My kiddo has easily spent 500+ on Roblox across birthday/Xmas gift cards/chores.
I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.
As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices. I imagine they can hide behind the fact users are making most of the mini games, and they are just providing a platform.
I've mentioned this in other comments, but I sat in with my nephews on a Roblox session, then stayed after to check things out on my own. There's an astounding number of adults on that platform saying some of the most horrible things.
The games are like you say, and there's some that are indeed the model of what I expected: games that kids and amateurs made with their tools. Car jump games. Simple platforming. Basic shooters. But then there are games that seem like they're some dark pattern mobile devs side projects lol Games where you do nothing but collect stuff or pets and there's lots of gratification devices happening and suddenly there's just a literal pay wall. Just the worst of f2p gambling addiction built right into player built roblox games over and over and over again.
But on to the adults, my favorite example was joining a 'shooter' game that was really just a shooting gallery of sorts but it had voice chat enabled and wtf there's some eastern european accent going off on gay people and talking about how the targets should have sombreros so 'we' can shoot "lazy" Mexicans.
That experience was replicated through a few games and I just wrote Roblox off completely as infested with people trying to help kids find hate based ideologies or get them addicted to gambling. I warned their mother, she didn't listen til she got her credit card stolen.
> As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play.
Considering how much you said your kid has spent, that money could’ve been spent on buying copies for all their friends and you’d still have plenty left over.
> As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.
But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.
I'm a gamer and I always play the games my kids are playing to see what's up. Roblox was banned in my house after I messed around with it on my own for 30 minutes. Most of the games on the platform are pay to win skinner boxes and they have a pedophile problem. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...
I am a gamer dad too. This is something I worry about. I have been playing Minecraft with my son but he is learning about these other games.
I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.
How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?
Ive been shown WhatsApp threads of the young teens who play the DRM-free games i upload - my google drive ID is effectively referenced as some kind of deity lol
Side benefit: No online play or interaction with the outside world, only with your own group (usually)
Eh, I dunno. My son plays a bunch of Roblox and has spent a net $10 for a few custom avatar mods. While there is certainly a pay to win aspect for some games within, there is also a ton of "free" games to sift through, and since all of them are competing for players, they still have to make the experience compelling enough at the free tier. We've had conversations about the pay-to-win aspect, and even though he has several hundred dollars saved up, he has never once asked to spend money on pay-to-win aspects of Roblox. I'd argue that almost any modern videogame / mobile game is equally if not more "predatory" with the pay-to-win side of things. Just look at the menu screens in any modern first person shooter / battle royale type game. Those look far worse than anything I have seen in Roblox.
> I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.
That started at a certain moment in history, when paying online became trivial, so everyone who didn't produce pay-to-win was leaving a lot of money on the table. You need to find games that are older than that.
Some of the good old games are free, for example Starcraft or Wesnoth. There are many cheap games on Steam, but you need to review them first, or maybe find a review on YouTube. If the game is sufficiently cheap, for example up to $5, you could simply buy 5 copies and tell your kid to give donate 4 of them to his best friends.
Former Roblox player that quit back in 2016, there used to be a free currency called Tickets which were a free currency you could get through various means, it was a lot more restrictive on what you could get, but it really boosted my enjoyment of the game. The moment they got rid of tix I quit, because I refused to spend any of my meager allowance on Roblox (also generally being bored of the game after years of playing.)
Modern Roblox is really impressive, and really depressing. The things people make are incredibly cool, and they are rewarded incredibly poorly for it.
> Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices.
Because if you held game companies responsible for deliberately fostering addiction in their customers to earn a profit, we'd have scores of industries behind them in line to be brought to heel the same way and the stocks for tech companies, game companies, tobacco companies, casino companies, alcohol companies, etc. etc. would all implode.
There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds, and that's been status quo for so long that I sincerely doubt there's any way to actually change it.
> Though Roblox isn’t profitable, there are some significant caveats to the situation. Over the last twelve months, operating cash flow—a far more important measure than accounting-defined profits—were $650MM, about 20% of revenue. Roblox has been cash-positive for at least twenty-four quarters.
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
I can't recall the exact company name (Edit: it was TCI), but this was a smart accounting move that made one of the big US telcos frogleap the competition in the race for connectivity.
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
HN hivemind has already delivered but I've found that for "I can describe it but can't remember the name" an LLM will have a decent chance of surfacing the name given the description (and is usually a very simple case to verify unlike much LLM output).
The bigger question about Roblox is how and why they got their special treatment from Apple. The whole concept of Roblox is in blatant violation of Apple's App Store policies. I believe they are significantly shielded from competition because who else can get that kind of ongoing and reliable relief from Apple's famously picky and capricious App Store reviewers? Maybe Roblox is happy to pay Apple their 30% in exchange for that protection. And this is not a small matter: Roblox is a public company worth 25 billion dollars based in no small part on this special treatment. The SEC ought to be investigating this.
My kids have started playing Roblox recently and they have started asking for some Robux so they can buy crap... I really don't get how so many people are into spending dollars on this stuff. Everything they wanted was ~$10-20 NZD and it was just throw away stuff, like a costume, etc. And then it's only useful in that one game you have brought it for. It blows my mind that it ever got this popular.
I got my 8-year-old going on Roblox because she asked for it. I had no idea what is really involved with it and as I watched her play it, it all seemed to me to be a big scam.
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
My niece was about $1500 into that game before anyone realized what she was doing. She had been asking for gift cards and what not to get the credits. My sister realized what was going on when she added it all up. She thought it was a harmless game her kid was playing. It has a lot of dark patterns designed to scrape cash. There is nothing more expensive than a 'free to play' game.
Because kids aren't utilitarian. They want shiny things impulsively now in whatever niche game they are playing at the moment. Or want to keep up with their friends who got cool stuff to keep status. Doesn't matter to them that they'll switch games in a week and lose everything.
It is illegal to advertise to children in Iceland because of this. They have no means to evaluate purchases like this. Modern technology has completely circumvented these laws.
Thats just being a kid. Their $10 digital costume was some $5 cheap batman figure some 30 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the skin lasted longer.
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
Who is "people" here? The children or the parents? The children are literally children; to them the funny numbers we use really are just funny numbers, they don't know how they relate to real value. As for the parents, a few credits here and there to shut them up and keep them out of trouble is probably considered worthwhile. When I was little they got football shirts, yoyos, trading cards etc. Same thing.
Yeah, this should be discussed more in my opinion. This entire business is just exploiting kids. I'm pretty worried about how my kids will behave when they get older and they will start to get bombarded by the Algorithm with all this "popular" staff.
Eh IMO how is it any worse than a video arcade? I really think that's all Roblox is an arcade. Yeah it's the experience is fleeing and ephemeral. But these kids are hopefully experiencing what I felt in my childhood that I can't achieve anymore. I probably dumped 60$ alone over months going to Pizza Inn trying to win at Mortal Kombat.
There's something weird and sad about Roblox for me as an old-timer who still has silly dreams about free/open software internet utopias for just fun? There's so much creative (programming etc) energy in that place and, for what?
In my (non-finance, parent of a roblox-player) opinion, the problem that Roblox has is that every single roblox game has a "roblox" essence. Every roblox game is undeniably roblox, and to broaden their market and attract higher-paying users, I think they need to fix that.
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
Roblox is a huge problem for me, as a parent of a 8y kid.
Let me explain: I try to block violent apps in his tablet using Google's Family app, however, Roblox internally keeps 'offering' my kid almost any game, whatever if there's violence, drugs, killing others, and so forth.
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
Why can't they just issue their own device to minimize app store fees. it seems to me the amount money going to app store real estate is more than enough to justify some sort of method of allowing their users to play the game without app store intervening. The total amount spent so far is astounding if viewed in figures. Minus half or quarter of the total time since appearing in app-store for it to be served to the large audience. The other half would have to be too much time spent content. Rest of that half of paid out fees could have more than enough to fund a plan B.
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
This feels like reading finance fan fiction (which it kind of is, given the author's profession?) and uses a lot of text to reach the part that lays out the actual problem: the average operating costs based on daily active users are $18 per user per quarter, and the average amount made is only $13. so either operating costs need to come down, charges need to go up, or they need (more, stable) external revenue (e.g. ads).
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
They have positive cash and are paying their employees well. That's what a company should be doing rather than paying peanuts and hoarding wealth like a dragon. Especially as it seems they are actually profitable, just hiding it with accounting.
> When a user buys $30 in Robux, the platform’s virtual currency, Roblox recognizes $30 in bookings. An average of $3 of that $30 is spent on a “consumable” (i.e., a single-user or otherwise perishable good), and so Roblox recognizes that $3 as revenue right away. The remaining $27 is spent on “durable” goods such as an avatar. As an avatar can and often will be used over time, Roblox recognizes this revenue over the average lifetime of a Roblox user
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
They have the craziest most difficult interview process I've ever seen, like beyond quant level. But I don't know why. My kids play it and it feels like the jankiest most busted-ass 3D engine that ever existed. I'm sure all the secret sauce is doing all this stuff at scale, but what do Leetcode hards in 20 minutes have to do with that?
reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
So the real reason they’re not profitable is because they’re doing some accounting magic that counts their income spread over the next 27 month, instead of all up front. They are cash flow positive, it’s just that their income numbers are lagging some 2 years behind.
[+] [-] GNOMES|1 year ago|reply
I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.
As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices. I imagine they can hide behind the fact users are making most of the mini games, and they are just providing a platform.
[+] [-] mrmetanoia|1 year ago|reply
The games are like you say, and there's some that are indeed the model of what I expected: games that kids and amateurs made with their tools. Car jump games. Simple platforming. Basic shooters. But then there are games that seem like they're some dark pattern mobile devs side projects lol Games where you do nothing but collect stuff or pets and there's lots of gratification devices happening and suddenly there's just a literal pay wall. Just the worst of f2p gambling addiction built right into player built roblox games over and over and over again.
But on to the adults, my favorite example was joining a 'shooter' game that was really just a shooting gallery of sorts but it had voice chat enabled and wtf there's some eastern european accent going off on gay people and talking about how the targets should have sombreros so 'we' can shoot "lazy" Mexicans.
That experience was replicated through a few games and I just wrote Roblox off completely as infested with people trying to help kids find hate based ideologies or get them addicted to gambling. I warned their mother, she didn't listen til she got her credit card stolen.
[+] [-] latexr|1 year ago|reply
Considering how much you said your kid has spent, that money could’ve been spent on buying copies for all their friends and you’d still have plenty left over.
[+] [-] whoknew1122|1 year ago|reply
If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.
But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.
[+] [-] wmeredith|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amerkhalid|1 year ago|reply
I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.
How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|1 year ago|reply
I Do this for young relatives.
Ive been shown WhatsApp threads of the young teens who play the DRM-free games i upload - my google drive ID is effectively referenced as some kind of deity lol
Side benefit: No online play or interaction with the outside world, only with your own group (usually)
[+] [-] _coveredInBees|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Viliam1234|1 year ago|reply
That started at a certain moment in history, when paying online became trivial, so everyone who didn't produce pay-to-win was leaving a lot of money on the table. You need to find games that are older than that.
Some of the good old games are free, for example Starcraft or Wesnoth. There are many cheap games on Steam, but you need to review them first, or maybe find a review on YouTube. If the game is sufficiently cheap, for example up to $5, you could simply buy 5 copies and tell your kid to give donate 4 of them to his best friends.
[+] [-] afloyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Suppafly|1 year ago|reply
It'd be cheaper to buy games for his friends to play than to support his robux addiction.
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|1 year ago|reply
Because if you held game companies responsible for deliberately fostering addiction in their customers to earn a profit, we'd have scores of industries behind them in line to be brought to heel the same way and the stocks for tech companies, game companies, tobacco companies, casino companies, alcohol companies, etc. etc. would all implode.
There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds, and that's been status quo for so long that I sincerely doubt there's any way to actually change it.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mercenario|1 year ago|reply
Who gave to your kid the money to spend on Roblox?
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wavemode|1 year ago|reply
This feels like an example of the phenomenon highlighted in another recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|1 year ago|reply
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
[+] [-] parpfish|1 year ago|reply
(I learned about it from HN here a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855)
[+] [-] devsda|1 year ago|reply
They had lot of profit-less years of growth and they have captured a big part of the market share.
[+] [-] jld|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ElCapitanMarkla|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] massysett|1 year ago|reply
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
[+] [-] sumtechguy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jack_pp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Hugsun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|1 year ago|reply
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
[+] [-] globular-toast|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ryoshu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] matusp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iainmerrick|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kraig911|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jrm4|1 year ago|reply
short rant over
[+] [-] bentcorner|1 year ago|reply
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
[+] [-] password4321|1 year ago|reply
>Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
20220707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 (Problems at Roblox)
> Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents.
[+] [-] niemandhier|1 year ago|reply
In addition to being mostly pay-to-win the platform has a pedophile problem.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...
[+] [-] raister|1 year ago|reply
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
[+] [-] mahirsaid|1 year ago|reply
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|1 year ago|reply
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
[+] [-] peanut-walrus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ro_bit|1 year ago|reply
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
[+] [-] nsxwolf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amitlevy49|1 year ago|reply
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
[+] [-] Aeolun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] formerlurker|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|1 year ago|reply
And how is this Roblox better than the (pre MS) Minecraft?