That’s a fair question. When I was a kid dabbling with stuff like this, it was all unmonetized tools and level editors coming with games. In most cases the terms of service actively prevented you from monetizing unless you got big enough to make a deal with the original devs, like Valve did with CounterStrike. And hey, once you have a bunch of people, many of them kids, making maps and mods for your game, you are arguably also profiting from that free work. I don’t hate that balance of giving people easy onboarding tools to game development and getting some competitive benefit in return.
That said, there’s a reason those ToSs prevented selling the content. Once you make any part of that process monetized a lot of big problems immediately open up, which I’m guessing is why there isn’t a ton of competition to Roblox and most publishers haven’t dropped down the rabbit hole of competing for monetizing UGC the way Roblox does. Child labor is a bold statement, but there are definitely sets of incentives laid out in Roblox’s ecosystem that cross some lines.
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?
That’s a fair question. When I was a kid dabbling with stuff like this, it was all unmonetized tools and level editors coming with games. In most cases the terms of service actively prevented you from monetizing unless you got big enough to make a deal with the original devs, like Valve did with CounterStrike. And hey, once you have a bunch of people, many of them kids, making maps and mods for your game, you are arguably also profiting from that free work. I don’t hate that balance of giving people easy onboarding tools to game development and getting some competitive benefit in return.
That said, there’s a reason those ToSs prevented selling the content. Once you make any part of that process monetized a lot of big problems immediately open up, which I’m guessing is why there isn’t a ton of competition to Roblox and most publishers haven’t dropped down the rabbit hole of competing for monetizing UGC the way Roblox does. Child labor is a bold statement, but there are definitely sets of incentives laid out in Roblox’s ecosystem that cross some lines.