Roblox Studio head insists children using it to make money is ‘a gift’, not exploitation
The platform has been accused of exploiting children because it takes a cut of money they make
The head of Roblox Studio has rejected accusations that the platform is exploitative when children use it to make money.
Roblox Studio is a development environment created by the Roblox Corporation which offers a range of building, scripting, testing, debugging and collaboration tools to let users make their own Roblox games.
Users can then upload their game, known as an ‘experience’ to the Roblox platform, where they can either make it available for free or monetise it, with Roblox taking a cut of any money made.
Because users of any age can upload and monetise experiences, and because Roblox takes a percentage of this income, some have accused Roblox of exploiting children by essentially making money off their development work.
In an interview with Eurogamer, however, Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza rejected suggestions that the practice could be considered exploitative, instead saying it can be “the biggest gift” for young developers, especially those in difficult conditions.
Update - Roblox responds
A Roblox spokesperson has contacted VGC with a statement claiming that the original source article was “not representative of [its] full perspective on this topic”, adding: “We always offer deeper conversations on topics unrelated to the interviews at hand and were surprised to see the story posted without taking us up on this offer.”
In a lengthy list of “additional context”, the statement claims the Roblox platform “serves a broad community of creators” of “all ages of backgrounds”, explains the other uses of Roblox Studio (such as learning to code) and claims that a recent survey conducted by Roblox suggets that “the primary motivator for most creators is not monetary gain”, but “having fun”.
It also claims that “the economics on Roblox are different from other gaming platforms” and that “in 2023, we delivered more than $741 million to the creator community”.
In terms of children making and monetising games on the platform, the spokesperson claims that “for the experiences that monetise, the majority are created by developers who are aged 18 or older”, and that “in 2023, more than 90% of the top 1000 experiences by hours engaged in were owned by developers who were at least 18 years old”.
It should be stressed that the statement does not deny that children make Roblox games or that Roblox takes a cut of the money they make, and does not claim that anything Corazza said in the original interview was misquoted.
“You can say this for a lot of things, right?” Corazza argued. “Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting child labour,’ right? Or, you can say we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even 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.
“There’s always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratised – and in this case, also with a younger audience. 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.”
Roblox was originally released on PC back in 2006, and was then ported to iOS in 2012, Android in 2014 and Xbox in 2015, with PS4 players finally getting a port in October 2023.
According to Roblox, more than 65 million people play the game daily.
