Back in 2021, gaming investigative outfit People Make Games published an exhaustive deep look at Roblox and examined ways the game and its creators exploit child game developers while netting millions. Additionally, the game and its owner before and after the report faced frequent scrutiny about harboring sexual predators that committed actual acts of sexual abuse and assault. Following PMG's report, Roblox Studios published an outline to Axios about how it planned to improve its payout system and engage in safety practices that provided all players with basic protections from personal injury or danger.
Unfortunately, Roblox continues to face accusations that it has done little to dodge claims that it continues to take advantage of child labor and that their current payout system errs on exploitation. This week, Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza finally issued a response on why they felt these criticisms are completely unfounded and their comments... are quite possibly the worst late-stage corporate apologism I have seen this year.It's a A LOT.
While being interviewed by Eurogamer, Corazza stated plainly:
"I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "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.
"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."
Also, Corazza repeated a defense that Roblox has made in the past that it provides younger audiences with an "educational value" that builds programming and personal finance skills that no other game outside of educational apps and programs provides. They also engage in a major informal logical fallacy by trying to dodge the issue of its treatment of minors on its platform by mentioning that most of its in-game content creators are in their twenties. That might be true, but the fact remains that minors are playing the game and Roblox is able to take advantage of their labor because they likely do not understand the context of the degree in which they are being exploited. Children and minors likely support Roblox's payout program because they don't know any better and their support of any program should not be cited as a sign that things are okay. Likewise, trying to reframe the discussion about child exploitation to that of Roblox's uplift potential in non-US or non-EU countries is downright disgusting. Major corporations have framed export processing zones or "free-trade zones" as places in which developing economies are uplifted by new factories or extraction facilities, often signed off by international institutions like the World Bank. However, after decades, we know that unless these zones are highly regulated and subject to third-party monitoring, no economic "uplifting" is bound to occur. It's safe to say that the same applies to Roblox and as PMG's initial report stated, if Roblox wasn't doing what it presently does on the internet, they would have been shut down years ago. But here's another quote from the interview that made my head explode:
"We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right?
"I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."
For reference, buying 1,000 Robux costs the equivalent of around $12.50. When creators in Roblox attempt to cash out 1,000 Robux, it nets them approximately $3.50. Furthermore, the number of FREE educational programs on the internet that teach programming skills and languages like Lua or Java are too many to list. Part of me wants to admonish Eurogamer for having this guy say his piece without even the slightest bit of pushback, but I assume they're presenting his words as such because they are so damning as they stand. I mean... good God.
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