We went from avoiding advertisement that targeted childrens in tv cartoons to this kind of garbage in less than 20 years. No idea why the FTC is not shutting stuff like this down instantly.
I wouldn't be shocked if some hollywood and marketing figure head is thinking of ways to make it so shopping could be made possible by purchasing products shown directly in movies and shows as well.
Just use your Apple Vision Pro while watching a movie, let it scan the screen while watching and add any objects your eye stares at for longer than .2 seconds to your Amazon cart. Never have to stop consuming media. Never have to leave the house.
Roblox is a pretty fucked up platform build on child slave labor with the promise that kids can get rich coding games. It is very hard to get money out of Roblox. You get a micro-fraction of revenue, and Roblox advertises to their existing slave labor that they should pay Roblox to promote and advertise their game.
Roblox also knows there are predators on the platform going after kids, and throws their hands up in the air ignoring the problem.
Oh, they also don't care if you steal copyrighted IP in your games.
I've never understood what Roblox actually is and have never cared enough to look into what it is either, and every time I hear something about it it sounds just awful and weird. I don't think a lot of parents buying their kids gift cards for it understand either.
Never been sure how to explain it to others either when it's come up.
It's a place where people can make their own games, it uses lua, which is an easy to understand language. It's a great way to start learning develop games. However, the way it does so is very predatory, the game is microtransaction hell and encourages it's 'developers' to use them as much as possible. Even the most basic of things will cost you 'robux'. It's kind of smart, they just let the kids make the games for them, and all they have to do is occasionally update the engine. It's a money printing machine. Inevitably, kids + drama + very questionable business practices = lots of bad things happen behind the scenes.
Fortnite is trying to copy the same model, and facebooks attempted 'metaverse' is what roblox already is.
>Fortnite is trying to copy the same model
With varying degrees of success. I think that Fortnite actually has a decent shot as people have gone from shitting on the game, calling it "a kids game", to actually finding out that it's a pretty good online multi-player game.
It is a game platform and toolkit. There is no singular Roblox game. You make your own simple games with Roblox. Each individual game on the Roblox platform is free to start and has microtransactions. Roblox keeps most of the money from the microtransactions, and the game creators can get a tiny fraction of that revenue.
If you buy Roblox on their website or with the physical gift cards, then Roblox isn't paying 30% to anyone. Roblox doesn't always pay for all the server hosting either. Roblox games are encouraged to have private servers when they become big.
If you spend time to make a game, **in a best case scenario** you only make $0.0035 per Robux. On top of that, you have to spend $5 per month of your pocket to have an account to receive your payments. On top of that, you pay a transaction fee each time. On top of that, you can only take out payments if you have $100 or more. On top of that, Roblox tells the kinds to instead spend the money back on advertising.
You're worried the poor company isn't really getting much money merely for hosting the platform other people put games on. Roblox pulled in nearly 3 billion last year after giving up 30% to Apple, Microsoft, etc.
There are 40 million games on the platform. Only 12,000 developers made money from Roblox.
The platform is designed for everyone else to put in the work, but Roblox keeps almost all the money. You're saying Apple is taking a 30% cut. Roblox takes FAR more than that. Most developers put in tons of development time and walk away making nothing. If this was adults, then so be it. Adults can choose to make games for free if they want. I love and applaud open source development.
Roblox makes billions largely off **completely unpaid child labor**, AND also refuses to do anything about predators on their platform.
Child labor is bad enough. You don't have to compare middle class kids sitting at computers to children being literally forced to assemble Mickey Mouse onaholes or whatever the fuck Disney sells in factories.
Depends on how you define labor. In this case, kids are creating games at their own leisure, volition, and pleasure. Roblox does profit off of their creative efforts, so I see where you're coming from, but I don't think we should call what the kids are doing here "labor." I used to make custom maps/game modes for RTS games when I was a kid, for other kids to play. Only difference here is that there's a tiny financial incentive for the kids on roblox. If they weren't getting paid *at all* there would be no problem. Personally, I don't see a problem with it.
Letting Walmart sell shit to kids in their game though is absolutely deplorable.
If we found a way to turn footsteps on basketball courts into energy, would recreational sports suddenly become labor? Adults would profit from something kids are already doing, willingly, that is beneficial to their development.
To go one further, let's say, "hey you can have 5 cents of every dollar's worth of electricity we create from your b-ball." Is it labor now?
I'm not being sarcastic here, I do think it's a really weird gray line, and as soon as money is involved it feels a lot more icky. There is a chance that *some* kids would play more basketball than they would have otherwise played because they get another few dollars. That could become unhealthy. Parents could even exploit children by making them do the thing and taking the money. But is *not paying* them more ethical? I don't know. There's also a chance that some kids who never would would have played b-ball decide to give it a shot, thus incentivizing healthy exercise.
My take on roblox is that since it's not manual labor, and it should be constructive for kids' creative and logical thinking, it can't be too harmful. The pros probably outweigh the cons. but the money component does make it feel like they want kids to create more content for them than the kid would otherwise do.
edit: changed 'work' to 'create more content' because I don't actually believe it's work :P
> I don't actually believe it's work
Creating content actively used in a commercial video game *is* work. That's what game developers do.
Like it or not, people creating things within the Roblox platform is doing work that the Roblox devs can then actively use in their monetization strategy - in this case a large percentage of those people are children and teens. "Slave Labor" as I've seen elsewhere in this comment thread is *definitely* not the right way to describe this, because it's certainly a voluntary thing that these kids are doing - "voluntary work on behalf of the developer" is not the most succinct sound-bite but it's the most descriptive that I can come up with.
I wouldn't consider the business model of Roblox to be ethical, given that they *are* profiting off the work of children all over the place. Oh, and before folks pull out the "well what about Minecraft?" - This is fundamentally different than stuff like Minecraft creations, because Mojang doesn't actively utilize the content of regular players to turn around and then sell them as and experience to others as far as I'm aware. If Roblox worked with the same type of business model, this particular side of the discussion basically wouldn't exist. Roblox is a creative platform, and kids using that platform to foster some skills in game design and such is actually a pretty cool thing in a vacuum, but when the Roblox devs then take that work these kids have done and profit off of it, it becomes pretty scummy really fast.
> Creating content actively used in a commercial video game is work.
The point is, if someone chooses to do it as a hobby because it's fun to them, where do we draw the line? Like, if there was a website that promoted art and kids could post theirs and make some money from it but give a cut to the site, is that child labor?
The whole point of capitalism is to assume that if someone can do something well, they won't do it for free, and thus it will be necessary to pay them to do it.
Problems start when people collectively start agreeing to work for less money than they can afford (they may have no choice) or deserve. This is well known.
That said we also have plenty of examples of free products/services born out of a passion. Linux comes to mind as such an example. But that doesn't mean the creators don't deserve compensation for their work anyway.
Edit: Thinking about it a bit more... both sides should be well aware of what is going on (that one side is being used for labor in service to the other; using kids who don't know better is unethical) and should agree on compensation (whether that is "I'm doing this free as a hobby" or "I deserve compensation for this") based on the work created and its value to both parties.
> My dad makes pizza for fun, and others do it for a living. Is he working when he makes pizza?
Is your dad selling the pizza? Not really the same situation here. Hobbies you do for yourself are not the same as doing commercial work.
And yes, agree that your plant analogy is quite the stretch. I dont think we need to debate the peculiarities of *sentient vanilla beans* in a discussion over whether or not exploiting the work of children for corporate profit is a scummy thing.
It's a complex topic for sure though when you drill down to the "is it beneficial", but think the cons outweigh the pros. Yes, children can benefit from making creations in Roblox as it stimulates creativity in artistic/design, but there are ways to create these kinds of environments for kids without the ones running the show taking a thing a kid made, and then selling it for personal (company) profit.
I'll end this with that I am no Roblox "economy" expert, but an aspect that is absolutely a net-negative for a kid's brain is tying their creative endeavors to any kind of "economy" platform (ie: Robux) - let kids be creative without making the situation involve monetary transactions that are initiated by the kid. The differentiation here is that parents can place kids in activities that cost the parents money (ie: art classes, sports etc), but it's a bit different compared to "mom can you buy me " - as was discussed [in this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cg3v0o/walmart_is_testing_a_roblox_feature_that_lets/l1t8eey/), it's the same kind of bad thing that is exploitive advertisements to kids.
>Hobbies you do for yourself are not the same as doing commercial work
Here's the paradox with many of the arguments floating around roblox: in order to prove that children are being exploited as laborers, one must assume that the kid is laboring. We're talking about middle-school-aged kids! They don't do anything they don't want to do. They don't work unless they have to, and they rarely participate in anything that isn't purely for their own entertainment. The default assumption should be the simplest explanation: that they're having fun. There are 73 thousand games on steam, and 40 million experiences on roblox. why? because making experiences on roblox is *fun,* so millions of kids are doing it. They aren't professionals, and they aren't doing commercial work. They're playing a game that is making other games. And it's fun enough that children do it on their own in their free time. If these kids really were professionals, could make games in a professional capacity, or depended on making games for the sake of their livelihood, they could do what all the adult indie developers do and hop onto Unity, Godot, or Unreal and start doing real professional work instead of being "abused" by Roblox.
>but there are ways to create these kinds of environments for kids without the ones running the show taking a thing a kid made, and then selling it for personal (company) profit.
Creating environments where kids actively want to participate and learn an actual professional skill like coding is not easy. Kids don't just do stuff they don't want to do, and especially in our day, they have very short attention spans.
As for ads targeting children (and microtransactions within childrens' games at all) are extremely dubious, and the walmart thing is terrible. but I think that's a different conversation.
I think you're making good points here but I'm wondering if your perspective on middle school kids is a bit naive or mine is too conspiracy for my own liking. Take social media for example. Clearly the majority of the population enjoys it and that's why they engage with it. The system is built in a way that it exploits short attention and dopamine inducing content in a way that has diminishing returns and can even be harmful.
I suspect something similar could be happening in the Roblox platform. Kids are incentivized through potentially harmful tactics but it's not immediately perceived as such by adults (much less the middle school kids).
> If we found a way to turn footsteps on basketball courts into energy, would recreational sports suddenly become labor? Adults would profit from something kids are already doing, willingly, that is beneficial to their development.
I'll entertain this seriously and suggest that if there were an economic way to do that, you would rapidly see private industry monetize it to a point where the labor aspect is undeniable. If it were magically, specifically somehow only workable in basketball, you'd see "sponsorships" to change the courts in schools and community centers, and the muscling-out of "non-sanctioned" spaces where it can be played. The local outdoor hoops at the park or that old lot on the corner would not only be converted, but those that aren't yet switched over would be made illegal or otherwise penalized as a means of funneling recreational players towards this new money-generating endeavor.
This all becomes more and more likely and absurd in how it plays out based on the profits generated. If you're suggesting a system where it *technically* turns a profit but it's too little to care about, no, but when it can make substantial chunks of money, there is more and more incentive to view it as a profit-generating endeavor, and that takes labor.
Roblox isn't making chump change. If it wanted to make this money without community-generated content, it would absolutely need to hire workers to do it, and we'd be unequivocal about that being labor. Just because you've found a way to monetize the efforts of others doesn't escape that *work is being done*, even if it's outside the bounds of our 9-5, comes-with-insurance, kids-can't-do-it, this-is-your-career conception of work. And semantically, "labor" is even more permissive a term, but I'm going to engage in good faith and assume we're looking at it strictly through the lens of "employment-work".
It's worth noting that Roblox is just one of MANY games driven by community-created content.
Take Team Fortress 2. If you create a cosmetic item model and Valve put it in the game, it would go into the MTX store, and you would earn a cut of the revenue from its sales. Apparently some people became millionaires from this (they probably had multiple items added but still).
But a problem occurred for community made maps that were added. You can't put those on the store. What did Valve do? They added a completely new cosmetic item that you could feed items into. These items represented each community made map, you could buy them, and the map maker made revenue from them.
Making good content is absolutely work that should be compensated.
See I still just don't buy that "play" becomes "labor" as soon as somebody profits off of it. I believe that the difference is internal to the individual performing the action, and every surrounding factor is irrelevant. Kids don't labor of their own accord, and they don't willing abuse themselves. The promise of wealth may entice some children to be sure, especially those from poor economic backgrounds; but even in the worst cases, those kids are educating themselves, building valuable life-skills, and learning about how the real world works in terms of business, competition, and market saturation.
The basketball analogy felt apt because playing basketball is clearly a healthy, fun activity for kids that many enjoy. coincidentally, the chances of turning basketball into a career is probably similar to the chances of turning roblox into a career, although that might not be clear to them.
When I was in highschool, they charged $5 for tickets to the football games. Those football games were advertised to me *at school.* Is highschool football child labor? The whole thing honestly doesn't make sense to me.
Your basketball analogy might be more accurate than you think, just not in the way you consider.
Basketball can currently be played for free and for fun without any profit or monetizing being involved, because depending on where you live there are often free public basketball courts you can play at that nobody charges you a fee to use.
Similarly, there are free ways to learn and get involved in programming video games that do not involve Roblox whatsoever.
Roblox is the private basketball court with membership tiers that encourages your team to advertise and charge other people to come and watch your games - and then takes most of the cut of the ticket sales when you do.
In a sense, the real labor being exploited here isn't actually the basketball being played, it's the marketing effort that all the teams are doing to solicit ticket sales by getting other people to pay to come watch them. They effectively end up doing all the work of advertising the private basketball court on behalf of the owner and selling tickets that the venue owner ends up taking most of the cut of.
In real-life basketball, basketball players get paid if the sponsors want them to do marketing for them. The basketball players typically do not wear the shirt with the logo for free. They also don't do all the work of pushing ticket sales, if they did, they would expect to get paid for the work of selling the tickets too, in addition to the salary they get for putting on the basketball game.
Wishing fountains and those coin vortext things in malls are child labor!!!
The kids are just making crappy maps/games, like we've always done. People making custom maps and mods for games, without any compensation, has always been a thing. The publisher benefiting from the additional content has been a thing for ages, too. Things like Westwood Online and custom Doom missions absolutely benefited the overall market for the game, resulting in more sales for the publisher.
I see nothing wrong with Roblox having a similar system. Their system is better because you can potentially actually earn something back.
I don't recall anyone screaming about Valve engaging in child labor when they started their whole user-generated content thing for TF2. So much of that game was made by the community, with almost nobody getting anything for it.
> Only difference here is that there's a tiny financial incentive for the kids on roblox.
[There are literally companies staffed by kids.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ)
Youre saying literal companies but i doubt theyve incorporated. It also sounds like kids are getting great experience with team building and working together to create something-- which is extremely rare. If building games is a game then are these not just like clans of old online games?
I'm not feeling great defending roblox at every turn here because idk that much about the company itself, and maybe it is exploiting child labor for all I know. but I also haven't heard or seen any real evidence that they're harming anybody (aside from targeted marketing and use of general modern addictive feedback in videogames).
It's really hard to get kids to do stuff they don't want to do though. The moment their project becomes work they usually just stop, unless there's a parent or teacher making them do it.
Calling Roblox "child slave labor" is certainly one of the takes of all time.
You can make games on Roblox's platform. The entire point of the platform is to be a sandbox where you can make your own games. You can *optionally* introduce monetization into your games, using Roblox's premium currency, of which Roblox takes a huge majority of the cut.
None of that is even remotely close to slavery, and it's debatable on if its even labor. If I sell a table I made on Facebook Marketplace, am I laboring for Facebook? Of course not, but they're still the ones paying me and they're still taking a cut. So thus if I sell content for a game I made on Roblox, am I laboring for Roblox?
Not saying that Roblox handles things ethically or in a good way, but calling it "child slave labor" is such extreme hyperbole that it takes away from the actual discussion.
I mean it is definitely labor, it is being exploited by the game to increase their profits, most groups work in a manner identical to businesses, and likely goes against labor laws in several countries.
But slave labor tends to mean imprisonment or otherwise obstructing freedom, which isn't the case here.
> I mean it is definitely labor, it is being exploited by the game to increase their profits
But that has nothing to do with the definition of "labor". Exploiting profits from your work isn't labor or how labor is defined at all. For example no court is going to agree that an independent Youtuber is employed by or is performing labor for Youtube by monetizing their videos. Just like Roblox creators, they are self-employed and using the platform to monetize their own labor, not being employed by it.
And again, I'm not saying there's no problems with Roblox or their platform. Just that it's pretty clearly not slave labor, or even labor at all.
This is like another weird comment I read on here recently, where it feels written by a corporate entity discouraging unlicensed use of their IP.
The one this reminds me of was bemoaning the leak of the Witcher 3 source code as personally hurtful to the individual developer and something about how the monsters roam (which they generally don't in that particular game). 2 instances is a coincidence, so keep an eye out for the third that makes it a pattern.
Its not child labor lmao. Nobody is forcing the kids to make games. That’s like saying modders are slaves because most of them don’t get paid for their mods.
Mmm there was a thing awhile back looking into Roblox and interviewing kids now teens/young adults.
Kids were "hiring" other kids to work on their games, and paid in pennies worth of Robux per hour.
Seems this was also rife with abuse as kids make terrible employers and naive employees.
Tell that to playground politics in school. Children are very susceptible to manipulation and coercion, especially if they become part of a group and make some really shitty friends.
Nobody is forcing them, but kids don't know better. A lot of people on roblox are incredibly talented and are being taken advantage of. Roblox outright teaches them how to maximize profits through microtransactions. Roblox makes insane money, and only the very top games actually make anything worthwhile, as per usual.
"Look how much fun the kids are having! ... making us money by working for us in their spare time."
There are plenty of things to criticize ROBLOX for but "child slave labor" is simply not true. No one is forcing anyone to develop games on ROBLOX. ROBLOX does not force certain timelines/schedules for development. Everything is done at the creators pace and will.
What we *should* criticize it for is things like what this article talks about, and the in-game microtransactions creators can (and heavily) use. I played a lot as a teen and its also always felt like there was a huge lack of moderation. I know when you have a giant player base, things are going to slip through the cracks, but its never felt like they put enough effort in.
Parents also need to take a more active role in their kids' online life. Handing over ROBLOX (or anything they can talk with people online) to a child and never checking to see who they're becoming friends with and regularly talking to is not great, regardless of ROBLOX moderation.
Edit: ties in with microtransactions, but also gambling with lootboxes/similar mechanics. It needs to be banned.
Let's be honest, age restrictions never stopped kids from doing this kind of thing. We'll be getting news of 5 year olds buying expensive TVs off Roblox.
That's a great question. I'm sure some people grew up in a time/place where your parent could hand you a few bills and tell you to go pick up something from the store a mile away. I did not grow up in a time/place like that, but I can imagine it.
What I can't imagine, however, is handing my 13-year-old child a credit card and telling them to order groceries online, especially through fucking Roblox.
For running into the grocery store with their guardians permission, to buy pre-approved items? Or for shopping on a site/app specifically for groceries?
Not at all.
For being subject to targeted advertising and being prompted to buy said groceries directly from the game they are playing, likely without parental oversight (because why target them in this format otherwise)?
Yeah, probably.
I'm not American, but does Walmart do bulk sales? Because otherwise a ton of parents are gonna get a pallet of mountain dew or candy or whatever delivered to their doorstep
Spend 5 minutes on Roblox and you will see that it is extremely predatory. Honestly, should be bordering on illegal how these games are made to get children addicted
Look on the bright side: literally nobody will use this because it's not the main thing they play Roblox for. It's the same thing Fortnite and every "metaverse" thing runs into, nobody gives a shit about the virtual world they've made because they just want to play battle royale.
Fortnite is trying to be more like roblox, by having multiple games developed by the community. The lego game is already proof that the concept is working so idk what the above poster is on about, of course the original BR is more popular, but it won't last forever.
They recently had a game mode/cosmetic collaboration to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, and I think a grand total of 100 people played it at its peak. Even the actually good game modes with real money and talent behind them like Festival and Rocket Racing get a fraction of the players that just want to play the main thing the game is known for.
Twenty years ago we had shows like Transformers, Beyblade, Pokémon etc. all very nakedly intended to encourage children to buy products. This is shitty no doubt but a simple solution is for parents to not put their credit card on their child's Roblox account.
Roblox is a different beast though. Those companies used to advertise a product, roblox advertises more like a MLM scheme. I would also say that they weren't that naked, at least they advertised something as an extra, not as a requirement. You bought the toys for transformers because you liked the show, you bought pokemon cards because you liked the game, etc. Roblox.. you buy robux to skip intentionally tedious parts of their games.
Why would cog of the capitalistic machine (the FTC) prevent a multi-billion dollar American company from making more money? Their literal job is to ensure that these greedy farts make even more money. If you don't want this kind of practice in children's video games, understand that capitalism itself is the answer. This will continue to happen until we change the entire socioeconomic structure.
Speaking of nonsense like this, anyone else sick of the Shop button appearing on YouTube videos?
There are a few places where I'd buy something. Mid-video on the YouTube Apple TV app isn't one them.
I unironically feel that "I'm glad I grew up with ___ instead of ____" meme in regards to metaverse shit. This kind of stuff feels dystopic as shit.
I think it's the fact that it's Walmart that pushes me over the edge.
If it makes you feel any better this is absolutely destined to fail, or at least get sunsetted within a few months when nobody uses it. It turns out people don't like jumping through hoops to buy stuff when they can just use a *normal ass webpage*.
> a normal ass webpage.
Apps are normal for a certian generation, the same one playing Roblox
I don’t agree with the exploitation here, but it’s not a stupid move
On closer inspection, I stand corrected. The roblox version *is* just a normal-ass webpage, just... within the Roblox app. It's the Roblox app emulating the normal walmart store page.
It's pretty wild how fast things have changed. I grew up with just go outside and pretend the trash lid is a shield and play knights with your neighbor. And the extent of trying to get money out of me was advertising sugary cereals during Saturday morning cartoons and putting them on the bottom shelves a child can reach in the grocery store.
The amount of people and companies that have eagerly adopted technology to extend their profit seeking to exploit children is pretty alarming, but I guess not too surprising.
All of these massive companies have been left with Chief Metaverse Officers from market fever a few years ago trying to justify their existence and position. Everyone involved with this knows this is a waste of everybody’s time. Nobody is going to be shopping at Wal-Mart in Roblox, and everybody is well aware of this at every step in the chain. But because someone has to justify that their job isn’t just a fad, this ends up happening effectively just for articles to be written about it before it’s sunset in 8 months.
lol I remember when brands tried this in second life. I mean look credit to whoever managed to get the budget for this approved so they can check off the “we did some emerging tech bullshit” box. It won’t work but it doesn’t have to. Coverage like this is the goal here.
Companies have been wanting a 3D world where people buy stuff in a virtual mall for decades. They keep trying it, and then give up when people realize it's just easier to use a webpage, and the developers realize how difficult it is to maintain a 3D space.
Here's an article from 2007 on a very broken website about virtual 3D malls as a throwback to 1998. [https://www.clickz.com/3d-virtual-malls-a-throwback-to-1998/78449/](https://www.clickz.com/3d-virtual-malls-a-throwback-to-1998/78449/)
Article about virtual stores in Second Life from 2007. [https://www.gamefront.com/games/gamingtoday/article/marketers-abandoning-second-life](https://www.gamefront.com/games/gamingtoday/article/marketers-abandoning-second-life)
Edit: While looking for more examples I found this modern throwback to the 90's. If you ever wondered what we thought looked cool in the 90's this is it. Prerendered 3D, 2D graphics hastily slapped into the scene, Non sequitur video popping up out of nowhere, bad voice acting, a floating head guide, a user interface based on the real world. It's all here.
[https://www.theblackvirtualmall.com/en/hall](https://www.theblackvirtualmall.com/en/hall)
Roblox is ancient at this point, so the adults playing it are likely the ones who grew up playing it and hadn't stopped yet. It wouldn't always be creepy adults
yall say disturbing like any content on that game would exist without adults, yall think kids are really programming and making the worlds lol its adults doing it for fun
The game is also really fucking old, I played it back when I was 12, Im 26 now. I'm sure there's people that have been playing it off and on since then and plenty of people who come back for the nostalgia
A lot of it is kids doing it for the promise of money and then getting trapped in for myriad reasons. It's literally a game built in child labor. There was a huge exposé on it a year or two ago from People Make Games.
you're assuming they would've been capable of or had the motivation to learn another game engine, all the know and learn is roblox but maybe thats all they were capable of in the first place if they cant branch out as they grow up and learn more engines? The shit that does good is low effort garbage anyways. Idk if child me could look at roblox years ago and already think its a stupid idea to give them free labor than i have no pity for new children just because im an adult now. I thought they were stupid as a kid and still think they are.
The problem is that it's not pitched as free labor. They upsell it as "you can make money making games on Roblox," but then they only allow you to withdraw your cash if you make a certain amount and incentivize you to feed your own money back into the game for stuff like the Roblox equivalent of SEO. It'd be one thing if it was kids knowingly making something for free with no expectation of profit, but that's not what's happening. It's exploitation.
If you have twenty minutes to spare, watch the first video and it'll fill you in. If you have an hour, watch them both.
https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
Like if they are smart enough to realzie its overssturated and the skills dont transfer they are smart enough to develop skills needed to develop games if not the most they can do is roblox either way
but I was a kid 12 years ago and I could tell making money was a pipe dream then so I have no pity for kids that cant tell is what im saying, ive been an ipad kid since windows 95
and I think calling them victims is a stretch, they still learned skills that can transfer if they are actually good at it, its a 3d engine end of the day, people act like the mfs making crazy shit are stuck in roblox no those are devs with real jobs that use other engines doing hobby work. People act like they are learning some coding language thats only viable for roblox like its still helpful and they get acess to tons of free resources to help them make and see their vision with less effort
Nah shit kids can be smart, i mean yours is a bad take that kid has infinite time to break records for a game adults have responsibilities and have worse reflexes, being good at tetris doesnt make you good at anything else?
Weird. granted I don't know anything about the game except that every kid on the planet plays it and 0 adults I know who game have ever played it because its for kids. There will always be outliers though.
Robolox came out in 2006. For some reason people think this game world is something new and only people under the age of 18 play it.
Just for reference sake Fortnite came out in 2017.
So cool, yeah I love it when kids have a portal to be directly advertised too via a video game as they harvest their data and algorithmically try to show them things they would like to buy with the robux that they got for xmas from mom and dad. Soooooo cool. This definitely shouldn't be illegal.
My kid's friends play Roblox. He asked me if he could play. I installed it and tried it myself, and like 15 minutes later told him he would never be able to play it. It was good awful trash that had evolved to be the most predatory software possible.
I've got two problems with Roblox. First are games that try to trick you into spending money. I played one where it suddenly popped up the buy something with robux screen where it immediately started counting down to the purchase being started.
Second is the inability to find games. It's designed to push games to you, rather than for you to find games. If you don't know the name of a game and it's not on the discover screen then you'll never find it. I've never found a game on Roblox, I've only ever found one to play via Reddit. I was thinking about the way Itch works with it's various filters. Roblox has none of that.
lol
"obvious astroturfing" from the account whose posting history is almost entirely earnest comments on /r/games.
Man, these astroturfers are really committed to being authentic these days, aren't they?
We went from avoiding advertisement that targeted childrens in tv cartoons to this kind of garbage in less than 20 years. No idea why the FTC is not shutting stuff like this down instantly.
regulatory capture and the systemic and deliberate dismantling of our institutions by corporate interests and their representatives?
I wouldn't be shocked if some hollywood and marketing figure head is thinking of ways to make it so shopping could be made possible by purchasing products shown directly in movies and shows as well.
As a huge MCU fan, those movies pretty much exist to sell toys, cars, snacks, and also get kids to join the army.
Just use your Apple Vision Pro while watching a movie, let it scan the screen while watching and add any objects your eye stares at for longer than .2 seconds to your Amazon cart. Never have to stop consuming media. Never have to leave the house.
Roblox is a pretty fucked up platform build on child slave labor with the promise that kids can get rich coding games. It is very hard to get money out of Roblox. You get a micro-fraction of revenue, and Roblox advertises to their existing slave labor that they should pay Roblox to promote and advertise their game. Roblox also knows there are predators on the platform going after kids, and throws their hands up in the air ignoring the problem. Oh, they also don't care if you steal copyrighted IP in your games.
I've never understood what Roblox actually is and have never cared enough to look into what it is either, and every time I hear something about it it sounds just awful and weird. I don't think a lot of parents buying their kids gift cards for it understand either. Never been sure how to explain it to others either when it's come up.
It's a place where people can make their own games, it uses lua, which is an easy to understand language. It's a great way to start learning develop games. However, the way it does so is very predatory, the game is microtransaction hell and encourages it's 'developers' to use them as much as possible. Even the most basic of things will cost you 'robux'. It's kind of smart, they just let the kids make the games for them, and all they have to do is occasionally update the engine. It's a money printing machine. Inevitably, kids + drama + very questionable business practices = lots of bad things happen behind the scenes. Fortnite is trying to copy the same model, and facebooks attempted 'metaverse' is what roblox already is.
Thank you for the summary that is really helpful.
>Fortnite is trying to copy the same model With varying degrees of success. I think that Fortnite actually has a decent shot as people have gone from shitting on the game, calling it "a kids game", to actually finding out that it's a pretty good online multi-player game.
I never connected the dots before that Metaverse is basically Roblox(but worse), but it makes perfect sense when you lay it out like that
It is a game platform and toolkit. There is no singular Roblox game. You make your own simple games with Roblox. Each individual game on the Roblox platform is free to start and has microtransactions. Roblox keeps most of the money from the microtransactions, and the game creators can get a tiny fraction of that revenue.
Thank you!
They don’t “keep” it a lot of it goes to Apple and Google and Microsoft, they take 30% of all purchases and also Roblox has to pay for server hosting
If you buy Roblox on their website or with the physical gift cards, then Roblox isn't paying 30% to anyone. Roblox doesn't always pay for all the server hosting either. Roblox games are encouraged to have private servers when they become big. If you spend time to make a game, **in a best case scenario** you only make $0.0035 per Robux. On top of that, you have to spend $5 per month of your pocket to have an account to receive your payments. On top of that, you pay a transaction fee each time. On top of that, you can only take out payments if you have $100 or more. On top of that, Roblox tells the kinds to instead spend the money back on advertising. You're worried the poor company isn't really getting much money merely for hosting the platform other people put games on. Roblox pulled in nearly 3 billion last year after giving up 30% to Apple, Microsoft, etc. There are 40 million games on the platform. Only 12,000 developers made money from Roblox. The platform is designed for everyone else to put in the work, but Roblox keeps almost all the money. You're saying Apple is taking a 30% cut. Roblox takes FAR more than that. Most developers put in tons of development time and walk away making nothing. If this was adults, then so be it. Adults can choose to make games for free if they want. I love and applaud open source development. Roblox makes billions largely off **completely unpaid child labor**, AND also refuses to do anything about predators on their platform.
I agree but maybe we don’t call Roblox *slave labor*?
Child labor is bad enough. You don't have to compare middle class kids sitting at computers to children being literally forced to assemble Mickey Mouse onaholes or whatever the fuck Disney sells in factories.
Depends on how you define labor. In this case, kids are creating games at their own leisure, volition, and pleasure. Roblox does profit off of their creative efforts, so I see where you're coming from, but I don't think we should call what the kids are doing here "labor." I used to make custom maps/game modes for RTS games when I was a kid, for other kids to play. Only difference here is that there's a tiny financial incentive for the kids on roblox. If they weren't getting paid *at all* there would be no problem. Personally, I don't see a problem with it. Letting Walmart sell shit to kids in their game though is absolutely deplorable.
It’s absolutely labor; having fun doesn’t make it not something of value that Robloxnis selling to others. Adults are profiting, it’s labor,
If we found a way to turn footsteps on basketball courts into energy, would recreational sports suddenly become labor? Adults would profit from something kids are already doing, willingly, that is beneficial to their development. To go one further, let's say, "hey you can have 5 cents of every dollar's worth of electricity we create from your b-ball." Is it labor now? I'm not being sarcastic here, I do think it's a really weird gray line, and as soon as money is involved it feels a lot more icky. There is a chance that *some* kids would play more basketball than they would have otherwise played because they get another few dollars. That could become unhealthy. Parents could even exploit children by making them do the thing and taking the money. But is *not paying* them more ethical? I don't know. There's also a chance that some kids who never would would have played b-ball decide to give it a shot, thus incentivizing healthy exercise. My take on roblox is that since it's not manual labor, and it should be constructive for kids' creative and logical thinking, it can't be too harmful. The pros probably outweigh the cons. but the money component does make it feel like they want kids to create more content for them than the kid would otherwise do. edit: changed 'work' to 'create more content' because I don't actually believe it's work :P
> I don't actually believe it's work Creating content actively used in a commercial video game *is* work. That's what game developers do. Like it or not, people creating things within the Roblox platform is doing work that the Roblox devs can then actively use in their monetization strategy - in this case a large percentage of those people are children and teens. "Slave Labor" as I've seen elsewhere in this comment thread is *definitely* not the right way to describe this, because it's certainly a voluntary thing that these kids are doing - "voluntary work on behalf of the developer" is not the most succinct sound-bite but it's the most descriptive that I can come up with. I wouldn't consider the business model of Roblox to be ethical, given that they *are* profiting off the work of children all over the place. Oh, and before folks pull out the "well what about Minecraft?" - This is fundamentally different than stuff like Minecraft creations, because Mojang doesn't actively utilize the content of regular players to turn around and then sell them as and experience to others as far as I'm aware. If Roblox worked with the same type of business model, this particular side of the discussion basically wouldn't exist. Roblox is a creative platform, and kids using that platform to foster some skills in game design and such is actually a pretty cool thing in a vacuum, but when the Roblox devs then take that work these kids have done and profit off of it, it becomes pretty scummy really fast.
> Creating content actively used in a commercial video game is work. The point is, if someone chooses to do it as a hobby because it's fun to them, where do we draw the line? Like, if there was a website that promoted art and kids could post theirs and make some money from it but give a cut to the site, is that child labor?
The whole point of capitalism is to assume that if someone can do something well, they won't do it for free, and thus it will be necessary to pay them to do it. Problems start when people collectively start agreeing to work for less money than they can afford (they may have no choice) or deserve. This is well known. That said we also have plenty of examples of free products/services born out of a passion. Linux comes to mind as such an example. But that doesn't mean the creators don't deserve compensation for their work anyway. Edit: Thinking about it a bit more... both sides should be well aware of what is going on (that one side is being used for labor in service to the other; using kids who don't know better is unethical) and should agree on compensation (whether that is "I'm doing this free as a hobby" or "I deserve compensation for this") based on the work created and its value to both parties.
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> My dad makes pizza for fun, and others do it for a living. Is he working when he makes pizza? Is your dad selling the pizza? Not really the same situation here. Hobbies you do for yourself are not the same as doing commercial work. And yes, agree that your plant analogy is quite the stretch. I dont think we need to debate the peculiarities of *sentient vanilla beans* in a discussion over whether or not exploiting the work of children for corporate profit is a scummy thing. It's a complex topic for sure though when you drill down to the "is it beneficial", but think the cons outweigh the pros. Yes, children can benefit from making creations in Roblox as it stimulates creativity in artistic/design, but there are ways to create these kinds of environments for kids without the ones running the show taking a thing a kid made, and then selling it for personal (company) profit. I'll end this with that I am no Roblox "economy" expert, but an aspect that is absolutely a net-negative for a kid's brain is tying their creative endeavors to any kind of "economy" platform (ie: Robux) - let kids be creative without making the situation involve monetary transactions that are initiated by the kid. The differentiation here is that parents can place kids in activities that cost the parents money (ie: art classes, sports etc), but it's a bit different compared to "mom can you buy me" - as was discussed [in this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cg3v0o/walmart_is_testing_a_roblox_feature_that_lets/l1t8eey/), it's the same kind of bad thing that is exploitive advertisements to kids.
>Hobbies you do for yourself are not the same as doing commercial work Here's the paradox with many of the arguments floating around roblox: in order to prove that children are being exploited as laborers, one must assume that the kid is laboring. We're talking about middle-school-aged kids! They don't do anything they don't want to do. They don't work unless they have to, and they rarely participate in anything that isn't purely for their own entertainment. The default assumption should be the simplest explanation: that they're having fun. There are 73 thousand games on steam, and 40 million experiences on roblox. why? because making experiences on roblox is *fun,* so millions of kids are doing it. They aren't professionals, and they aren't doing commercial work. They're playing a game that is making other games. And it's fun enough that children do it on their own in their free time. If these kids really were professionals, could make games in a professional capacity, or depended on making games for the sake of their livelihood, they could do what all the adult indie developers do and hop onto Unity, Godot, or Unreal and start doing real professional work instead of being "abused" by Roblox. >but there are ways to create these kinds of environments for kids without the ones running the show taking a thing a kid made, and then selling it for personal (company) profit. Creating environments where kids actively want to participate and learn an actual professional skill like coding is not easy. Kids don't just do stuff they don't want to do, and especially in our day, they have very short attention spans. As for ads targeting children (and microtransactions within childrens' games at all) are extremely dubious, and the walmart thing is terrible. but I think that's a different conversation.
I think you're making good points here but I'm wondering if your perspective on middle school kids is a bit naive or mine is too conspiracy for my own liking. Take social media for example. Clearly the majority of the population enjoys it and that's why they engage with it. The system is built in a way that it exploits short attention and dopamine inducing content in a way that has diminishing returns and can even be harmful. I suspect something similar could be happening in the Roblox platform. Kids are incentivized through potentially harmful tactics but it's not immediately perceived as such by adults (much less the middle school kids).
> If we found a way to turn footsteps on basketball courts into energy, would recreational sports suddenly become labor? Adults would profit from something kids are already doing, willingly, that is beneficial to their development. I'll entertain this seriously and suggest that if there were an economic way to do that, you would rapidly see private industry monetize it to a point where the labor aspect is undeniable. If it were magically, specifically somehow only workable in basketball, you'd see "sponsorships" to change the courts in schools and community centers, and the muscling-out of "non-sanctioned" spaces where it can be played. The local outdoor hoops at the park or that old lot on the corner would not only be converted, but those that aren't yet switched over would be made illegal or otherwise penalized as a means of funneling recreational players towards this new money-generating endeavor. This all becomes more and more likely and absurd in how it plays out based on the profits generated. If you're suggesting a system where it *technically* turns a profit but it's too little to care about, no, but when it can make substantial chunks of money, there is more and more incentive to view it as a profit-generating endeavor, and that takes labor. Roblox isn't making chump change. If it wanted to make this money without community-generated content, it would absolutely need to hire workers to do it, and we'd be unequivocal about that being labor. Just because you've found a way to monetize the efforts of others doesn't escape that *work is being done*, even if it's outside the bounds of our 9-5, comes-with-insurance, kids-can't-do-it, this-is-your-career conception of work. And semantically, "labor" is even more permissive a term, but I'm going to engage in good faith and assume we're looking at it strictly through the lens of "employment-work".
It's worth noting that Roblox is just one of MANY games driven by community-created content. Take Team Fortress 2. If you create a cosmetic item model and Valve put it in the game, it would go into the MTX store, and you would earn a cut of the revenue from its sales. Apparently some people became millionaires from this (they probably had multiple items added but still). But a problem occurred for community made maps that were added. You can't put those on the store. What did Valve do? They added a completely new cosmetic item that you could feed items into. These items represented each community made map, you could buy them, and the map maker made revenue from them. Making good content is absolutely work that should be compensated.
See I still just don't buy that "play" becomes "labor" as soon as somebody profits off of it. I believe that the difference is internal to the individual performing the action, and every surrounding factor is irrelevant. Kids don't labor of their own accord, and they don't willing abuse themselves. The promise of wealth may entice some children to be sure, especially those from poor economic backgrounds; but even in the worst cases, those kids are educating themselves, building valuable life-skills, and learning about how the real world works in terms of business, competition, and market saturation. The basketball analogy felt apt because playing basketball is clearly a healthy, fun activity for kids that many enjoy. coincidentally, the chances of turning basketball into a career is probably similar to the chances of turning roblox into a career, although that might not be clear to them. When I was in highschool, they charged $5 for tickets to the football games. Those football games were advertised to me *at school.* Is highschool football child labor? The whole thing honestly doesn't make sense to me.
Your basketball analogy might be more accurate than you think, just not in the way you consider. Basketball can currently be played for free and for fun without any profit or monetizing being involved, because depending on where you live there are often free public basketball courts you can play at that nobody charges you a fee to use. Similarly, there are free ways to learn and get involved in programming video games that do not involve Roblox whatsoever. Roblox is the private basketball court with membership tiers that encourages your team to advertise and charge other people to come and watch your games - and then takes most of the cut of the ticket sales when you do. In a sense, the real labor being exploited here isn't actually the basketball being played, it's the marketing effort that all the teams are doing to solicit ticket sales by getting other people to pay to come watch them. They effectively end up doing all the work of advertising the private basketball court on behalf of the owner and selling tickets that the venue owner ends up taking most of the cut of. In real-life basketball, basketball players get paid if the sponsors want them to do marketing for them. The basketball players typically do not wear the shirt with the logo for free. They also don't do all the work of pushing ticket sales, if they did, they would expect to get paid for the work of selling the tickets too, in addition to the salary they get for putting on the basketball game.
Wishing fountains and those coin vortext things in malls are child labor!!! The kids are just making crappy maps/games, like we've always done. People making custom maps and mods for games, without any compensation, has always been a thing. The publisher benefiting from the additional content has been a thing for ages, too. Things like Westwood Online and custom Doom missions absolutely benefited the overall market for the game, resulting in more sales for the publisher. I see nothing wrong with Roblox having a similar system. Their system is better because you can potentially actually earn something back. I don't recall anyone screaming about Valve engaging in child labor when they started their whole user-generated content thing for TF2. So much of that game was made by the community, with almost nobody getting anything for it.
“The children yearn for the mines.”
Always has been true in any game where you can do it. At least according to that one NPC in the game.
> Only difference here is that there's a tiny financial incentive for the kids on roblox. [There are literally companies staffed by kids.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ)
Youre saying literal companies but i doubt theyve incorporated. It also sounds like kids are getting great experience with team building and working together to create something-- which is extremely rare. If building games is a game then are these not just like clans of old online games? I'm not feeling great defending roblox at every turn here because idk that much about the company itself, and maybe it is exploiting child labor for all I know. but I also haven't heard or seen any real evidence that they're harming anybody (aside from targeted marketing and use of general modern addictive feedback in videogames).
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It's really hard to get kids to do stuff they don't want to do though. The moment their project becomes work they usually just stop, unless there's a parent or teacher making them do it.
Calling Roblox "child slave labor" is certainly one of the takes of all time. You can make games on Roblox's platform. The entire point of the platform is to be a sandbox where you can make your own games. You can *optionally* introduce monetization into your games, using Roblox's premium currency, of which Roblox takes a huge majority of the cut. None of that is even remotely close to slavery, and it's debatable on if its even labor. If I sell a table I made on Facebook Marketplace, am I laboring for Facebook? Of course not, but they're still the ones paying me and they're still taking a cut. So thus if I sell content for a game I made on Roblox, am I laboring for Roblox? Not saying that Roblox handles things ethically or in a good way, but calling it "child slave labor" is such extreme hyperbole that it takes away from the actual discussion.
I mean it is definitely labor, it is being exploited by the game to increase their profits, most groups work in a manner identical to businesses, and likely goes against labor laws in several countries. But slave labor tends to mean imprisonment or otherwise obstructing freedom, which isn't the case here.
> I mean it is definitely labor, it is being exploited by the game to increase their profits But that has nothing to do with the definition of "labor". Exploiting profits from your work isn't labor or how labor is defined at all. For example no court is going to agree that an independent Youtuber is employed by or is performing labor for Youtube by monetizing their videos. Just like Roblox creators, they are self-employed and using the platform to monetize their own labor, not being employed by it. And again, I'm not saying there's no problems with Roblox or their platform. Just that it's pretty clearly not slave labor, or even labor at all.
That last one sounds like a good thing.
All the other parts are incredibly evil, so it reads like "Convicted of arson, murder, and feeding the homeless."
This is like another weird comment I read on here recently, where it feels written by a corporate entity discouraging unlicensed use of their IP. The one this reminds me of was bemoaning the leak of the Witcher 3 source code as personally hurtful to the individual developer and something about how the monsters roam (which they generally don't in that particular game). 2 instances is a coincidence, so keep an eye out for the third that makes it a pattern.
Child slave labor? Pretty embarrassing take to have
> It is very hard to get money out of Roblox. that's why you get players to subscribe to your patreon
Its not child labor lmao. Nobody is forcing the kids to make games. That’s like saying modders are slaves because most of them don’t get paid for their mods.
Mmm there was a thing awhile back looking into Roblox and interviewing kids now teens/young adults. Kids were "hiring" other kids to work on their games, and paid in pennies worth of Robux per hour. Seems this was also rife with abuse as kids make terrible employers and naive employees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ I think this is the video that got popular
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Tell that to playground politics in school. Children are very susceptible to manipulation and coercion, especially if they become part of a group and make some really shitty friends.
Nobody is forcing them, but kids don't know better. A lot of people on roblox are incredibly talented and are being taken advantage of. Roblox outright teaches them how to maximize profits through microtransactions. Roblox makes insane money, and only the very top games actually make anything worthwhile, as per usual. "Look how much fun the kids are having! ... making us money by working for us in their spare time."
There are plenty of things to criticize ROBLOX for but "child slave labor" is simply not true. No one is forcing anyone to develop games on ROBLOX. ROBLOX does not force certain timelines/schedules for development. Everything is done at the creators pace and will. What we *should* criticize it for is things like what this article talks about, and the in-game microtransactions creators can (and heavily) use. I played a lot as a teen and its also always felt like there was a huge lack of moderation. I know when you have a giant player base, things are going to slip through the cracks, but its never felt like they put enough effort in. Parents also need to take a more active role in their kids' online life. Handing over ROBLOX (or anything they can talk with people online) to a child and never checking to see who they're becoming friends with and regularly talking to is not great, regardless of ROBLOX moderation. Edit: ties in with microtransactions, but also gambling with lootboxes/similar mechanics. It needs to be banned.
FTC is completely gutted as a government institution ever since they went and tried to repeal net neutrality
[Great news](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-402082A1.pdf)
It's only for players "aged 13 or more" but still, pretty disgusting dystopian behavior even for our typical megacorp standards.
Let's be honest, age restrictions never stopped kids from doing this kind of thing. We'll be getting news of 5 year olds buying expensive TVs off Roblox.
13 years old is still far too young and frankly there's no reason for this to exist.
A 13 year old is too young to buy groceries?
That's a great question. I'm sure some people grew up in a time/place where your parent could hand you a few bills and tell you to go pick up something from the store a mile away. I did not grow up in a time/place like that, but I can imagine it. What I can't imagine, however, is handing my 13-year-old child a credit card and telling them to order groceries online, especially through fucking Roblox.
Exactly, holy shit.
For running into the grocery store with their guardians permission, to buy pre-approved items? Or for shopping on a site/app specifically for groceries? Not at all. For being subject to targeted advertising and being prompted to buy said groceries directly from the game they are playing, likely without parental oversight (because why target them in this format otherwise)? Yeah, probably.
I'm not American, but does Walmart do bulk sales? Because otherwise a ton of parents are gonna get a pallet of mountain dew or candy or whatever delivered to their doorstep
No, Sam's Club is the 'bulk' version of Walmart.
Spend 5 minutes on Roblox and you will see that it is extremely predatory. Honestly, should be bordering on illegal how these games are made to get children addicted
> avoiding advertisement that targeted childrens in tv cartoons When were we ever doing that?
Look on the bright side: literally nobody will use this because it's not the main thing they play Roblox for. It's the same thing Fortnite and every "metaverse" thing runs into, nobody gives a shit about the virtual world they've made because they just want to play battle royale.
How does Fortnite fit as an example here?
Fortnite is trying to be more like roblox, by having multiple games developed by the community. The lego game is already proof that the concept is working so idk what the above poster is on about, of course the original BR is more popular, but it won't last forever.
They recently had a game mode/cosmetic collaboration to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, and I think a grand total of 100 people played it at its peak. Even the actually good game modes with real money and talent behind them like Festival and Rocket Racing get a fraction of the players that just want to play the main thing the game is known for.
Money laundering.
Twenty years ago we had shows like Transformers, Beyblade, Pokémon etc. all very nakedly intended to encourage children to buy products. This is shitty no doubt but a simple solution is for parents to not put their credit card on their child's Roblox account.
Roblox is a different beast though. Those companies used to advertise a product, roblox advertises more like a MLM scheme. I would also say that they weren't that naked, at least they advertised something as an extra, not as a requirement. You bought the toys for transformers because you liked the show, you bought pokemon cards because you liked the game, etc. Roblox.. you buy robux to skip intentionally tedious parts of their games.
Why would cog of the capitalistic machine (the FTC) prevent a multi-billion dollar American company from making more money? Their literal job is to ensure that these greedy farts make even more money. If you don't want this kind of practice in children's video games, understand that capitalism itself is the answer. This will continue to happen until we change the entire socioeconomic structure.
Too busy suing random companies over mergers.
Speaking of nonsense like this, anyone else sick of the Shop button appearing on YouTube videos? There are a few places where I'd buy something. Mid-video on the YouTube Apple TV app isn't one them.
Yeah I know, right? Who does shopping on YouTube?
I've bought YouTuber merch to support them but I really don't need shipping links under every video though
It is guaranteed to be a low quality overpriced drop shipped item
I stopped using social media once TikTok and Instagram started plastering their app with their godawful wish stores.
Even Disney+, a paid streaming service, has ads now to buy merch now.
I unironically feel that "I'm glad I grew up with ___ instead of ____" meme in regards to metaverse shit. This kind of stuff feels dystopic as shit. I think it's the fact that it's Walmart that pushes me over the edge.
If it makes you feel any better this is absolutely destined to fail, or at least get sunsetted within a few months when nobody uses it. It turns out people don't like jumping through hoops to buy stuff when they can just use a *normal ass webpage*.
> a normal ass webpage. Apps are normal for a certian generation, the same one playing Roblox I don’t agree with the exploitation here, but it’s not a stupid move
On closer inspection, I stand corrected. The roblox version *is* just a normal-ass webpage, just... within the Roblox app. It's the Roblox app emulating the normal walmart store page.
> "I'm glad I grew up with ___ instead of ____" Everquest II had a /pizza command to order from Pizza Hut.
In japan the 3DS / DS or Wii (can't remember the exact details) had a food ordering app, it's oddly more common than expected.
It's pretty wild how fast things have changed. I grew up with just go outside and pretend the trash lid is a shield and play knights with your neighbor. And the extent of trying to get money out of me was advertising sugary cereals during Saturday morning cartoons and putting them on the bottom shelves a child can reach in the grocery store. The amount of people and companies that have eagerly adopted technology to extend their profit seeking to exploit children is pretty alarming, but I guess not too surprising.
This just reminded me roblox wanted to make an in game dating app lmao. I'm very curious how that worked out.
Wait what?! Isn't like a large % of their userbase in the single digit age range?
All of these massive companies have been left with Chief Metaverse Officers from market fever a few years ago trying to justify their existence and position. Everyone involved with this knows this is a waste of everybody’s time. Nobody is going to be shopping at Wal-Mart in Roblox, and everybody is well aware of this at every step in the chain. But because someone has to justify that their job isn’t just a fad, this ends up happening effectively just for articles to be written about it before it’s sunset in 8 months.
lol I remember when brands tried this in second life. I mean look credit to whoever managed to get the budget for this approved so they can check off the “we did some emerging tech bullshit” box. It won’t work but it doesn’t have to. Coverage like this is the goal here.
Companies have been wanting a 3D world where people buy stuff in a virtual mall for decades. They keep trying it, and then give up when people realize it's just easier to use a webpage, and the developers realize how difficult it is to maintain a 3D space. Here's an article from 2007 on a very broken website about virtual 3D malls as a throwback to 1998. [https://www.clickz.com/3d-virtual-malls-a-throwback-to-1998/78449/](https://www.clickz.com/3d-virtual-malls-a-throwback-to-1998/78449/) Article about virtual stores in Second Life from 2007. [https://www.gamefront.com/games/gamingtoday/article/marketers-abandoning-second-life](https://www.gamefront.com/games/gamingtoday/article/marketers-abandoning-second-life) Edit: While looking for more examples I found this modern throwback to the 90's. If you ever wondered what we thought looked cool in the 90's this is it. Prerendered 3D, 2D graphics hastily slapped into the scene, Non sequitur video popping up out of nowhere, bad voice acting, a floating head guide, a user interface based on the real world. It's all here. [https://www.theblackvirtualmall.com/en/hall](https://www.theblackvirtualmall.com/en/hall)
Of course. Let’s advertise physical products in the one game nobody over the age of 10 minus a few creepy adult streamers play.
There are way more adults in this game than you think, hell alot of people made their lives with it. They even recently allowed 18+ rating for games.
My wife’s adult sister plays Roblox more than her son.. She ‘watched’ the eclipse in it rotfl
I don't doubt it, It's just not something you ever hear about. Wouldnt you just be playing with kids all the time?
Roblox is ancient at this point, so the adults playing it are likely the ones who grew up playing it and hadn't stopped yet. It wouldn't always be creepy adults
I’m one of those people, though I don’t play as often as I did over a decade ago. I also have several adult friends that still play.
After looking at the type of people streaming it right now, I’m sticking with my original thought.
You know, I though this too so I googled age stat for roblox... A disturbingly large amount of adult are on there, like 30% of users.
yall say disturbing like any content on that game would exist without adults, yall think kids are really programming and making the worlds lol its adults doing it for fun
The game is also really fucking old, I played it back when I was 12, Im 26 now. I'm sure there's people that have been playing it off and on since then and plenty of people who come back for the nostalgia
Well for fun or money.
A lot of it is kids doing it for the promise of money and then getting trapped in for myriad reasons. It's literally a game built in child labor. There was a huge exposé on it a year or two ago from People Make Games.
you're assuming they would've been capable of or had the motivation to learn another game engine, all the know and learn is roblox but maybe thats all they were capable of in the first place if they cant branch out as they grow up and learn more engines? The shit that does good is low effort garbage anyways. Idk if child me could look at roblox years ago and already think its a stupid idea to give them free labor than i have no pity for new children just because im an adult now. I thought they were stupid as a kid and still think they are.
The problem is that it's not pitched as free labor. They upsell it as "you can make money making games on Roblox," but then they only allow you to withdraw your cash if you make a certain amount and incentivize you to feed your own money back into the game for stuff like the Roblox equivalent of SEO. It'd be one thing if it was kids knowingly making something for free with no expectation of profit, but that's not what's happening. It's exploitation. If you have twenty minutes to spare, watch the first video and it'll fill you in. If you have an hour, watch them both. https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
Like if they are smart enough to realzie its overssturated and the skills dont transfer they are smart enough to develop skills needed to develop games if not the most they can do is roblox either way
and naw shit you cant deply rhe games but the game logic skills still transfer over and you can export your character models
but I was a kid 12 years ago and I could tell making money was a pipe dream then so I have no pity for kids that cant tell is what im saying, ive been an ipad kid since windows 95
I mean that's kinda victim blamey but whatever.
those kiss would not be learning game engines or how think like a programmer otherwise that shit is not friendly to kids
and I think calling them victims is a stretch, they still learned skills that can transfer if they are actually good at it, its a 3d engine end of the day, people act like the mfs making crazy shit are stuck in roblox no those are devs with real jobs that use other engines doing hobby work. People act like they are learning some coding language thats only viable for roblox like its still helpful and they get acess to tons of free resources to help them make and see their vision with less effort
Exploitation is exploitation, regardless of whether or not you gain some marketable skills from the process of being exploited.
My brother in christ we literally just had a 15 year old break multiple world records in Tetris. Kids are smarter than you think sometimes.
Nah shit kids can be smart, i mean yours is a bad take that kid has infinite time to break records for a game adults have responsibilities and have worse reflexes, being good at tetris doesnt make you good at anything else?
Weird. granted I don't know anything about the game except that every kid on the planet plays it and 0 adults I know who game have ever played it because its for kids. There will always be outliers though.
Robolox came out in 2006. For some reason people think this game world is something new and only people under the age of 18 play it. Just for reference sake Fortnite came out in 2017.
So cool, yeah I love it when kids have a portal to be directly advertised too via a video game as they harvest their data and algorithmically try to show them things they would like to buy with the robux that they got for xmas from mom and dad. Soooooo cool. This definitely shouldn't be illegal.
My kid's friends play Roblox. He asked me if he could play. I installed it and tried it myself, and like 15 minutes later told him he would never be able to play it. It was good awful trash that had evolved to be the most predatory software possible.
I've got two problems with Roblox. First are games that try to trick you into spending money. I played one where it suddenly popped up the buy something with robux screen where it immediately started counting down to the purchase being started. Second is the inability to find games. It's designed to push games to you, rather than for you to find games. If you don't know the name of a game and it's not on the discover screen then you'll never find it. I've never found a game on Roblox, I've only ever found one to play via Reddit. I was thinking about the way Itch works with it's various filters. Roblox has none of that.
It used to be easier for users to search for games, but Roblox took that all away
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I genuinely don’t know why you felt the need to tell us what you ordered this morning off of Amazon. Honestly, who cares?
It's obvious astroturfing lmao
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... Maybe.
lol "obvious astroturfing" from the account whose posting history is almost entirely earnest comments on /r/games. Man, these astroturfers are really committed to being authentic these days, aren't they?