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.
I do find it weird how much of a fuss the second video makes about the pseudo-NFT marketplace in Roblox considering Steam has had every single one of those features in place for a while.
These are good videos, as usual for PMG, and they do highlight relevant issues, but I’m sometimes frustrated by these things in that they mix genuine, dealbreaking concerns with things they flag for this example but not when they surface elsewhere and with things that are legitimately either standard practice, long term gaming-wide concerns or… just fine, actually.
Which is not me defending Roblox, to be clear. Roblox is a mess and it’s crazy how successful they are at keeping a low profile about some of the stuff they do compared to other successful games and platforms and relative to their size. For an American company it’s insane how little they are on the spotlight for some of this stuff. But “some” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These videos run the gamut.
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?
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.
I do find it weird how much of a fuss the second video makes about the pseudo-NFT marketplace in Roblox considering Steam has had every single one of those features in place for a while.
These are good videos, as usual for PMG, and they do highlight relevant issues, but I’m sometimes frustrated by these things in that they mix genuine, dealbreaking concerns with things they flag for this example but not when they surface elsewhere and with things that are legitimately either standard practice, long term gaming-wide concerns or… just fine, actually.
Which is not me defending Roblox, to be clear. Roblox is a mess and it’s crazy how successful they are at keeping a low profile about some of the stuff they do compared to other successful games and platforms and relative to their size. For an American company it’s insane how little they are on the spotlight for some of this stuff. But “some” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These videos run the gamut.