this story began when i learned three stunning things about roblox if you don't know much about roblox today it is the most popular video game in the us and europe played by 200 million mostly young people every month roblox is more of a creative platform than a game though it's a downloadable portal to a staggering quantity of multiplayer games of all different genres that are all just a little bit floaty and janky that's because anybody can download roblox and use its free tools and free hosting to start making and monetizing games and an astonishing number of people have done just that where today steam hosts almost 55 000 games roblox hosts more than 20 million experiences which is what roblox calls games because legally speaking it can't admit to selling games within apple's app store as that would make it a game shop within a game shop so those three things i learned that made me do the internet equivalent of a double take one all of roblox's developers do earn a cut of the revenue of everything they create but that cut is shockingly small to put it in perspective steam catches heat from game developers for taking 30 of every sale while epic and microsoft's pc store take just 12 roblox claims the developers receive around 24. 5 of any sale although as we'll soon see in reality they get even less the second thing i saw when roblox went public on the stock market this year it was valued at a staggering 41 billion dollars a value somewhere between nintendo and electronic arts roblox is now worth seven ubisofts and three in the words of roblox's own vice president of marketing tammy barmick from the very beginning it was about having kids develop games for other kids these kids are not just hobbyists they're doing real work that is driving the value of one of the biggest video game publishers in history but with a cut that's just one third of the industry standard and nobody looking out for their health we had to ask is the next generation of video game developers being exploited before they've even finished secondary school but before we look at how roblox treats its workers first we have to look at how roblox turns its young users into workers in the first place so the good thing about roblox as i've said is that the tools are free the hosting's free the tools actually let you skip with the traditional learning curve associated with 3d modeling and roblox even handles moderation of your players for you but people just using these three tools to get creative doesn't make roblox any money in fact it loses the money because servers are expensive which is why the moment that roblox's core player base of nine to fifteen year olds start playing they are submerged in this idea that they could be an entrepreneur after all it's impossible to play roblox without making other roblox users richer because you're buying passes for their experiences you're buying their cosmetics but we're just getting started the tabs at the top of roblox. com are basically find games find cosmetics and start making stuff yourself but if kids click on that they see make anything reach millions of players and earn serious cash creators like you it says are being paid for what they love to do if you go to roblox's youtube channel the first videos you see are about successful game developers in general roblox's pr department loves shining a light on the game's younger success stories the official roblox tutorials and the games support website both assume you want help with monetization and if you go to education.
roblox. com which contains lesson plans for educators one of the lessons is how to earn money in roblox or in the words of one 11 year old i interviewed i saw other big games i saw other developers getting money in a way that looked easy so are any of these kids really earning serious cash well where the average indie game on steam makes several thousand dollars the vast majority of games sorry experiences on roblox earn their creators zero dollars now to understand why that is we need to take a closer look at the roblox marketplace because it took me weeks to get my head around this i'll let you decide for yourself what chance you think kids have of understanding it so making a game in roblox is easy it's when you want other people to play it to reach those millions of players that roblox promise that your journey will start heading uphill if you want to figure out what to play on roblox it only shows you the thousand or so games out of its 20 million that have the most players right now there are no discoverability tools that let you see the newest games or to help new designers the up and coming section still shows you games with thousands of players so if you're a kid trying to make games for roblox you have two choices at this point you can hustle and try and get your game in front of streamers or youtubers or you can pay roblox to advertise it but to buy anything in roblox you first have to convert your real money to the company's virtual currency robux developers on roblox bid with robux for ad slots in an auction a system that is discussed by developers in forum threads as a gamble with developers hoping that with the right game and the right ad they'll grab enough players that their game ends up surfacing in the churning froth of the roblox marketplace so the first thing roblox tells us young developers is make anything reach millions of players earn serious cash and then the next thing it says is ow well i mean if you actually want people to play your game i guess you could give us money but as duplicitous as it sounds we know this works because roblox has 20 million experiences made by its mostly young audience even though when i spoke to professional roblox developers they told me that kids should not expect to make money on the platform i don't think it's really impossible for young developers to succeed on the platform anymore it's really hard to get into those top 200 games sometimes i think of making roblox games as trying to make a viral tick-tock or a viral meme it's really tricky uh there's pretty much only one big market to shoot for on roblox right now and that's kids if you don't uh hit that demographic just right and if you don't get your gameplay loop just right you fail later in this video we're gonna get to why it benefits roblox corporation to have hundreds of thousands of developers making games for the platform ignorant of the fact that the odds are stacked against them but first let's go back to that question of why it's so hard to make money on the roblox marketplace because we're not done let's imagine you actually made a game that beats the odds and becomes a small hit and now your game has thousands of players who are making inexperienced purchases with robux roadblocks takes a 30 cut off every transaction on their platform and then you actually get paid the rest in robux which of course isn't real money you can only spend it in roblox you want to get paid you want to withdraw that money as actual cash now here's the bit that i think is just super shady if any roadblocks user wants to take robux back out of their account and put it in their bank account as actual currency the minimum withdrawal mail is 100 000 robux valued at around 1 000 u. s dollars if you make 900 worth of robux selling stuff you've made your real life paycheck will be zero dollars oh and also you can't withdraw anything unless you're first paying for a roblox monthly premium subscription now let me make this part abundantly clear this is a choice that roblox corporation has made entropia universe the world's only cash-based mmo that we did a video on last year has a minimum withdrawal amount of 100 u.
s dollars in second life it's just 10 us dollars in making the minimum draw amount so high roblox is just increasing the chances that you won't hit that gap and so will just plow the money back into roblox whether that's buying games or cosmetics or saving up to advertise your next game lots of roblox developers even use their robux to pay other roblox developers to work on their game and if they're not smart about how they pay these developers roblox will take a cut of that paycheck too but for now let's just imagine that you make a game and it's a hit and you do make it to 100 000 robux so you're allowed to withdraw it finally to your real life bank account you see roblox buys robux from users at a very different rate that it sells them so withdrawing 100 000 robux doesn't get you a thousand us dollars it gets you 350 think about it if your assets in roblox become substantially devalued only at the moment you take them out of the platform why not keep them on the platform in case you need them one day and so tons of robux don't ever make it off the platform instead they just go round and round with roblox taking cuts after cut and so while on paper roblox developers get that 24. 5 percent of a game sales in reality it's even lower if we look at roblox's published records we can read that for every one dollar roblox earns in bookings only 17 cents make it back out of the ecosystem to developers or at least that's our best guess as to what developers are getting the platform is actually so opaque that even full-time professional devs who've been doing this for years do not know what fraction of the pie they're taking home like you just have to roughly estimate it based off of like those exchange rates and that's all you get and by the way the lack of regulation in today's tech sector is seeing a lot of historically illegal practices coming back again with a new lack of pain roblox paying people in robux is very very similar to historical mining and logging camps in the united states paying people in company scrip script was currency invented and manufactured by these companies that could only be used to buy things within the company's camp for example in the stores that they would build the mining camps like paying people in script for the same reasons that roblox does one it means workers spend their money at the company which makes the company richer two workers become more afraid of breaking company rules because companies can take away their ability to spend script essentially confiscating their paycheck and three script makes it harder for workers to quit their jobs because the moment they do they get poorer unbelievably these camps would have booths where you could exchange your script for us dollars but the exchange rate hurt the worker just like roblox scrip so messes with workers ability to make money that it was banned in the united states in 1938. and until we legislate script again in the digital age roblox is gonna keep paying developers with pretend money now when the question of whether roblox is treating its designers fairly comes up and it does come up you can find long threads on the official forums with older developers banding together to ask or really beg for a more fair profit share you always see the same two things you'll see roblox posting a super corporate and disinterested response as it ends the discussion without having it but you'll also see people saying that devs asking for more money is silly because roblox has never been a profitable company it loses money every single year and so there's no more money to give out that is bollocks but don't take my word for it take the word of the market analysts who have decided that as a money-making machine roblox is worth somewhere around the value of seven ubisofts the idea that this company has no more money to give out is a repulsive one roblox is just doing the same thing as companies like spotify uber and airbnb something known as platform capitalism all of these companies have business models based on unsustainable expansion always moving into more countries hiring more staff increasing their expenses until they control the entire market sector and all of its data and can use this monopoly to make incredible money as we saw with facebook and amazon if roblox wasn't losing money year after year its investors could reasonably turn around and say why not and so when roblox's developers come cap in hand asking for more revenue there's never any left even though the platform has 200 million monthly users and the ceo is a billionaire because if roblox were to give more money to developers that's less money it could spend growing the platform and becoming a monopoly we reached out to roblox corporation for an interview or comment on how they treat their young developers they did not reply to us let's take a moment to put a human face on all of this was it harder than you expected to make robux with your levels it's definitely a big yes this is a mill emil is 11 and he got his parents to send him to a special summer camp where he could learn to code for roblox and then he made a game all by himself and the game flopped and he ended up sounding like a disenchanted 30 year old veteran in an 11 year old's body even though roblox says to encourage you to actually make games the likelihood of you making a successful game is basically zero you always compete with the people that have lots of money and like be a problem if i showed you something because i'm trying to oh no please show me whatever you like this is like a big game developer that has lots of success like the amount of people that they have means the bigger the successes and that means that they get a giant spike and even if the spike lowers they still get they still go back up and it's just an infinite cycle of spikes that go up and down up and down when you're a small game developer you'll have that spike you come all the way down you stay down were you tempted to spend robux on advertising your game after you made it that i didn't even have robux but i wish i did because then i could advertise it and maybe have a chance amel's disappointment wasn't to do with whether roblox's revenue split was fair he hadn't really thought about that concept he was just upset that roblox only shows its users games that have tons of fans but the thing is roblox benefits from giving a very small fraction of its developers almost all of the money because those successful devs can then keep updating their popular games or they can make new games or they can go full time and hire people to work for them they can even become celebrities i wanted to make this video to really tell you my story and give you my honest thoughts on the 8th annual bloxy awards and interestingly the only concession roblox has made in recent years to do with giving developers more money gives even more money to the developers who were already making money experience based payouts is a new sliver of roblox's revenue that goes to the games that roblox subscribers play for the longest this is also roblox corporation tacitly encouraging its developers to make games that are addictive rather than fun but the way that roblox encourages its users to make games that are manipulative would be a whole other video and i'm gonna stay on topic here's games professor and labor activist tai underwood on why roblox would be trying to empower its most successful developers and ensure the rest have no power at all comparing it to youtube you and i know of many youtube channels where it's like oh well i'm actually a boss with employees now and so are all the top roblox games you can't organize bosses their interests do not align with workers the worker's power comes from having the ability to stop production and all bosses everywhere uh it is against their interest to stop production that does track with my experience i reached out to one extraordinarily successful roblox developer for this piece and they did agree to speak to me on the condition that we didn't reveal their identity saying quote despite some fair criticisms we have a good working relationship with roblox and i wouldn't necessarily want to be directly featured or quoted in a video critical of their platform cut i asked that same anonymous developer what message they'd like to get out to roblox's young developers they told me on roblox many young devs crunch and burn out they're not privy to ongoing dev community discussions about healthy working practices my advice would be to not overwork don't feel pressured to work long days especially as a young person and lower your expectations there are millions of experiences on roadblocks and only a handful become top games make sure to have fun even if only a few people play your game there's just one problem with getting those messages out to young game developers roblox is a publicly traded company now which means it has a legal obligation to maximize profits and kids working too hard with unreasonable expectations isn't bad for the company and this is the heart of roblox's success in convincing its young users that making money on the platform is possible it gets hundreds of thousands of young people pouring their imagination and spirit into making the next big roblox success story and while by my estimation 99.
9 of them flame out and make no money at all that doesn't affect roblox's bottom line one bit here's genya again talking about his experience in the roblox official internship program for instance in my class i was the only person that released the game and that game was the only game from the whole class that actually did well and we had like 7 000 people online and so it's kind of rare for those games to actually work but then if some young wunderkind does make the next great thing on roblox there is nothing to stop an older team of developers taking the idea refining it really releasing it and then advertising it but whether young developers find success on roblox or not the platform benefits from young developers training themselves up before they've realized that the odds are stacked against them and once they've done that they're that much less likely to walk away you can't take your game anywhere else if i'm on steam theoretically i could move my game to some you know epic or try to make a deal with apple or something like that but once you're in roblox it is impossible to extract your game or your work or even your skills from roblox because it's such a idiosyncratic system to work with and this is so infuriating for me because if roblox was actually operating with care for its young audience it could be a great thing for the games industry free tools to get kids messing around and making stuff that their friends can come and play also for free that's awesome that anonymous developer who spoke to me told me that they wished roblox had been around when they were a kid and trying and failing to make games in flash but that's not what makes roblox money what makes roblox money is empowering kids to become workers with unreasonable expectations of what they can achieve on this platform in a way that would be illegal if it wasn't happening online so what can we do about any of this the question of whether or not is like possible to do labor organizing with children productively is like a really bizarre question with much older young people like young adults who i'm just like only now introducing the idea that your boss may have interests that diverge from your own in some cases right and this is mind-blowing i think the answer in this case is that it should just simply be regulated that roblox cannot have people sell within their games right if their their audience is largely children and that's not usually what i reach for because uh top down regulation doesn't build worker power but like in this case it's like they're kids it's what's going on here it's a very weird and scary situation and what about emil uh 11 year old game developer what does he think should be done do you think that kids should be encouraged to try and sell things on roblox i think that kids should be encouraged but they shouldn't be lied to about how how easy it is because it's not easy but the one thing we know for sure is that roblox is not gonna legislate itself in a way that affects its ability to make money roblox is going to continue doing everything it can to scratch revenue out of its young vulnerable audience no matter whether they're getting fair pay whether it's good for their health or whether they're fully empowered to walk away thank you very much for watching this video everybody if you enjoyed it please do share it because well the more awareness we raised this issue the more pressure we apply to roblox to be better but also please share it because frankly it took absolutely ages to make and for that we have to thank the supporters of the people make games patreon if you believe in games journalism like this video we would love to have your support if you head over to patreon. com peoplemategames you can also see all the cool rewards you can get like bad idea house a regular feature where chris and i go through stories we researched but couldn't quite turn into videos for one reason or another ah the catharsis of actually getting to turn this work into something but at least now it was worth something because we've been able to talk about it and give it to you yeah thanks again everybody that link was patreon.
