Does Roblox play with child labor? The CEO’s response isn’t the best…
More than the accusation, already infamous in itself, the real damage for the constantly growing video game software house Roblox risks being caused by the words used by number 1 Stefano Corazza to defend his actions
An unprecedented global phenomenon capable of keeping over 71 million players glued every day (in Italy the entire population no longer reaches 59 million people, just to have a second term of comparison).
ROBLOX IN NUMBERS
A phenomenon, for those who have never heard of it yet, which with the last quarter of 2023 recorded growth of 25% on an annual basis to 1.13 billion dollars, beating Wall Street estimates which put it at 1 .08 billion dollars. The turnover of the American video game developer reached 749.9 million dollars.
But Roblox is known for offering its users a real development environment, complete with integrated tools with which it is possible to create "games within a game", upload them and share them with other gamers, for free or for a fee. In the latter case, however, the platform takes its part as an intermediary on the transaction. And it is precisely by taking inspiration from this mechanism that the accusation of exploitation of child labor has arrived (inevitable, it must be added, given the stellar figures that Roblox now generates internally).
DOES ROBLOX EXPLOIT CHILD LABOR?
Having explained how Roblox works, the accusatory theorem ( this video investigation from two years ago goes into more detail ) can be summarized as follows: the platform does not sell so much for what it offers, but for what its users create, autonomously fueling the furnace; the domestic market sees the US software house earning on every single transition between gamers; many gamers are minors ergo Roblox is exploiting child labor.
THAT CHANGE IS ANYTHING BUT ADVANTAGEOUS…
Exploitation then also took the form of the system devised to pay developers their share of the earnings deriving from the game. Not in dollars, but by means of Roblox's in-game currency, Robux, to be spent if desired in the game itself. The theme, however, is that Roblox sells these Robux at a much higher price: 1000 Robux are cashed out at $3.50, while the purchase of 1000 Robux by gamers costs the equivalent of around $12.50.
THE ANSWER OF NUMBER 1
This is not the place to try to give an answer to such an accusation. What is certain is that the reply from the CEO, Stefano Corazza , was very bizarre, and could also have important financial consequences. In fact, speaking to Eurogamer , he rejected any inference in a curious way: "You can say that we are exploiting child labor, or you can say that we are offering people all over the world the possibility of having a job and also income."
If this argument itself doesn't hold water, it becomes even more slippery soon after: "I can be a fifteen-year-old Indonesian living in a slum and now, with just a laptop, I can create something and make money to support myself." However, in doing so, Corazza depicted precisely the classic situation in which the exploitation of labor germinates: a third world country, extreme poverty and the need, precisely, to start working at a very young age, perhaps for some foreign multinational.
A lapse in style that could affect the company's accounts which, as we have seen, are of primary importance. According to Corazza himself, Roblox has redistributed an amount that has reached almost a billion dollars to the authors of the games. At that point in the interview, Eurogamer reports somewhat maliciously, the PR person present in the exchange with the reporter intervened to add that "the vast majority of people who earn on Roblox are over 18".
For his part, Corazza however wanted to reiterate that very young gamers "according to their experience, do not feel exploited. They feel like they have been given the greatest gift with which they can create something and reach millions of users, making so much money that they can retire.” Never before does the saying 'a good silence was never written' seem to hold true more than in this case.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/roblox-giochicchia-col-lavoro-minorile-la-risposta-del-ceo-non-e-il-massimo/ on Sat, 06 Apr 2024 19:14:15 +0000.