The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]
There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.
I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.
In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
Just because two things are "annoying", doesn't mean they have the same ethical problems.
The fun single player games only need to convince you they are a fun experience and you should buy them once.
Games with loot boxes are trying to convince you every day to spend money on them. Dunno about roblox, but often the items are visible, and "defaults" are often perceived as poor or noobs.
We can't be naive: It's a whole other level and companies are spending millions on manipulating kids to spending more and more money.
Of course a kid is gonna be annoyed if they get something other than what they want, but, to use a hamfisted but scarily apt analogy, are the kids yearning for the drug called sugar or the drug called crack/meth/etc. Both are "bad" but on completely different levels
Dunno man, when the “core gameplay loop” gets interrupted every 2 minutes with “do you want to pay to win?” Banners and 50% of the screen is covered in ads and trap buttons that pop up a purchase dialog when you press them accidentally (a given on mobile with touch controls), it’s fairly obvious the gameplay loop is the last thing in the developers mind.
> games allow you to spend money to rapidly get better
Audience is the problem here. It's obviously not a big deal if the platform is targeted for adults, but majority of users are underage. The platform can certainly implement guardrails for the vulnerable users if they wish to
Those guardrails exist. They’re called parents. My son doesn’t have a credit card and therefore doesn’t have robux. Having no robux, he can’t spend it on anything.
> the core gameplay loops work just fine without it.
Of course it's functional, it has to string people along for enough time to get them to start paying.
That doesn't mean grinding a system tuned to get you hooked enough to give up and pay is a 'just fine' as a game. It's openly deliberate malicious design.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
This is misleading because for every dollar spent, $0.67 is not what developers get paid. The link (https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences) you referenced clearly says 25% is the "Developer share".
The cost to run the platform is the platform's cost."Platform hosting & support" and "App stores & payment processing fees" should not be considered as developer operational cost
Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?
Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.
The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users
Compare with other platforms. Payout model is as simple as platform takes % or fixed fee, rest is dev to keep. There's no verbiage that says dev share is 67% but you they actually get paid less.
What exactly goes behind the platform is platform's business, not the user. If developers are getting paid out $0.25 per dollar spent, that's the developers profit and rest is spent running the platform which is Roblox's concern.
The main reason this argument exists is because of Roblox being difficult to compare with other platforms. For the most widely used platforms/engines/storefronts in the industry, the main payout model is that the percentage (for storefronts ~30%, smaller for smaller platforms, for commercial game engines ~5%) or fixed/variable fee (per month or per seat in the client organisation) is taken as payment for using the distribution platform or a royalty for using the game engine. The remaining quantity (60-80%) is given to the developer of the game.
To make it clear, this is not profit! Any money earned after paying the storefront and the engine still needs to be spent on server hosting & maintenance, as well as moderation & legal compliance if a game is popular enough to need it. There also is a risk that the expenses taken away in this area could outweigh the revenue and the developers end up with a loss. Unless all expenses are negligible, the resulting revenue isn't just for the developer to keep.
Roblox pays for an experience's server hosting, maintenance, moderation, legal compliance, discoverability, engine development, app store fees, etc. As results, there is no risk of such loss, though Roblox's operating costs are much higher than a typical game storefront. I would consider these costs as developer operational costs. As far as I can tell, the key difference is the fact that one party is having their costs paid by another rather than one party giving another the money to pay for it themselves. This, to me, is an arbitrary distinction.
Other platforms don't have clauses that need to differentiate between money given to developers as profit and money given to developers as infrastructure/upkeep costs because these other platforms don't deal in the kind of broad integration that Roblox has from the storefront to the datacentres. In almost all cases, the final payout a developer gets from Roblox is pure profit.
The services Roblox is selling might not be using a standard industry pricing model, though it's still very clear and not at all deceptive what the product is the developers are paying for and what the profit share is after operating expenses have been paid for on their behalf.
Your response explains why Roblox might charge such a steep fee but that isn't my issue as I said earlier.
> 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent
Profit given to dev is $0.25 per dollar spent, not $0.67. It's as simple as that. I understand Roblox needs to maintain infra, support regional regulation, etc, but that's Roblox's business operational cost and shouldn't claim the delta of $0.42 is "given to developers" because developers never received it
I'll admit I read deeper into your argument than what you actually wrote.
Comparing with a platform like a digital distribution storefront, the infra & support & other OpEx still has to be paid. Could be argued that the developer has more choice on what to spend it on in the case they are given revenue directly, and in that case it would be their OpEx. That's why I think it's equally reasonable to consider it either as developer operations cost or a business one.
Other platforms routinely state that this money is given to the developers directly, which I suppose is true (given they also often host offline singleplayer games with generally much lower ongoing costs than multiplayer, which Roblox doesn't). Their communities also routinely refer to the money interchangeably as a "profit"/"revenue" cut, which I think is less forgivable and probably an indication of larger terminological clarity problems in the game industry regarding these cuts than just Roblox.
other platforms don't give you unlimited game servers, near-infinite scalability with no initial cost, a potential player base in the hundreds of millions, etc
Everyone should assume that _anything_ connected to internet will get uploaded to internet and someone within the company will have permission to review the contents regardless of what the policy says.
1. Debugging for troubleshooting.
2. Analytical for making product better.
3. Bugs that collects your info when it shouldn't.
4. Bugs from 3rd party vendor if company uses those.
5. Insecure process. Getting access to a private content within the company is trivial due to coarse permission model.
Source: I worked at two well known social media companies. Trust & Safety and data infra teams
Most doesn't event know what cookies too. In fact, most doesn't put extra thought into the things they are clicking/accepting on web.
Because of this, I found it odd that the regulation allows displaying the accept cookies button. Instead, it should be rejecting cookies by default and a separate flow to accept tracking cookies (e.g. via account settings page)
As someone who moved out of California a few years ago I assure you that it is exceedingly easy to move to a different state, assuming you have the money to move at all.
Sure. A state where housing is dirt cheap and no taxes is great, but if something happens to you, good luck finding a hospital or municipal services. Job prospects are also something to consider.
Just because houses cost more and there's a state tax, doesn't mean it's _bad_.
Games are filled with loot boxes that drop exquisite items on chance. It's a repeated cycle of charging robux only to spend on another slot machine.
US regulation is far behind protecting children from such scheme. Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.
reply