Roblox allows its players to create and monetise their own creations within its ecosystem. Across the entire breadth of Roblox game makers, a lot of money is made. At the individual level, however, the vast majority of creators making work within Roblox never earn enough to cash out their earnings – and some of those creators are children. This has long led to allegations that Roblox is exploiting child labour, generating value for Roblox Studio and its shareholders in the process.
“I don’t know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?” said Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza at GDC, when the allegation was put to him by Eurogamer. “Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life.
I’m not sure, ‘you can say we are exploiting child labour’ is what the head of Roblox ought to be saying in interviews. I’m also not sure, ‘look at what we’re doing for children in slums’ is what a publicly-traded company should be saying, while they’re clearly extracting more value from their players than they share. Corazza continues, however.
“There’s always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratised – and in this case, also with a younger audience,” he told Eurogamer. “I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there’s people that are teenagers – and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.
“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’t feel like they were exploited! They felt like, ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”
A PR for Roblox apparently interjected at this point to reiterated that the majority of people earning money in Roblox are over the age of 18.
The fact remains that the vast majority of people who create things within Roblox never earn enough to cash out at all. Creators are also paid in Roblox’s in-game currency Robux, and when they cash out, are paid a conversion rate whereby 1000 Robux converts at $3.50. For a player to buy 1000 Robox themselves, however, costs $12.50 – 3.5x more.
Eurogamer also have a full Roblox Studio interview, which delves into their recently announced AI creator tools.
