Roblox Boss Insists Payment Model Not Child Labour Exploitation, Says It’s a ‘Gift’

Roblox is genuinely breaking brave new ground, enticing users to “make anything you can imagine” using the in-game development tools provided and finding massive success in the process. It seems Sony really was onto something with Dreams, but it stumbled in the execution. The Roblox platform currently boasts an astonishing 71 million users globally, and part of the appeal is the tantalising prospect of those users creating a game, monetizing it, and publishing it for other players to enjoy, all of it in-app. But with more than three million “Roblox developers” already, many of them seemingly younger, accusations of child exploitation have been brewing for some time.

In an interview conducted during GDC, Eurogamer followed up on its earlier line of questioning, asking Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza about the game’s growing reputation. While some have suggested that Roblox’s business model (which reportedly pays creators on average 28.9 cents per dollar spent) is taking advantage of budding developers, Corazza says the creators he works with feel like it’s a “gift”, offering a way out of poverty in extreme cases:

“I don’t know; you can say this for a lot of things, right? 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.”

Corazza goes on to explain that “there’s always the flip side of that when you go broad and democratised — and in this case, also with a younger audience”. He later boasts “our average game developer is in their 20s” and that he’s “heard from developers that — as teenagers — had millions of players on the platform”.

He says that if you were to speak to these lucky few, they’d tell you a different story: “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 Roblox PR representative present during the interview added that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18”.