Roblox is kids with computers choosing to work in an ecosystem that is profiting far more from them than they are profiting from the ecosystem.
SPEAKER_01Quentin is a journalist working with People Make Games and Shut Up and Sit Down. And he recently did a really extensive and important investigation into Roblox. Now, if you don't pay close attention to video game news, to metaverse coverage, or don't have a kid who plays Roblox really frequently, you might not know a whole lot about this platform, and that is part of the problem. Roblox is huge. It has more than 200 million players, and more than 40 million of those visit the platform every single day. It's a publicly traded company with a valuation of more than $50 billion, putting it up there with, if not above, companies like EA, Activision Blizzard, and even Nintendo at times. But this is not just a regular platform where adults go on to play games and to socialize. This is a platform that is targeted at kids. It's a place where kids hang out, it's a place where kids have their own avatars that they dress up with skins and items to look cool among their friends and the other users on the platform. It's where kids play games, but it's also where kids make games and make items that then get sold to other kids. And that's part of where the problem comes in. I don't think it's an issue for kids to be playing games, for kids to be making items and being creative. I think that's really cool actually. But the problem is that now we have this publicly traded company that is worth more than $50 billion that is profiting from the work of those kids and from what those kids are buying. In an effort to maximize profits, it has set up very exploitative structures that not only promote kids making games, but kids making games in particular to earn money for themselves and to buy items not just to look cool with their friends, but to try to maximize their revenue if they're making them for themselves, and also to buy really pricey items so that they can actually look cool when there are limited edition items that will increase one's social standing on the platform. So Quentin's investigation gets into so many important points, and we touch on many of them in this interview, but my focus really is on kids doing labor on these platforms, and also the way that the platform sells things to them and is trying to ensure that it isn't being held to account for what it's doing. I would highly recommend going to watch the two videos that Quentin put together about his investigation, but even if you don't, I think you will really enjoy this interview and will learn a lot not just about Roblox, but also what it's doing and why it needs to be regulated quick. Tech Won's Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network.com. If you like this interview, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the interview with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it and on social media. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. So if you find this to be an informative conversation, if you're a regular listener and you enjoy the show, please consider joining supporters like Jordan McKent from Charlotte, North Carolina, and Eric from Burlington by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can support the show, join the Discord, and get some stickers. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Quinton, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Paris. Very happy to be here. Fan of the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much. I'm, you know, very happy to be joined by you and to discuss the fantastic reporting that you've been doing on Roblox and a lot of these issues with this platform that have gone somewhat unreported up until now, but that should be getting a lot more attention for quite a number of reasons that I'm sure we'll get into. But I think to you know get us started and to give the audience like a brief introduction, can you give us some information on what Roblox actually is for people who you know wouldn't really have been paying much attention to this company or might not even really know what it is?
SPEAKER_00So Roblox is a platform and not a video game, despite uh many people who I've uh read reporting on describing it as such. Roblox is a platform that enables users to make games. And it was designed to allow kids to make games for other kids. So anybody in the world right now can make a Roblox account and either start playing Roblox games that other Roblox users have made or experiment with the tools themselves and go through tutorials that Roblox provide to start making games. And when I say games, I mean all games. Roblox hosts everything from first-person shooters that the players have designed to, you know, RPGs or tower defense games, racing games, and also an entire genre of role-playing games. Roblox is actually a sort of creative crucible for a new genre of video games that I've not seen before, which is um role-playing games, but not in the sense that we know them as regular video games where you know you level up and you know fight monsters and stuff. Um, role-playing games on Roblox are literally like dolls houses which enable Roblox users to walk around pretending that they're a family or that they have a job. Sort of imagine, you know, kids playing with action figures on their floor, except the action figures are, you know, you and your friends, and the Roblox game is really just a playset. Um so over the last then, oh, you know, however long Roblox has been around, so 16, 17 years, it has just gotten simply enormous. Today, Roblox has 40 million daily users who are playing these games. And since the initial public offering, Roblox has become one of the biggest, if not the biggest video game uh company in the world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, it's so fascinating to think about this massive platform that so few people know about, but that has so many players, and in particular kids, as you say. So, you know, maybe parents would know a bit about it, but a lot of people who don't have kids uh probably haven't heard so much about it unless they're investors and got in on the IPO last year. But, you know, what you describe is so fascinating because in the reporting, you say that yes, Roblox is a platform for games, but they tend to call them experiences, so they don't get treated that way by the app stores and things like that as this kind of marketplace. Can you talk a little bit more about that aspect of it?
SPEAKER_00The problem that Roblox encountered is that because the Roblox platform enables people to buy games, that means that if Roblox is a platform which people wouldn't buy games and buy add-ons for games or buy cosmetics for games, if it's on the app store or the Android store or whatever, that makes it a game shop within a game shop, which isn't strictly allowed. And so for that reason, Roblox has this kind of weird legal defense that it's not selling games, it's actually selling what it calls experiences, even though anyone who plays video games would be able to look at Roblox and say that, you know, this is clearly a platform that hosts games. And uh, this is kind of where my reporting can start because I think so many of the problems with Roblox come about from it existing in a legal gray area. It's claiming to not sell games, it's also claiming to not be a kind of labor market, even though it transparently is. Anyone can make games on Roblox and then sell packages within those games in order to make money designing games for Roblox. And every year that passes, Roblox is paying more and more millions of dollars out to young people who are making games for the platform.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And as you said earlier, you know, even their VP of marketing has said that from the very beginning, it was about having kids develop games for other kids, right? And at its core, that doesn't sound like a bad thing, you know. I think we would want to encourage kids to be creative, um, you know, to socialize, even if it is in online spaces, especially during a pandemic, you know, it gives them this area to keep in touch with friends and have these new kind of experiences. But then I think part of the issue comes in with the company being, you know, a private company or I guess a publicly traded company now. Um, and so they have an incentive to make money. And so now you have these kids making these games, but those games are then generating a profit for a company, and there are a whole load of kind of exploitative structures that kind of develop around that as a result.
SPEAKER_00Oh man, yeah. Okay. Well, to start with, um, I'm really glad you brought up the fact that Roblox is actually providing some pretty useful and desirable services for kids because one of the criticisms we've had about our reporting is that um it feels very one-sided. Um, that the investigations that People Make Gains have launched seem to be exclusively trying to dig up dirt on Roblox. And so I want to use perhaps inappropriately uh this platform on the Tech Won't Save Us Podcast to say that looking at Roblox, I think it provides a super fantastic service to kids, especially during the pandemic. Roblox is, I think, inarguably the most successful example of a metaverse today. And I'm sorry to bring the M word up on this podcast so early. Um, but video gamers and grownups who look at Roblox will see kids playing kind of bad games on Roblox and think it's just a platform that hosts bad games. It's not, it's primarily a social platform. And I think there's an argument to call it like a sort of video game social network hybrid. It's like when you know Fortnite got really popular and adults like me had to realize that for kids, Fortnite the game wasn't, you know, the focus. Fortnite was just a place to hang out, like you know, hanging out behind the back of a mall or something in the 90s. This is how video games are used today. And so, in offering tens of thousands of games, all of which are free, because and this leads to its own problems, Roblox's business model is that if you make a game on Roblox, people have to be able to come and play it for free, but then you can sell them stuff within the experience or game that then is how you make your money as a game developer. And so Roblox is this incredible platform that hosts tens of thousands of free experiences that any kid can log on and just fool around with for free and do so with their friends, especially for kids who might come from uh a sort of low-income background. This is an enormous sort of uh service that is being provided to them. And I have no doubt that it's been transformative for many kids as pandemics.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, you think about um Minecraft as well, which kind of served part of that role, but I think was a bit less social. I know that it had those elements to it, but Roblox seems to really be like the key platform for this kind of interaction, I guess, but gaming as well and and these experiences, um, and you know, especially socialization during the pandemic when you know you can't really go outside with your friends. That's beginning to be allowed a bit more now, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00And something I find really interesting is that there's a lot of money in this being a social platform because um one Roblox developer I spoke to said that the cornerstone of making money on Roblox, of Roblox's economy, is kids trying to look cool in front of other kids. And whenever I interviewed other Roblox developers in future, I would suggest that to them and they would all agree with it that yeah, basically if you want to make money on Roblox, it's not sort of like unlocking new levels in your game that you want to provide. You want to provide kids with like skins or powers that they can use while playing Roblox with their friends. So their friends will look at them and go, oh wow, you can do that, you're so cool. So it's sort of it represents an interesting new frontier for game designers because game designers usually try and like gate content off with paywalls or, you know, offer DLC. Whereas with Roblox, game designers are having to figure out, okay, if a bunch of kids come into my game, what can I sell one of them that will make them look cooler than all of their friends? And I found that, you know, as someone who does games journalism, I found that to be a really interesting prospect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that is really fascinating, actually. And, you know, I I want to come back to that point on the skins and and things like that a little bit later. But I I want to dig into this aspect of the children actually doing work on the platform. And there are several aspects of this I want to get into. But one of the things that stood out to me to start was that there are programs and summer camps for kids that are aimed around teaching them how to make games in Roblox. And again, like it seems like this would be a positive thing, except for the fact that when they are taught these skills, part of the goal of that from Roblox's perspective is to get more people making games so that then it contributes to their business, right? It's not just a creative tool for these kids. Um, and in so doing, they're promoting ideas of entrepreneurialism, of you know, monetization, things like that. I wonder how you think about that aspect of it and how it promotes the use of the platform and the creation of experiences in that way.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's fascinating, right? The reason that Roblox going public on the stock exchange was such a big deal for me, and I saw it as such a transformative moment is that before the IPO, I don't think many people had an idea how much money Roblox was making. And if Roblox isn't making money, then it's very easy to look at educating kids in game development and providing them with creative opportunities as a good thing. But after the IPO, it was sort of revealed, certainly at least to me, just how much money Roblox was making. And overnight it became one of the largest video game companies in existence. And after that, it's difficult to look at it and not see it as exploiting the labor of children and any educational stuff to be kind of secondary to that. Because make no mistake, this is a company that has built a multi-billion dollar empire on mostly young people and certainly a lot of kids making games for the platform. Because to be clear, Roblox don't make any games themselves. All of the games that you go onto Roblox to play are made by other Roblox users who are overwhelmingly young people. Although as the platform gets older, they become adults. And then that creates its own problems because now a lot of the most successful Roblox developers are in their 20s or even 30s. You know, they're working on large teams that are collecting funding. And yet Roblox still has this messaging of, hey, kids, come and make games for us. Even though that now not only are those kids even less likely to make money than ever, they're going up against adults.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was absolutely one of the things that stood out to me, right? Like when you have these children who are making the games, there's this, you know, as you talked about on the website, it was specifically saying that they could make serious cash. And, you know, there's this idea not only that they should kind of hustle to get their games done to try to get them out there, but then once the game is released, it's difficult for that to actually get in front of people. And Roblox offers another pathway for them to do that through advertising. Yes. So not only are you then having kids making these games on the platform, but then you're saying, oh, you can't get people to see them. Well, pay us, and maybe we'll we'll get it in front of some eyes.
SPEAKER_00Yes, Roblox is a platform that actually has worse discoverability of games now than it used to. I believe it used to have genres so that you could browse genres more easily, like you can on Steam. Um, I don't think that's the case anymore. Um, but yes, as you say, you can pay Roblox money to advertise your game and hopefully avoid Roblox's own poor discoverability. And there are exploits to do with this. If you want to make money on Roblox, you don't have to make games, you can also make cosmetics. And uh one exploit that I was informed about is that let's imagine, Paris, that I design a cool t-shirt and I want to sell that to other Roblox users. Um, if I just release that cool t-shirt onto the cosmetics store, it's unlikely to be seen by many people. But what does happen is some other person, some user, maybe older, certainly more experienced, could steal my Roblox t-shirt and then use that sort of like the capital that they have to buy it and buy it and buy it and buy it and buy it like a hundred times, um using different accounts or using uh networks of friends. So that that t-shirt has been bought a hundred times, which means now it appears on the front of the avatar store, which by the way, let's clear, I I'm talking about them stealing your t-shirt, you know. Um, people can then manipulate it to get it in front of the marketplace because there are other sort of techniques to avoid the platform's wonky discoverability. So that not only now have I stolen your t-shirt, but it's now reaching way more people than you would ever be able to, you know, get it out to. Um, and then there's a whole other thing with Roblox having very poor um intellectual property theft sort of reporting and moderation. Um, so you would struggle to get Roblox to take action against uh stolen property.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, what you're describing there with people stealing other people's work, you know, definitely sounds like something else we're seeing in NFTs and those sorts of marketplaces. And, you know, in in terms of people making the games and then not being able to get them in front of people, it also reminds me of what I saw happen on Amazon as well, with you know, self-published authors promoting their books on there, where at a certain point it became really difficult to get those in front of people. And then Amazon said, Oh, hey, you know, you can advertise your books, and now a lot of self-published authors see that as kind of a requirement when they release a book, whereas in the past it was kind of like maybe something you would do to get a few more sales. So you can definitely see how Roblox kind of fits into this larger framework that's going on on these other platforms.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting. I hadn't I hadn't drawn those parallels myself. That's clever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a whole economy, right? Like all these platforms, I'm sure, are kind of learning from each other and and taking tips.
SPEAKER_00I don't know about Amazon, but one thing that's clear about Roblox is that I remember there's a past episode of the Tech One Service podcast where you had a guest talking about how Facebook's infrastructure isn't correct to uh prevent the kind of um hostility that the platform sees. But now it's so big it can't change that infrastructure. Like you make an error in how you build the platform, and then the larger the platform gets, the harder it is to fix that error. However, true that is for Facebook, that feels so much more true for me for Roblox. Like Roblox has exploded in popularity since the beginning of the pandemic, and the infrastructure was sort of rinky dink and not fit for purpose before. And now it's absolutely massive, and it feels like, you know, for all of the issues that we've raised in our Roblox reporting, it seems impossible to even get the company to acknowledge the existence of a lot of the problems that you and I have talked about so far on this podcast, and I'm sure we'll continue to outline.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was absolutely something that was shocking to me, right? When, especially in your second video where you talked a bit about, you know, trying to deal with Roblox, trying to talk to Roblox. And, you know, not only were they kind of pushing back on you, not only were they trying to get you to remove the first video, but then when you asked them like any kind of real questions about the platform, they would kind of stonewall you and not give you a real answer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we spoke to Roblox's head of communications between the first video and the second video, and uh we were told that hopefully we could set up an interview during that call, but during the call it became clear that they didn't really want to set up an interview. And in fact, their primary uh sort of mission on the call that we had with them seemed to be to encourage us to take the first video down. Um and I know other journalists who've had interviews with Roblox executives since our reporting was published, because you know, journalists can compare notes sometimes and see what we all know to try and like help one another to handle a company that can be um somewhat slippery. Um but yeah, the other journalists I've talked to have really struggled to get a good answer from Roblox about all kinds of stuff. And, you know, to use one example, something we discovered in the second video was Roblox's limited collectibles market. And this took the top of my head off. So within Roblox's avatar store, they have a subcategory of cosmetics, you know, so things like faces you can put in your avatar or hats or shirts, bags, swords. And this subcategory is collectibles that they only sell for a limited time or only sell a limited number of. And then the only way that users can get those collectibles once that initial sales period is over is to acquire them from other Roblox users. And you have to pay whatever the price those Roblox users set. We had one source describe it as like a marketplace of NFTs, basically. But um, it means that there are cosmetics on Roblox that sells tens of thousands of dollars or $30,000, you know, or more. But when we asked Roblox Corporation about this, I did not see them even acknowledge the existence of it. Not in our reporting or not when they've talked to any other journalists. And that actually makes sense to me because it is so transparently illegal. Like on a children's game, you have a marketplace which is enabling kids to speculate on assets that cost tens of thousands of dollars. And that would be dodgy on a platform that doesn't have as many scammers as are present on Roblox. You know, it's a very, very unsafe platform, technologically speaking. But they can't acknowledge it because I think the more they talk about it publicly, the faster it's going to be legislated against. So I think Roblox's strategy is just to keep quiet because frankly, that is a strategy that's been working for them for many years, you know. Something I really wanted to say on this podcast is that while, you know, a lot of people have been very kind about the investigative reporting that we've done on People Make Games about Roblox, I'm not an investigative reporter. My colleagues, Chris Bratt and Annie Sayers, have some experience in that. They did an excellent video on a YouTuber who ended up starting his own religion called Athene, and they've done other projects. But I'm not an investigative reporter. But I was able to find out all this stuff about Roblox because it's right there. You know, I just put out a couple of tweets saying, you know, has anyone had experiences on Roblox that they want to share? I asked those people to put me in touch with other people. The things that I find distasteful or or, you know, that maybe should be illegal about Roblox as a platform were right in front of me. It's staggering how this company is doing the things it's doing in plain sight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it makes you wonder like, you know, obviously there's been all this focus on Facebook lately, you know, to a certain degree, Amazon as well. But there are so many other tech companies out there that aren't one of those kind of big four or five companies that don't get the same kind of attention that they receive that are still doing like a whole load of super shady, exploitative, possibly illegal practices. And, you know, this is just one example of that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think there's a degree to which the video games press has been sleeping on Rome. In a way that, you know, I don't want to, you know, throw shade on my colleagues and other games journalists because I only picked up, you know, this reporting on Roblox in a whim after I saw a couple of Twitter threads about how little they pay their developers. Um, but there's a degree to which I think we're not just ignoring what Roblox is doing because it's an inscrutable tech company, like the ones you described. We are to some extent ignoring Roblox because they make video games for kids. And you know how hard it is, I'm sure, getting the mainstream press to cover video games in any way. So anything unethical about games, you know, whether that's like loot boxes or monopolies or whatever else you want to talk about, that tends to get covered by the games press. But the games press ignored Roblox because it looked like janky video games for kids. And I think that has enabled this company to operate in the way that it does for so long.
SPEAKER_01I think that's a great point. And I think I would also say that, you know, I feel like we've seen more of a critical turn in some of the Games Press in recent years in terms of, you know, the focus on crunch and labor conditions and things like that that we see. But there's still so much more to dig into in this industry.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, I mean, I personally think a lot about um, I can't remember where I read this, but the notion that unlike when I grew up in the in the 90s, you know, where music was the thing that kids were into, games are now the defining medium of a generation. And I think, you know, in the last couple of years, as you say, you know, we've all been able to enjoy watching the video games press kind of step up and handle more of these difficult issues like, you know, labor rights. But uh I think you know, we still have more growing to go until you know we're able to do this medium justice.
SPEAKER_01I want to go back to um another point on kind of the work that kids are doing on this platform because you talked about how, yes, the initial vision was for kids to make games for kids, but now we increasingly see that this has moved toward more of a kind of team-based approach where a lot of the bigger games on the platforms are made by larger and larger teams of developers. And a lot of that kind of contracting and that kind of work of organization happens through Discord, where sometimes there might be contracts, other times there won't, and there'll just be agreements. Like, what is going on there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is wild. I I've got to lay this out for your audience because I I have sympathy for Roblox because I can see how they ended up in this position, right? So, you know, to begin with back in the day, you know, 10 years ago, it wouldn't make sense to have more than one person working on a Roblox game because, you know, first off, the standard wasn't very high. And second, you know, it's not like you're gonna make much money anyway. So the more people you work with, the more you're dividing your revenue, right? Um, but as Roblox has grown, Roblox has encouraged this idea of, you know, why can't there be better games on Roblox? Roblox has incubators in which it tries to train its most talented, you know, community developers. Roblox sells action figures of its most popular games. And the CEO, David Bazooki, has this quote that we use in the second video that during the Roblox Developer Conference a couple of years ago, he said he envisioned in the next few years that there would be a game on Roblox made by a team of a hundred people. And I know for a fact that Roblox Corporation wants to support its most successful developers to turn into whole studios. The most popular game on Roblox, which I believe is still Adopt Me, is made by an entire team of people who work as a company, right? But what this means is that Roblox have created this problem for themselves that, like, I can see how they didn't see it coming or sort of just didn't think about it. But now they're here, it seems just like totally unsolvable. Because as Roblox games have gotten more and more successful, these games, which let's remind your audience, are supposed to be designed by kids for other kids, now require teams of people. So it's no longer a 13-year-old Wunderkind working in his bedroom on a game and now he earns more money than both of his parents put together. Now it's like, well, these Wunderkins have to form teams. Now, what kind of structure does that look like if your boss is 14? Do you have a contract with it? Are kids even allowed to sign contracts with one of that? And if they don't have contracts, then what stops these kids ripping one another off or, you know, running with the money or firing one another or abusing one another or forcing one another to crunch, which I heard a lot talking to Roblox developers. The answer is nothing stops any of this. And it's like, we don't know how large the problem of, you know, uh labor abuses, not just sort of Roblox profiting from the labor of young kids, but these kids profiting from the labor of one another. We don't know how deep this problem is because Roblox sensibly don't talk about it, don't think about it, and don't want to sort of like open this discussion of like how can we make our workplace safer? Because that would mean they have to acknowledge that their workplace isn't safe in the first place. So they just let these kids kind of get on with it. And so if people have seen our second video that I've seen, um Jordan's not their real name, but we have a source known as Jordan. And when Jordan was ripped off by their bosses, they made this decision to just keep quiet. Because if they were to say, Oh my god, my boss has ripped me off, I'm not working for them again, these bosses are awful, that makes their bosses look bad, but it also makes them look bad. Like no one's gonna want to work with a developer who's essentially a whistleblower on their previous boss. So again, this means that this problem of Roblox developers exploiting one another and it's impossible to know how big that problem is. Because not only does Roblox Corporation not want to talk about it, the developers themselves don't seem to want to talk about it because it could scotch their reputation with each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, all the issues that you described there are like key points, right? Because there's so much potential abuse and exploitation that's happening here. And like when it comes to you know there being contracts between kids, if that's even legal, like what exactly is going on there and what's the legality of this? Naturally, one of the questions that I had when I was watching the video and that I don't think was like explicitly addressed, but is the question of child labor, right? Like, is what is happening on Roblox an issue of child labor, which would be illegal in the US and the UK and many other countries?
SPEAKER_00That's the million-dollar question, isn't it, Parrot? Like, I think there's gonna have to be some kind of government legislation from some country like coming for Roblox soon. There has to be, because we don't have an answer to that question yet. So Roblox started saying, hey, we've got free game development tools for kids to come and make games on our platform. Also, when Roblox started, there was no way for kids to make money. It was just this free software and then free hosting, and then your friends could come and play the games you made for free. We can all agree there's no problem with that. Inarguably, it's a good thing for the universe. Then Roblox says, Well, okay, actually, if your games are really popular, you can make money. And then Roblox says, actually, we're gonna incorporate all this monetization technique. So now you can work as a game developer selling games on our platform. And is that child labor? But well, no, because the kids are choosing to do it. Well, okay, is it child labor if Roblox tells these kids they can make money? And that's kind of where we're at today. And like, well, no, today we're a little further than that. Today we've got, you know, Discord communities of thousands of kids working for one another, doing stuff that is inarguably work, because I guess at the beginning of Roblox, it felt more like a creative exercise. Because if you sit and you make a game yourself, if you do the scripting and coding and the sound and the whatever else, if you do all that yourself, it's more clearly a creative exercise. Whereas today, now that it's difficult to find a Roblox game that is made by just one person because they tend to all be collaborative, if you're like a 14-year-old just making a bunch of models for someone else's game, that doesn't feel like a creative exercise, right? That feels like work, which means that Roblox has kind of like pulled the rug out from under any theoretical legislation by having this foundation of like it's just child creativity and they can't make money. To it's just child creativity and actually they can make money, that's good. To they can make money and they're working in teams and it's still kind of creative, but well, we kind of bypassed all of the legislation problems, and now we're one of the largest video game companies in the world, thanks to the very poorly paid labor of children. You know, and so I don't know how much longer this can go on for, but like, I mean, I wish people at home could see my face because, you know, I've been researching this company for six months, and it's mind-boggling, you know, where we end up, you know, with all of this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Obviously, the child labor question, I think, is a massive one that needs to be thought through more, looked into more, and the the question of legislative responses, if there is going to be any, which I think there clearly should be. But if we assume that things are somewhat okay and that children should be allowed to make money for this company anyway, even if that happens, the way that they have set up for these kids to make money is also incredibly exploitative because it needs to go through this in-game currency of Robux, which is structured in a way that allows the company to take a huge chunk of what is going on on this platform.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so uh the you uh the UK government at various points over the last 500 years has banned what is called corporate or company script four times, right? And I personally am of the opinion that what Roblox is doing would necessitate a fifth banning of Script. So when you work for Roblox, if you make a game and then people come into your game and they're buying, like, you know, packs that you sell in your game that, I don't know, let them look cooler or something, that money isn't paid to your account as, you know, US dollars or Great British pounds or whatever. That money appears in your account as Robux, which is the virtual currency that any kid who, you know, plays Roblox wants, any parent who has a kid that plays Robux is going to have been asked to buy Robux at some point. So the developers are getting paid in the same pretend money that you use to do purchases in Roblox. So let's say, you know, as your game is continually successful, you build up like a larger and larger pile of these fictional Robux. You can be staggeringly wealthy, but only in Robux. If you want to turn that into real cash, you have to sell those Robux to Roblox. And the exchange rate is just horrific. So these numbers aren't accurate because it's impossible to get really accurate exchange rates for any of this because it depends on the amount you buy or sell. But 100,000 Robux is the minimum amount of Robux you have to have if you want to withdraw, do what's called developer exchange, and put that fictional money into your account as real money. 100,000 Robux would cost you if you wanted to buy it about a thousand US dollars. But if you have 100,000 Robux from selling, you know, digital assets or game stuff that you've made in Roblox, if you have 100,000 Robux and you want to sell it, they don't give you a thousand US dollars, they give you $350. So they buy Robux at a much worse rate than they sell them for, which means if you're a kid who hasn't hit that minimum withdrawal amount, then you're kind of inclined to spend it because, you know, well, you can spend it on expensive limited, you can spend it on games. You might think you're never gonna hit the minimum withdrawal amount, which is why it's there. But also, even if you do hit that minimum withdrawal amount, you have to decide between being like a Roblox millionaire, having a crazy amount of Roblox on the Roblox platform and being able to splash that around within this cool social ecosystem, this metaverse, or you can withdraw it and get significantly less money in real life because your virtual currency is devalued only at the moment you take it off the platform. And this is one of the many ways in which Roblox disincentivize people from ever taking money off the platform. But there are other problems with uh paying people in virtual currency, other reasons that companies tend to ban it when it shows up in real life. As I said, England had to ban it four times. So, one of the reasons that companies are incentivized to pay people in this script, in this currency of their own creation, is because it means that the people who get paid in that currency are substantially more afraid of the company. Because in Roblox, if you break any rules of any kind, Roblox can say, okay, you can never DebX again. It also means that you wouldn't be incentivized to go elsewhere. Because let's say you have a hit game on Roblox, and um if they were to pay you in actual money, Roblox users might think, okay, well, I made a game on Roblox and made money. Now I'm gonna go and try and make a game on Unity and sell it on Steam or Itch.io and make money. But with Roblox, you're just one step further away from that. With Roblox, they pay you in Roblox. You now have a huge pile of Robux, and actually, that means that if you choose, you could pay other Roblox developers, the Robux you have, to work on your next game. So rather than taking them off the platform, at which point they get devalued, you could reinvest them into your next game by using the Robux to pay other Roblox developers, which means the money is never devalued. And so you and your now new dev team can get to work working on a second game. The only catch is none of you have actually been paid by Roblox yet. They've just told you you have a bunch of this script, but only at the point that you go, okay, I want this off the platform, I want this out, only at that point do you sort of have control of your actual paycheck. And, you know, I've spoken to so many Roblox developers in the process of uh doing these investigative pieces on Roblox, that they'll just have all kinds of reasons that they never succeed at developer exchange. Either they never hit the minimum withdrawal amount or they get scammed for their Robux, because of course, money that's in your bank account is a lot harder for scammers to get. But if you have Roblox on your account, then scammers might find ways to get that off you. You might pay that Roblox to other developers to work on a game that then flops, or you might spend that Robux on a collectible because, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, there are virtual items on Roblox that will immediately mark you out as a mover and shaker, because you might have a hat that costs, you know, 500 US dollars that you bought in Roblox from the payday from your previous game.
SPEAKER_01What you're describing there is so fascinating because you talked about earlier how Roblox is increasingly moving to this like team-based model where there are these larger teams that are making the games. And at the same time, if people criticize a team for abuse or you know, mistreatment or anything like that, they can be kind of blacklisted in a sense, right? And even you said there was a time when uh in the forums, if people complained, they would get banned uh in the developer forums, I believe. Then at the same time, you're making this money in Robux. So then if you go afoul of any of these rules or if you criticize Roblox or anything like that, you're also like putting your money at risk. But then if you try to take it out, like you're getting paid 35 cents on the dollar. Like there are all these ways that the platform is designed not only to be exploitative, but also to reduce criticism of the company because it has so much control and power over everything that is happening.
SPEAKER_00In a lot of ways, I think there are very clear parallels between, you know, being a young developer making games for Roblox and you know, being uh, I don't know, a warehouse worker on Amazon or and wanting to unionize, but I mean, Amazon, I guess, isn't a fair example because this is the case of people who might want to unionize everywhere, wanting to criticize or wanting better treatment, but simultaneously being afraid of your bosses. Um, the amount of Roblox developers I've spoken to who said, Oh, yeah, I want to complain about this platform or I want a higher devx rate, but please keep my name out of your reporting because it wouldn't do good for me to be known as somebody who's who's difficult. You know, if you want to, you know, be part of the internship programs or the accelerators or whatever else, if you want a positive relationship with Roblox, for example, if you think that one day you might have a hit game, and when you do, it'll be really good if you've been, you know, this good little Roblox developer who never once complained, because that might mean that, you know, Roblox Corporation resources you better to go and make a big team or something, you know, you're gonna want to keep quiet. And I think to a lesser extent that's true within the community of Roblox developers who, you know, even if you just want to work for a developer who's who's famous, then you don't want to be known as somebody who's just got their start programming and then was complaining about how lowly they were being paid. But what makes this really insidious though is that let's not forget, these aren't workers, right? These are children. I don't know at what point you can legally call, you know, a human being like a worker in the traditional sense, but I'm describing this struggle that the workers on Roblox are dealing with. But these same workers, a lot of them I'm talking about, are like 13 or 14 or 15 and are like figuring out how to, you know, crunch on someone else's game while balancing that with schoolwork. And I've spoken to Roblox developers who dropped out of school because their Roblox career was going well enough, which for some people is certainly a really cool opportunity. When I was talking to uh Ty Underwood, who's a uh games professor and labor organizer who helped us out a lot with the first Roblox video, he had a fun point that like even discussing all of these issues immediately puts you in bizarre situations. Like if we're talking about what would it take for Roblox developers to unionize, it's like, can kids even unionize? Are kids workers? Like earlier in this podcast, you know, you asked me, like, well, is this child labor? What do we call child labor? And I don't think anybody knows. I can't think of a time in human history there has been a platform or a workplace that children would choose to go to. Like all of our child labor laws traditionally relate to like parents making their kid work or you know, kids below the poverty line having to work to earn money for groceries. That's not what Roblox is. Roblox is kids with computers choosing to work in an ecosystem that is profiting far more from them than they are profiting from the ecosystem, you know, like this is an analogy that might make me lose credibility with some of our listeners. But if I think of an analogy for what Roblox Corporation is, I keep thinking of Fagin from Oliver Twist, where it's like someone who is giving these kids an opportunity in a better life, but also is not necessarily a reputable figure. But you wouldn't get child labor laws involved with Fagin because those kids are choosing to be there even though they're being exploited.
SPEAKER_01I have to admit, I'm not familiar with Oliver Twist.
SPEAKER_00I just dated myself. Fagan's basically a pickpocket kick. Like, you know, Fagin is an adult who surrounds himself with street urchins and lets them go out and pick pockets.
SPEAKER_01Right. But you know, you've brought up a lot of really important issues there. And there are so many different topics that we could talk about, you know, about Roblox and even just about your reporting. But I want to get to a few of the bigger issues before we end our conversation. You know, we've talked about it a bit throughout this discussion, but why has it been so hard to get people to pay attention to Roblox? And how does it stifle the ability of media and the ability of government to actually look into what is going on here?
SPEAKER_00I think the reason that Roblox hasn't been looked at in detail yet is not just because it's for kids and inscrutable, but because it's somewhat insular. It's not like, you know, the Roblox developers are making games that other people then play. The Roblox community is making games for the Roblox community, and the Roblox community is growing, and they don't need, you know, attention or sort of credibility or money from other people. It's like at this kind of walled ecosystem where kids are kind of being exploited but are also being given opportunities. And it's only when you choose to look into it that you can kind of see what's going on. It's not like Facebook where these issues, you know, then go and affect the wider world. Roblox is just doing its thing, it's just growing, and that is somewhat alarming. As to why it stifles the attention of media and government, um, I'm actually not sure it does. Um, I have been blown away by the response to the reporting we've done on Roblox. But also, I'll stress this again: it wasn't difficult reporting for us to do. We kind of virtually walked through the door of Roblox and said, hey, what's going on here? Can we talk to some people? And some people spoke to us and we revealed what they told us. That's it. And uh, I think there's been a real groundswell of interest in, you know, getting better rights for Roblox users in looking more closely into the platform. You know, since doing the first piece, but certainly after doing the second, like my DMs are just full of journalists and Roblox users and developers and parents, and more than zero politicians who have seen our reporting and immediately gone, oh yeah, something has to be done about this. Or in the case of Roblox developers, oh yeah, oh, people are actually talking about this stuff. Hey, Mr. Journalist, I have stories that I want to tell about me and my friends all being groomed, or my company being, you know, like treated poorly by this other company within the Roblox ecosystem. I think that while Roblox was inscrutable for a while, now it's publicly traded. Now that journalists are starting to look into it, I think there's going to be a lot more stories like the reporting that we've done coming out over the next couple of years.
SPEAKER_01And as you describe, I think those stories are essential and they need to be told so that people have a better understanding of what's actually going on on this platform. And then I think my final question would be related to that, as you mentioned earlier, Roblox is probably the best example of a metaverse that we have so far, right? And this is something that is kind of being promoted as one of the futures of where technologies and virtual spaces could go. And so I wonder when we look at Roblox and if we think about that as kind of a template for a metaverse, you know, what does that kind of tell us about this kind of vision of the future of digital or virtual social space, if that is kind of what it is looking like?
SPEAKER_00I'm so glad you asked because I've been thinking about this question a lot, because Roblox is, in my mind, the most successful example of a metaverse that we have. But what Roblox also is, is a case study in maybe it's possible to moderate a community as big as the tens or even a hundred million users that Roblox has. But Roblox is not succeeding. If we're looking at Roblox as a template for the metaverse, it is crystal clear that moderation on the platform is inadequate. Every Roblox user I spoke to, whether they're a developer or a player, whether they're an adult or a kid, said that the moderation was ridiculous, that there were people grooming and abusing on the platform, that retribution from Roblox for these bad actors did not come quickly enough, that people were stealing one another's intellectual property, that people were continually successfully hiding sex games. And, you know, there's that wonderful Wired article on the fascist role-playing games on Roblox. If we're imagining, you know, the metaverse as this future where we're all gonna live in this big virtual environment, the number one lesson I think you can take away from Roblox is that while technology is theoretically infinitely scalable and that Roblox can host any number of servers and any number of experiences, the need and the ability to moderate these platforms as they get larger is what you need to pay attention to. Because I think what we see on Roblox and what we see on Facebook and any other platform you care to mention is that the larger they get and the more niches that appear, the more impossible it is to moderate. And Roblox is such a good example for how hard moderation is and how it is a problem that desperately needs to be solved if, and I don't agree with this, but if we are heading towards this metaverse future, there needs to be a solution because Roblox is for children. Half of the users on Robert. Roblox, according to the last piece of data that I had, are aged 12 and under. And Roblox is primarily known for not providing good enough moderation. If like the world's most successful metaverse and one for children is unable to moderate its platform in a way that keeps the scammers and abusers and hackers and god knows whoever else off the platform, then are we sure that this metaverse thing is a good idea? Because it sure seems like the most vulnerable people in society have a metaverse made for them, and the company responsible for it is totally incapable of moderating it. That has to be an enormous red flashing light for the future of the metaverse that I sincerely hope is not coming.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's an essential final point and a great place to leave it. Quentin, you know, your reporting on Roblox has been fantastic and has revealed so many important things that people should have known before, but at least know now and hopefully can dig into further. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Quentin Smith is a journalist working with People Make Games and Shut Up and Sit Down. You can find links to his recent investigation into Roblox in the show notes. And you can follow him on Twitter at Quins108. You can follow me at ParisMarks and you can follow the show at TechWon't Save Us. Tech Won's Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.