Roblox - Exploitation or Opportunity: A Response to Quintin Smith and People Make Games (VL528)

It's our annual (semi-annual?), let's respond to some...interesting claims made on YouTube episode!

In this installment - Is Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, exploiting your child? What you don't know...probably won't change your understanding of the underlying voluntary transactions at play here.

That said, there's much to discuss as Shut Up and Sit Down's Quintin Smith gets *extravagant* on behalf of People Make Games.

Nobody needs to Shut Up, but we should probably still have a bit of a Sit Down...in Virtual Legality.

#Roblox #Exploitation #Response

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CHANNEL SUPPORT

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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
03:50 The Underlying Premise
05:46 Overview
06:53 Encouraging Folks to Develop
19:32 Problems of Discoverability
25:07 A Fair Share
36:47 Robux and Suspect Terms
44:57 Understanding Company Scrip
49:59 Bonus Arguments: Children and Activists
57:50 Jumping to Conclusions
1:01:59 My Conclusions (and Emil's)

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Discussed in this episode:

"Been working on this for a while."
Tweet - August 19, 2021 - Quinns

"Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers"
YouTube Video - August 19, 2021 - People Make Games

"What is Roblox?"
Roblox Parents Webpage

"An Antitrust Epic"
YouTube Playlist - Hoeg Law

"Roblox bookings grow 35% to $665.5M for Q2 2021"
VentureBeat - August 16, 2021

"Infographic: Indie game revenues on Steam"
August 9, 2020

Roblox Corporation
FORM S-1 REGISTRATION STATEMENT

"Roblox Terms of Use"
Updated May 18, 2021

"Developer Exchange Terms of Use"
Roblox Help Page - Updated October 4, 2019

"American kids want to be famous on YouTube, and kids in China want to go to space: survey"
Business Insider - July 17, 2019

"Scrip"
Wikipedia Entry

"Payment in scrip or similar medium not authorized."
29 CFR 531.34

"Definitions"
29 USC 203

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"Virtual Legality" is a continuing series discussing the law, video games, software, and everything digital, hosted by Richard Hoeg, of the Hoeg Law Business Law Firm (Hoeg Law).

CHECK OUT THE REST OF VIRTUAL LEGALITY HERE:

DISCUSSION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS LEGAL ADVICE. INDIVIDUALS INTERESTED IN THE LEGAL TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS VIDEO SHOULD CONSULT WITH THEIR OWN COUNSEL.

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Twitter: @hoeglaw

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DESIGN WORK
Joe Ellis (Logo Design)
Chris Leroux (Motion Graphics)
For more information: contact Chris at @Chrisleroux on Twitter.

PODCAST VERSIONS ALSO AVAILABLE

[thegofer]

Very thorough. One thing to keep in mind is that Europeans, in general, have very different views on worker employment relationships than Americans.

[lwinklly]

Nice video. A few months after the original People Make Games video was published, Roblox began to remove the "make serious cash" keywords from their website, and later lowered the threshold for entry to DevEx from 100, 000 to 50, 000 Robux. This shows that they're clearly trying to create a better view of themselves.
I've been with the platform for over 7 years and I hated seeing misinformation get spread like wildfire from the People Make Games videos, I tried to make several comments with similar points to yours but they often were disliked or buried under the sea of comments agreeing with the videos.

[Krojester]

"We're not quite getting to the level of exploitation I would have hoped for, in this particular argument" (20:30) sentences taken out of context are hilarious.

[penguin]

Supporting Hoeg; endless prayers! 💜🙏

Always great content... Get well soon; you are greatly missed! 💜

[Dobbiy]

I as a Roblox developer have to point out that creating a famous game for roblox can be easier than creating a famous game for a steam-like platform.

Since roblox lacks tools for promotion, the search tools work very well and depending on the type of game, it is not a difficult task to make it popular.

moreover, most games with more than 200 players generate income.

[pxyiirg]

Great video. I would love a response on his second part as he goes over a lot of issues that are industry-wide but he frames it as a roblox issue. One area he calls “black market” is essentially sale of video game currency and items for real money and is seen with almost every single video game (notably CSGO). He also brings up moderation issues, which is another thing that every single video game has and is a ridiculous point which is unrelated to his premise. Basically the second video is even “worse” than the first and a response would be even more entertaining. Also the second video is more popular than the first at 1.5M views if you care about that.
If you find the time I would be very excited to watch a video from you on the subject. :)

[wildreams]

Incredible content and effort. Thanks for the nuanced discussion.

[PrettyGuardian]

You mentioned Roblox being a good opportunity to teach children that just because someone promises you the moon doesn't mean that they will deliver on that. If Roblox is promising anything and not delivering on that while simultaneously being financially enriched by that child's efforts then, for me, that's exploitative on its face. I think the whole situation would be fundamentally different if we weren't talking about kids though.

[HoegLaw]

Nobody needs to Shut Up, but we should probably still have a bit of a Sit Down...in Virtual Legality.

[zeroisnine]

This is so incredibly hypocritical. Fan-sourcing video game development is exploitative, but Fan-sourcing video streaming content isn't? I.e. every video sharing site ever.

[timogul]

I will say, the "scrip" does make the company a bit richer. In practice. I mean, part of it is the "company town" aspect, but basically if you are paying your workers in a money that they cannot spend outside your ecosystem, and then you are selling them products for that money, then even if you have to spend your money to buy those products, you are still making profit on the difference. If you agree to pay a worker $50 a day, but then he spends $30 of that money on products/services that you are selling him, and then you have to spend $15 buying those items wholesale, then you are still only out $35 a day to acquire his primary labor value, rather than being out $50.

[handtrap]

The issue I have with it is that instead of teaching kids how to program it removes the difficult part of programming which while it is good for those who only use Roblox. If there is something they find wrong with the app which in this case is essentially unfair "pay", (even though there not technically staff so legally it cant be considered pay the point still remains) they cannot move to another platform to share and use there software which would be the main driving force for most game stores to provide a good service as otherwise all there developers would just up and leave the example being moving to steam or epic games store. which means they cannot control there means of profits and business making it much easier for Roblox to get away with things they wouldn't otherwise. Moreover with the among us-Fortnight case, the creators of among us still had the ability to sue while the creators of a Roblox game couldn't because Roblox still owns all the "experiences" on the platform and it would not change the profit of the business so they don't care and wont do anything about it.

[Detton]

An opportunity...for exploitation! (I just watched the video in question and i'm looking forward to your take on it. Still watching, but preliminary upvote!)

[TheLizardKing]

I've definitely worked for a few digital production studios that could have been named Shut Up and Sit Down

[cdarklock]

Wait until you hear about Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation, and the GPL.

[PrinsessePeach]

When the company script system was mentioned I was reminded of the excellent song Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford. 🤓

[ITR]

I think there might actually be an argument in it being better to not allow people to earn money on the platform, as people might treat it more like "work" than "for fun" once you can earn money on it. That said, it *is* legal, so it'd be better to have an argument on whether or not it's ethical.

I don't know if it warrants another video, but PolyMars made a video on the same topic with a different angle a few days ago, maybe you could check that out too?

[lvbuckeye]

Conflation, not conflagration. One is getting it backwards, the other is a fire. :) 15:20 mark

That aside, awesome analysis as usual!
👍👍

[evilgeek]

So there's a better for up video on the people make games channel that actually addresses and gives specific examples of some of problems with the Roblox platform, from crunch, to NFTs and the gambling like nature of microtransactions to some more Activision-Blizzard like accusations.

[AlucardNoir]

I like the findability of Youtube. That's how I found your channel. Then again, I'm not a content creator so things might be different from your perspective.