game, free. Developers can make money through Roblox with its Developer Exchange program, or DevEx, which gives developers 25 percent of a game’s earnings. (Part of Roblox’s justification for this split is its huge investment in infrastructure for these devs.)
Roblox’s VP of marketing told AListDaily in 2018, “From the very beginning, it was about having kids develop games for other kids.” DevEx’s terms require users to be 13 or over.
Most of Roblox’s userbase is under 18, with about a third between 9 and 12. Emil, 11, tells People Make Games that he “saw other developers getting money in a way that looked easy.” It wasn’t easy. To withdraw money earned through microtransactions in a game, a developer must earn a minimum of 100,000 Robux, the platform’s in-game currency.
Buying 100,000 Robux through Roblox’s store costs $1,000. Selling 100,000 Robux back to Roblox earns you just $350. Withdrawal is not even possible unless these developers pay a five-dollar monthly fee for a Roblox Premium Subscription. (Second Life and Entropia Universe, which also allow players to sell items, respectively have $10 and $100 minimums for withdrawing money.)
“If you accept that we need to treat minors who are doing a job better than we treat adults doing the same job, that's just abhorrent,” says Smith. “Especially when you consider the platform is encouraging kids to come and work for them.”
Smith believes this setup disincentivizes users from withdrawing Robux. They’re devalued off-platform, so why not spend them on other Roblox games? Smith compares Roblox’s currency to mining camps’ company scrips, a now-illegal currency used by miners to purchase goods at company stores. Miners were encouraged to spend their money on their employers’ goods because, elsewhere, the scrip was moot.
A Roblox spokesperson tells WIRED that “building experiences on Roblox teaches the fundamentals of coding, digital civility, and entrepreneurship and has helped many begin their careers in STEM.”
Roblox gave developers $129.7 million in the second quarter of 2021, and according to the spokesperson, over 600 developers earn over $85,000 a year from their Roblox creations. The company also hosts programs and offers Developer Relations professionals to help developers succeed.
Roblox’s gargantuan valuation and outstanding success is in part due to the number of children hoping to strike a vein of gold making games. Children can’t organize for better working conditions, though; in fact, adults in the games industry are having trouble reaching quorum to unionize.
How many children play it?
Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls.
In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights. Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%).
The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like CBBC (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%).
Why is Roblox popular?
“We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.”
He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were.
“When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball. But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says. “Most of the experiences on our platform aren’t just about the object to win. It’s an experience you have with other people: a shared experience.”
How do people make games for it?
Anyone can make a game (or “experience” – they can simply be virtual spaces) for Roblox by downloading its separate Roblox Studio software. The company says that it has more than 2 million “creators” – so around 2% of its players – with the most popular games being played by up to 100,000 people simultaneously.
For many children, creating a simple game or virtual room where they can hang out with friends is the limit of their ambitions, but others build bigger, more complex games, and even start to make money through taking a cut of in-game purchases using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux. The company expects to pay out more than $100m in 2019 alone to them.
“We have these teams forming businesses, and making millions of dollars a year,” says Donato. Roblox is keen to foster this community: in 2018 it launched its own curriculum, available under a Creative Commons licence, for educators to use. Donato says it reached more than 500,000 children in its first year.
Are people really making businesses out of this?
There is Josh Wood is one of the British Roblox game-makers. He’s 18 now, but discovered Roblox in 2013, and started to make his own games for it a year later.
“From there I continued to learn and collaborate with other people on projects until I released my most successful game to date, Game Dev Life, which has so far had over a million play sessions,” he says.
Wood has now set up his own company to make games for Roblox, hiring other developers, artists and testers, and even launching a line of toys based on Game Dev Life, in partnership with Roblox.
“With the money from my games I have been able to pay for my university education, and continue to reinvest in my business,” he says.
Another young British developer working on Roblox games is Abbie Leigh. Now aged 19, she started playing Roblox in 2011, but took the leap into development in 2017, initially creating assets for other people’s games. She’s currently working on three games, including her own sports-themed title, and hopes to make a full-time career out of freelance development.
“It never feels like a job, which of course is the best part. I enjoy building and do so in my free time, and I’m simply rewarded when it comes to doing what I love.”
Game Dev Life by DoubleJGames. Players must try to build a successful game.
Is Roblox safe for children?
When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery.
The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”. The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform.
“We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players.
“We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says.
“It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are. We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.”
How can parents keep informed about it?
Another measure taken by Roblox is to launch a section of its website called For Parents, which explains its safety tools – from algorithms blocking swearwords and names and addresses in text chats, to its reporting system for inappropriate chat or content. There’s even an algorithm detecting whether players’ avatars are wearing “appropriate attire”.
Higgins admits that parents can get “very frustrated” when there’s a horror story around safety on a children’s platform like Roblox: “You think, how hard can it be? [to stop these things happening],” she says. “And it’s very hard, is the answer. When things go wrong, it’s because somebody is trying very hard to break your systems.”
She’s keen to make sure that parents also see the positive side of the games that children are creating on Roblox, citing the example of a game made by a teenager whose father had recently died.
“He developed a game around managing mental wellbeing, mental health, as a journey for other young people experiencing those kinds of issues,” she says. “It was an amazing outlet for him, but it also helped many young people who played it, and were able to explore their emotions.”
That’s an aspect also highlighted by developer Abbie Leigh. “I absolutely love the developer community as a whole. We all stick together, support each other’s creations and help each other when we need it the most,” she says. “From feedback on games, to personal issues.”