While Roblox faces a lawsuit about profiting off children’s labor, Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza explains he’s given children a unique, multifaceted opportunity. When asked about the topic in an interview with Eurogamer, he touted the unique source of income for up-and-coming programmers, as well as the educational value of programming for those younger programmers. Since then, in an update, Roblox had to clarify a possible misspeak on his behalf.
However, Corazza and the follow-up response to Eurogamer do bring up some salient points—some of which will remain important in the ongoing modder-versus-publisher debate.
Corazza started the response off by directly attempting to reframe the “child labor” claims, proposing that the creator system is “offering people anywhere in the world the capacity 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,” he continued in a now-controversial quote. (It seems there was a PR agent present when this was said.)
For clarification, for most developers, the payout is about 29% for “experience” creators and 30% for cosmetic artists, according to the Roblox official documentation. Plus, income in systems like Roblox is contingent on a sustained, viable and accessible project, often done without income in the meantime, plus an audience willing to pay a premium in an otherwise-free game; neither of these factors are guaranteed. On top of this, there is a minimum threshold of 30,000 Robux needed to cash out (about $105 USD).
Corazza then explains some of the justification of the current creator and monetization system—and at one point, he claims certain under-18 creators were actually picked up by Roblox itself:
[O]ur 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.
At the interview itself, a PR agent had to intervene eventually, claiming that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18.”
Since then, Roblox reached out to Eurogamer to attempt to clarify that claim and state that minors are not directly hired, though the statement published by Eurogamer doesn’t provide concrete confirmation that no minors are hired.
The statement pivots the focus from the child labor perspective to a more focused spin on the fun and educational angle, as well as clarifying the point of a majority-adult creator base (though it doesn’t eliminate the possibility that minors do work on paid content). The statement explains that “Roblox is also an educational tool and education has been part of the company's DNA since day one,” and that surveys found that fun was a more common motivator for creators than money.
We do get one number, though, pushed to the end of the lengthy statement to explain content creator programs: “In 2023, more than 90 percent of the top 1000 experiences by hours engaged in were owned by developers who were at least 18 years old.” That still means between 1 and 10 percent of the top “experiences,” between 1 and 99, are published by users under 18.
Push and Pull of Modders and Publishers
As any MMORPG player could explain, there’s a dual reality to custom modes in gaming. Historically, most “mods” and “custom maps” for video games have come from free labor by passionate players. Some of the educational and skill benefits that Corazza explains are very real—after all, mods don’t just spawn from ideas, as they require an outstanding degree of coding and design. It’s basically a game within a game, after all.
Custom game mods are typically put online free, too, due to a risk of copyright law infringement, and for that reason are often kept away from official channels. However, many mods accept support through platforms like Patreon, Kofi, and even PayPal. There’s a range of awareness and intervention; most famously, Nintendo has tried to snip out mods, emulators, and custom games of varying sizes, while others, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and major RPGs by Bethesda, have devs directly engage with the community (typically with caveats and/or boundaries).
Meanwhile, Roblox game modes are officially hosted on the game’s website in a browsable library. While it’s technically free for players to join its custom games, Roblox directly profits from any in-game premium content that’s made. This can include “battle/season passes,” extra add-ons, and especially the massive selection of Roblox character cosmetics also often made by developers. There are also games available exclusively with a paid subscription.
Technically speaking, any of these platforms are privileges, as most Terms of Use or the like will be fairly restrictive about how much a game and/or software can be altered, especially if it utilizes online servers. Following that logic, Roblox is fully permitted to act as its own middleman to services, often both for quality control purposes to avoid incidents and to dip at least a finger into profits.
In this case, the official support given to publishers by Roblox surpasses that of most video games, as the follow-up statement points out.
“Roblox levels the playing field for developers by offering frictionless infrastructure, global distribution and development technologies at low upfront cost to developers,” Roblox explained to Eurogamer. “For instance, unlike other platforms where developers incur expenses for app store fees, payment processing, storage, hosting, infrastructure, moderation and safety features - this is all covered by Roblox.” Indeed, these costs and points of labor do add up, as many Minecraft modders, for instance, have dealt with.
However, a recent lawsuit at the heart of these issues alleges that Roblox exploits creators through its requirements and ignores the aforementioned reality of game development, pointing out the long hours of unpaid labor. The issue is less that modding is being done at all, and more that Roblox holds onto as much money as it can while claiming to be generous to its creators.
Roblox creators have to meet certain criteria in order to cash out, including 30,000 in Robux ($105 USD) and an approval process, which requires US tax forms and agreeing to updates and maintenance. Therefore, many creators, especially children and many foreigners (certainly those in an Indonesian "slum"), who gain a following never see the “Robux” they earn. (The lawsuit points to the Premium Subscription that was formerly necessary, too, but that was removed in 2022.)
It’s common for creator programs to have a floor of requirements to cash out, but many are rarely as strenuous as Roblox’s. Cashout for CurseForge, which supports mods for The Sims series, Minecraft and Starcraft II among others, only requires $5 in earned points (100 points, valued at $0.05 each). The major difference there is that it's only the mod files themselves that are held on the site, where Roblox also hosts full instances of its games for players, plus security and monetization. As for general creators, Twitch formerly had a higher threshold of $100, but lowered it to $50 unless wired; TikTok also has a $50 minimum, and Instagram's is $25.
Lawsuits and arguments such as these, as well as an investigative report by People Make Games famous for unearthing these issues, posit that even if Roblox is technically correct, these practices are beyond unfair and unhealthy for its developer community, especially the younger ones. This debate also reemerges in the midst of an industry-wide labor “moment,” as developers start to rally for change across the industry, including union pushes at major studios due to an excess of unhealthy working conditions, not to mention layoffs are such a massive event that there’s literally a Wikipedia page about it now.
So is there a middle ground to all this? Is the current system already fair, as Corazza insists, or can Roblox do better?
