A 'Gift' for Kids or Exploitative Child Labor? Video Game Boss Speaks Out on Controversy
There are two titanic pillars of the video game industry currently, and you’ve likely heard of at least one of them.
“Fortnite,” a battle royale shooter, is effectively the most popular game in the world and it’s not close. The game periodically partners up with massive pop icon entities, and carries enough cultural heft to fetch a $1.5 billion investment from Disney.
But “Fortnite” has achieved this mainstream cultural relevance thanks to — like it or not — rock solid gameplay mechanics under the hood.
The other pillar, “Roblox” features no such robust gameplay, nor anything approaching the graphical prowess of “Fortnite.”
But in terms of popularity, “Roblox” can really go toe-to-toe with “Fortnite” and that’s because it specifically carves out a target audience just a tad bit younger than the shooter.
Underneath the veneer of that massive popularity, however, is the growing criticism of “Roblox,” due to the nature of user generated content.
In grossly simplified terms, “Roblox” provides digital LEGO bricks to users to make their own little games with. And in fairness, those games can get pretty deep, like a Pokémon clone.
That vast network of games are then shared among countless other users across “Roblox.”
Over the years, as “Roblox” grew larger and larger as its library of user generated content swelled, people began accusing the company of something rather untoward: That the game was somehow exploiting its young fans for free game development labor.
While the controversy has simmered for some time now, the hornet’s nest was kicked badly by Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza after a late March interview with Eurogamer.
In that interview, when asked about the allegations that the company was making money off the work of a younger-skewing audience, Corazza offered a response that critics swiftly latched onto.
After claiming he spoke to some of these younger “developers,” Corazzo said: “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.”
That all sounds noble enough but the backlash — particularly to the use of the term “gift” — swiftly prompted Roblox Studios to issue an update to Eurogamer.
Part of that update reads: “The Roblox platform serves a broad community of creators. People of all ages and backgrounds start creating on Roblox for many different reasons – to learn to code, to share their creations with friends, or simply for the joy of building.
“For many, using Roblox to build a game or virtual experience or virtual item is a form of creative expression. Much like other forms of creative expression, such as learning to play a musical instrument, or filming and uploading your own videos to the internet, for many it is a hobby, for others it may eventually turn into a career.”
Despite this being far from Roblox’s only controversy, given the way the game continues to grow, it seems unlikely it’ll do much.
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