Rendered at 04:15:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
amiga386 6 hours ago [-]
Roblox turns a blind eye to child exploitation (whether being creeped on by adults, or being exploited by teens/adults to make games) and makes a fortune out of it. If it weren't online, it'd be illegal and people would be in jail.
Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Oh, and the company scrip - Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money. They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden. This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
In all, approximately 17% of the real-world money paid into Roblox is paid back out to creators. What a scam.
The 2 videos linked here are nearing 5 years old now and have been refuted many times, including by some of the developers mentioned in the article. To condense it as much as possible:
The 1st video hinges on a point where they find that developers earn a revenue cut of 24.5%, a number that isn't correct because
1. it's found by multiplying 3 arbitrarily chosen numbers together (the DevEx rate, the default sales fee, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,
2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).
3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.
The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.
They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.
> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden
Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.
> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate.
The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. And even this is underrepresentative due to being published before the September 2025 DevEx increase.
Sebguer 40 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
2001zhaozhao 7 hours ago [-]
I come from the Minecraft modding/server community. There is interesting fact that I like to tell people about the sheer size of Roblox compared to other communities like Minecraft.
The largest Minecraft server in the world is Hypixel at around ~30K concurrent players. Most other servers are very far behind.
There is one Roblox game that looks and plays like Minecraft and copied one single gamemode (Bedwars) common in servers like Hypixel. It had 60K+ concurrent players last time I checked late last year.
There are almost definitely more people playing BedWars on Roblox than there are playing it on Minecraft at this very moment.
bstsb 7 hours ago [-]
these days, Roblox BedWars averages 36K on weekends:
however, Hypixel seems to have overtaken it! last Saturday, it peaked at 39,000 concurrent players. i prefer the original gamemode anyway
Svoka 20 minutes ago [-]
Grow a Garden, a game on Roblox reached 21.6 million concurrent players.
That number is just insane.
For comparison - top Steam concurrent game is 3.2 million in PUBG.
Imustaskforhelp 7 hours ago [-]
Some of it has to do with roblox being free.
(I don't have a minecraft account) but Trust me when I say this but within developing countries especially. You can find 3-4 people out of 1 who plays on hypixel but can't because they can't pay for the game usually when we are really young which is also roblox's most major userbase.
I can imagine Hypixel being atleast 2x and a rough estimate of 5x more the size if they support Cracked Minecraft accounts for example.
Btw, this is also the reason why aternos is so popular within some communities because a free server which can have cracked option. Sign me up starts happening in bulk.
Me and my friends had an aternos server. It was truly something out of this world meeting them tomorrow after having 10 people together in a minecraft server.
I was the person though who spent way too much time and had less stacked gear lol in the end because some of my friends were like bandits haha, who stole my stuff from caves and in general, I have spent much of my time in minecraft during the starting (nothing -> diamond) then afterwards (diamond -> end/netherite)
Anyways my point is that we all could've definitely been on hypixel and something similar if Hypixel supported crack client. For example 11 of us or more played the game one time or another (not sure) within our single class of 50 people and only one of the guys had an minecraft account.
One of my friends literally got into some cash-app type stuff with a shady tetris to earn money app which showed ads to earn 25$ just so that he can buy minecraft to play on hypixel and the game fundamentally required something impossible and my friend felt so depressed at the time and he's one of the smartest people I know. A) people are easy to scam, B) he and many of us had so much desperation to play on hypixel in general.
You can get an alt (and I used to) for free or very cheap which would work everywhere unless on hypixel which had stricter rules and the difference between account prices could be 10x back or more that at that point its just better to make a minecraft account just for hypixel or similar. (I remember seeing accounts for 3$ or something that would work everywhere except hypixel)
I asked him if I should write a blog post to name and fame the company but he denied and he was truly sad that day :(
All of this combined can show how Roblox truly hits a jackpot with it being a free game. Most people might not pay but because of the perceived fame of the game and the number of people playing it. The people who pay would be more likely to pay and I see some people/kids who really look for ways to make robux online.
So with all of this, its easy to see how these (usually teen developers like us) can make something which can land 100k$ as unachievable that sounds.
one of my friends racked in quite a lot of money making 3d sprites in blender for these roblox people and in exchange used to have them buy blender extensions. Those extensions were truly a lot of money if he had to go buy them.
2001zhaozhao 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with this. For the last ~4 years I have been working to turn my Minecraft server into a free browser game on a custom engine.
Though in Roblox's case, there's two additional factors helping the success of games on its platform besides being free to play
- Roblox has become the de-facto portal from which lots of people play games by default, especially on mobile devices like tablets where discovery for other games (that aren't P2W and can spam ads) is very poor
- Multiplayer games are exceptionally easy to develop on Roblox. (With a standalone game you have to grind on an engine for years like what I'm doing. I'm developing thousands of LOC per weekend with a multi-agent setup and there is just so much necessary complexity that launching an alpha build will take months.)
foobarian 23 minutes ago [-]
I would also add it's easier to download and set up than Minecraft. I still have nightmares about setting up various Microsoft and Xbox accounts and trying to help my kid play with her friends. IMO that Roblox doesn't have this friction is huge
blakesterz 7 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of when kids were doing the same on MySpace
So true. A member of the clan I was in was operating a proper hedge fund, taking in investments from the clan and using it to flip on the Grand Exchange. Iirc he was even doing sorts of arbitrage, market making, and other advanced stuff.
Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol
aj_icracked 7 hours ago [-]
I just laughed out loud. My friends and I LOVED RuneScape in middle school. I'll meet yall in the wilderness to trade armor.
hsuduebc2 21 minutes ago [-]
I love the comeback of old school RuneScape! The good kind of nostalgia.
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe every generation feels this. But I really think ours lucked out. We were shielded by childhood from the worst of the early times and then bolstered with past success for the worst of the later times.
spaceribs 2 hours ago [-]
I was big into the WC3 custom maps community back in the day, the idea that you could make money doing any of this was silly. The point when I was growing up was two things:
1. Make something fun to play
2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio
I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.
Jabrov 7 hours ago [-]
RuneScape millionaires?
draftsman 1 hours ago [-]
RuneScape private servers used to bring in tons of money. I helped manage one when I was in my early teens, and I can confirm the owner (who was only a few years older than I) was bringing in mid six-figures annually.
Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
I had swim teammates who made at least hundreds of thousands minting and selling autominers on eBay. I assume if I knew a couple who did that well some made millions.
intrasight 7 hours ago [-]
"According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16." - Wikipedia
2 decades in the making, they are really hitting their stride. But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.
nomel 5 hours ago [-]
> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators
My understanding is that the recent improvements are face scans, and communication limited to people within a few 4 year windows.
They've also increased moderation of chat significantly, especially for the lower age windows.
What low hanging fruit do you see? What's the "ideal" system? Seems like a hard problem, if any sort of cooperative communication/play is involved.
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
It is indeed a hard provlem. No low hanging fruit. There certainly not alone, but have a bigger issue with grooming and predation since half of all kids use their platform.
It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
> It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.
Implying there's a simple solution that isn't being implemented because they weren't forced to by law. So what is that simple solution?
Children typically don't have any form of government issued ID. You can verify someone is a legal adult (you probably shouldn't, but the point is that you can) whereas you can't easily verify that someone online is a child.
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
> It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.
What would these reforms look like?
fwipsy 2 hours ago [-]
I thought that sounded off, Wikipedia says it's half of all American kids.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.
It's first and foremost a huge risk for kids.
My solution is simple: my daughter (11 y/o) can play Roblox but she must be in a game with another friend (whom I know and whom I know her parents) and she must on a video/conf-call with that friend, using another device, while she plays Roblox. That way I hear everything they're saying.
And they're ecstatic and having lots of fun.
I check the chat once in a while: the rule is "not hiding the chat when parents look or no more Roblox".
Keeps her mostly at bay from predators.
Incipient 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like for a 11yo, you can't even explain the risks. Not just for lack of true comprehension, but also just kids shouldn't have to worry about that stuff, and just be kids.
sanswork 2 hours ago [-]
My son has had the local police do a presentation to his class/preschool/daycares about online safety every year since he was 4 so it's pretty drilled in by this point.
2 hours ago [-]
yieldcrv 6 hours ago [-]
> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.
I run a studio that makes Roblox experiences and this is Discord's problem, and will immediately become Telegram's problem the decade where parents and policy makers figure out its Discord's problem
their kid went into an experience within Roblox so I can see that's the branding, the parent paid the kid's allowance in Robux, so I can again see that's the branding
but this is largely a symptom of parents nationwide not paying attention whatsoever
I've talked to many parents, aunts and uncles, they don't know they're the central bank of Roblox of a currency that can be accumulated and cashed out, let alone that its a distributed set of third party experiences.
Roblox Corporation already has age gated talking ability on platform. What specifically should they be doing when everything happens in different communities and off platform?
tadfisher 3 hours ago [-]
This is the actual excuse Roblox used when confronted with actual evidence of child sex trafficking originating on their platform, at the same time balking at implementing age gates and chat restrictions. So of course they caved and implemented age gates and chat restrictions when their "central bank" (a.k.a. concerned parents) learned about Roblox's "issues" from YouTube exposés and other concerned parents.
It doesn't matter that the illegal shit happens off-platform. It is not a good look to be the top of the funnel for traffickers, which is why they put in these invasive restrictions.
If you don't like it, then invest in "creating experiences" for platforms which don't target children. Because asking "what is Roblox supposed to do about their pedo problem" didn't and will never work to placate the people who actually fund the platform.
yieldcrv 19 minutes ago [-]
Parents haven't changed their behavior and the age gating is there now and the activity on
Discord is still the problem
Not an excuse, not pointing fingers, as a betting man thats the actual answer and any other bet would go to zero, its what happening
hsuduebc2 18 minutes ago [-]
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking. If I understand the business correctly, the brands are inquiring to design specialized worlds in Roblox so kids can play in them and look at ads?
Spivak 7 hours ago [-]
See this is why I think the whole age verification thing is backwards. If you want to create child friendly spaces then you need to verify someone's age is under 18, 16, 13 etc.. That's a way more real and tangible harm than a teenager looking at a
nudie mag.
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
Please check this box to confirm that you do _not_ possess a government issued photo ID ...
Sorry, in order to use this service you will need to visit your local police station and have them verify that you are in fact a child ...
Yeah I'm not seeing how this is supposed to work. I don't think age verification solves very many real world problems. (It does mitigate some, such as alcohol consumption. Just not most.)
intrasight 7 hours ago [-]
For sure. But age verification protocols can handle such rules:
App to IdP: is this person 13-15
IdP: yes
fakedang 3 hours ago [-]
Is Persona an IdP or does it request you to verify with personal information every single time?
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
This is so far out of the realm of what I do with computers that I'm not even really sure what Roblox is. I guess sort of a virtual game world? Seems crazy that there's so much money in it.
gmueckl 7 hours ago [-]
In very simple terms, Roblox is an MMO based exclusively around user generated contents (games, items, assets...), including its own virtual currency, microtransactions, marketplaces and convertibility to/from real money. Roblox as a company takes pretty hefty cut from all transactions.
There has been a silent shift in the gaming market over a long time now. Roblox is one aspect of it. Another is the absolutely massive amount of money raked in by some free to play mobile phone titles. For example, Playrix has a revenue comparable to Ubisoft, but their main products are a series of match-3 type games for phones.
ikr678 6 hours ago [-]
Hasnt this 'casual' games market always existed? Once upon a time Zynga/Candycrush was a behemoth on the back of facebook embedded games.
gmueckl 5 hours ago [-]
Back then, the market was much, much smaller than it is today if I'm doing the math correctly. Zynga reached an early peak in the early 2010s, but multiple companies, including Zynga (at least pre-acquisition) reach bigger revenue numbers today.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
It's so large now that most of that famous "Apple Services Revenue" is just their 30% cut of mobile game payments.
giobox 8 hours ago [-]
It's basically a litmus test for whether you have kids or not at this point. The age at which kids become aware of Roblox from their peers is getting younger and younger in my experiences anyway. Before I had kids, I had very little idea either, and I consider myself fairly well acquainted with PC gaming.
LoganDark 7 hours ago [-]
Roblox is a game engine and social platform. The basic idea is, you create a game in their engine, using their development tools (such as Roblox Studio), and then you market/promote the game on their website for others to play together with their friends. The game runs on their servers, and you don't have to worry about your own infra if you don't want to, in exchange for the money players spend on Robux (their virtual currency, and now the only one), which they can in turn spend on developer products and other paid items that you set up in your games. Then once you make enough Robux from player purchases, you can cash it out through a process called Developer Exchange which essentially makes you a W-2 employee of Roblox (or whatever financial partner they use, Tipalti?)
The idea is that people like playing with their friends and when they can take their friends and make new friends across hundreds of thousands of games they stay for a long time and (they or their parents) make lots of purchases. The social features of Roblox are a huge part of the appeal, even though I was mostly interested in the engine.
zerr 7 hours ago [-]
And how does it differ from Second Life?
kentm 7 hours ago [-]
Second life is trying to be a metaverse in the style of snowcrash; it’s one big world. Roblox is more like Newgrounds, where you have a bunch of distinct games or experiences that you select from a menu, but skins and currency and whatnot are portable between the games.
jayd16 7 hours ago [-]
Easy to dev for. Runs on a potato. There are many maps and modes.
0x3f 7 hours ago [-]
Kids in current year like it
NuclearPM 7 hours ago [-]
The main difference is there that Roblox games are fun.
sys32768 6 hours ago [-]
My youngest has played Roblox half her life, but is very angry about recent decisions like requiring ID to chat in-game.
Still, if she's anything like other players, she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games, and we've spent a few $100 on Robux gift cards over the years.
bstsb 7 hours ago [-]
even tiny roblox games make money. i developed for a small game (~10m plays) a few years back and i still earn a decent residual from player revenue, even as the game slowly loses traction
2001zhaozhao 4 hours ago [-]
I made a roblox game years ago with no more than like 2 concurrent players at a time. The game's ideas were immediately copied by a much bigger game (this turned me off the Roblox platform for good).
I still got enough robux to DevEx just from premium roblox subscribers playing the game. (If I cash it out i would get a few hundred dollars. Which is nothing for me today but absolutely a lot of money for an aspiring teenage developer.)
hmokiguess 7 hours ago [-]
what does a decent residual mean?
bstsb 7 hours ago [-]
enough money to cash out via DevEx, Roblox's developer program, every month or so ($110). it's absolutely not a salary - there are barely five people playing at any given time - but given i've done nothing in a year, it's appreciated.
edit: looked at the old stats online. a few years back that game was pulling $1,500+ with no effort each month
7 hours ago [-]
joezydeco 7 hours ago [-]
The one place where Lua coders are valuable.
frakt0x90 7 hours ago [-]
Balatro was made in Love2d which is Lua!
Levitating 7 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, I would not have guessed that
sonofhans 6 hours ago [-]
Factorio! The factory must grow! (And it must be modded in Lua).
NuclearPM 7 hours ago [-]
1. Roblox
2. WoW addons
3. Neovim
4. OpenResty
5. NodeMCU
6. Wireshark
7. Lightroom
8. Hammerspoon
9. LÖVE
10. Redis
toast0 3 hours ago [-]
> 6. Wireshark
I love this game, but there's no paid DLC; not sure how they monetize.
qingcharles 55 minutes ago [-]
It's location-based like Pokémon Go. If you play it at the right place you can definitely make a living wage from it :)
ge96 6 hours ago [-]
It's one of those things, you hear about it (Starter story) and think "I should start churning out games too" but gotta be in it/have drive/creativity too. I personally haven't been playing games for a while (I have a gaming rig).
Also have to keep up with trends that kids are into
Would be interesting to look at the numbers eg. how many games are created, percentage who gets paid. Like steam releases with free game assets
nsingh2 5 hours ago [-]
From [1] (2022 numbers), the median creator earned around 50 Robux per year, which is ~19 cents with the current DevEx rate, and the average was 13,500 Robux.
Out of ~7.5 million creators in 2022, only 11,000 qualified for cashing out.
The distribution is brutal, realistically you have to stick with it for years before getting a hit, if ever. Not to mention the stats probably look worse in the LLM era. You definitely have to like doing it as a hobby.
One caveat is that the creator total likely includes a lot of casual experimentation. If many users make one or two games and then stop (I can see most kids doing this), the 7.5 million figure may overstate how many people are seriously trying to make money from it.
> But the platform’s more successful game makers say they don’t have complaints.
Imagine being a journalist and just accepting this and ending a paragraph with it.
> “In Amsterdam we did get a VIP table at a club overlooking everyone,” Zirschky says. “But we always make sure to try McDonald’s in every country.”
Blind consumerism making up for a lost childhood? Yikes, even for Bloomberg.
femiagbabiaka 7 hours ago [-]
Seems possible that MMO's will have a resurgence once the Roblox generation comes of age.
terrycody 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, I don't understand why those young teens can spend that MUCH money on it, does their parents allow this virtual spending thing?
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
Consider how much money used to be spent by children in aggregate at suburban shopping malls.
ares623 2 hours ago [-]
What used to go to local business as kids and teens spend time out together, it now goes to a single company on the other side of the world.
xivzgrev 7 hours ago [-]
"In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby."
Kid is making $400k PER MONTH...and he wants to do this for 10 YEARS before he is comfortable retiring. Apparently his FIRE number is $40M.
Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
harrall 6 hours ago [-]
If you’re planning to not work at all, $1 million is approx. $35,000 per year in salary.
At $5 million, we’re talking more $200k per year. I’d likely still work.
At $10 million, we’re seeing more like $400k.
At $40 million, you can can early at least $1 million/year. This kind of puts you in a new bracket for things you can blow money on.
If you quit working entirely, you will become not very employable so you need to consider that.
Swizec 6 hours ago [-]
> Apparently his FIRE number is $40M
> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living
I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.
You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.
But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.
tverbeure 6 hours ago [-]
FWIW, the 4% rule is for safe withdrawals for around 30 years of retirement, as in, you retire at 65 and you hope to live until 95, and even then it has a non-zero chance of running out of money. It's not a percentage you should use if you want to retire at 40.
3eb7988a1663 2 hours ago [-]
At $4 million, GP might have been hand-waving a 4% annual rate of return and keep the principle intact.
tverbeure 18 minutes ago [-]
4% is the standard number that's quoted by pretty much any financial planner. It's based on backtesting and assume that there's be large downswings along the way.
sdwr 6 hours ago [-]
It's very rational to overshoot in that situation. If you build your lifestyle and then FIRE, you are derisking your budget while you still have income.
But wanting to change your lifestyle when you retire is incredibly risky, especially if you're young without life experience.
Any misstep costs you a fraction of lifetime earnings, and there's no way to recover it.
semitones 6 hours ago [-]
well you certainly could get the lambo, it would just be 10% of your net worth, which is already far less (ratio) than what most Americans pay for their car...
hooloovoo_zoo 6 hours ago [-]
Traffic for his game has declined by 90% from its peak already though.
mikkupikku 6 hours ago [-]
If he thinks he can get that with a ten year grind, why would he stop short? 10 years isn't long compared to most careers so maybe he should go longer and get a bigger house or something. Of course roblox will probably fall out of fashion and stop being so profitable by then.
Milk that cow for all it's worth.
3eb7988a1663 1 hours ago [-]
We all die in the end. At some point, an additional dollar is not improving your life.
pear01 6 hours ago [-]
Someone thinking they need 40M to escape the "anxiety about the cost of living" is not just a personal decision. It is either extreme greed or delusional. He makes money doing Roblox he is the "laptop class". If you make 400k per month and can't afford to live something is wrong with you. Let's not conflate parents struggling to support their families with whatever this kid is doing.
For reference a worth of $40M puts you well within the top fraction of one percent of all Americans, nevermind the world. If anything given his age it is probably more likely his wealth will become a liability for him rather than an asset. The trope about people who come into that much wealth that young and it creates problems for them exists for a reason. Staying at his desk cranking out more Roblox products might be the best way to keep him away from becoming the victim of his own success.
Anyway good for him. You're right there is a lot of anxiety out there. On some level he should rightly get as much as he can. But let's not pretend you need millions and millions to be safe. We should be working to change that anyway, not merely celebrating massive outliers. I assume since you care about struggling families so much you support his taxation so some of that money can go to people or communities that are struggling? Or since you seem open the idea he needs 40M to survive perhaps you think the government should keep their hands off?
Imustaskforhelp 7 hours ago [-]
> Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
I am teen and I think that FIRE has many terms but This still is like a really really FAT fire.
At some point though, I think that what my generation might forget is that even with Fire, you still live a normal life or you would need tremendously more money if your lifestyle is lavish, something which we see in social media (sometimes even on paid money)
If you want to buy 100k$ watches and 1 Million dollar or more lamborghinis, probably even this money would not be enough for you.
But if you want to live a normal life like you do. even 2-3 years of sustained could be MORE than enough even for some slightly expensive side hobbies say horse riding or minor watch collecting even. But if you are online and you see people flexing their 1 million dollar watch, you are gonna add 12 more years of life on a project to get to that level
I'd say its more of an expectation/comparison issue and I am not even sure if 10 years can satisfy that
My personal Fat Fire number is more like ~2 million and I don't even want Fat Fire particularly because I would be happy doing a job that I might like so more of a lean FAT which can be around 300-500k even.
maybe this changes into what is affordable or not within the more western hemisphere though as things feel even more (unaffordable?) but even that doesn't really explain why he might need 40M from my perspective.
To be honest, it can very well be ambition. Might as well make 10 years of money if possible because then the number feels so absurdly large that I can do anything that I want and then I will make my own game. Not realizing that you would only need a fraction of 40M to realisticly achieve that same goal and we are discounting the fact that 400k is even sustainable in a such long period of time.
ekropotin 2 hours ago [-]
As someone who been a teen long time ago, I can’t imaging someone in this age responsibly planning their retirement.
I’d 100% blow out all money on some useless crap.
If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.
kylehotchkiss 6 hours ago [-]
Ugh, they're just gonna blow it all on e-bikes for them and their crew and broccoli hair maintenance product
Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make games for them strike it rich!!!! They don't mention that to do so, you first have to become popular amongst millions of competing titles, and the easiest way to do it is to pay them so they'll advertise it for you.
Oh, and the company scrip - Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money. They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden. This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
In all, approximately 17% of the real-world money paid into Roblox is paid back out to creators. What a scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
The 1st video hinges on a point where they find that developers earn a revenue cut of 24.5%, a number that isn't correct because
1. it's found by multiplying 3 arbitrarily chosen numbers together (the DevEx rate, the default sales fee, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,
2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).
3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.
The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.
They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.
I suggest reading EcoScratcher's brilliant response <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/7e1c1f0fc493> and follow-up articles <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/e51651da6bf4>, of which their 2nd video briefly mentions and claims it misquotes (it doesn't) and misrepresents (it doesn't) their position.
Edits in response to parent comment edits:
> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden
Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.
> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!
The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate.
The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers per in-experience dollar spent, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut. And even this is underrepresentative due to being published before the September 2025 DevEx increase.
The largest Minecraft server in the world is Hypixel at around ~30K concurrent players. Most other servers are very far behind.
There is one Roblox game that looks and plays like Minecraft and copied one single gamemode (Bedwars) common in servers like Hypixel. It had 60K+ concurrent players last time I checked late last year.
There are almost definitely more people playing BedWars on Roblox than there are playing it on Minecraft at this very moment.
https://romonitorstats.com/experience/6872265039/
however, Hypixel seems to have overtaken it! last Saturday, it peaked at 39,000 concurrent players. i prefer the original gamemode anyway
That number is just insane.
For comparison - top Steam concurrent game is 3.2 million in PUBG.
(I don't have a minecraft account) but Trust me when I say this but within developing countries especially. You can find 3-4 people out of 1 who plays on hypixel but can't because they can't pay for the game usually when we are really young which is also roblox's most major userbase.
I can imagine Hypixel being atleast 2x and a rough estimate of 5x more the size if they support Cracked Minecraft accounts for example.
Btw, this is also the reason why aternos is so popular within some communities because a free server which can have cracked option. Sign me up starts happening in bulk.
Me and my friends had an aternos server. It was truly something out of this world meeting them tomorrow after having 10 people together in a minecraft server.
I was the person though who spent way too much time and had less stacked gear lol in the end because some of my friends were like bandits haha, who stole my stuff from caves and in general, I have spent much of my time in minecraft during the starting (nothing -> diamond) then afterwards (diamond -> end/netherite)
Anyways my point is that we all could've definitely been on hypixel and something similar if Hypixel supported crack client. For example 11 of us or more played the game one time or another (not sure) within our single class of 50 people and only one of the guys had an minecraft account.
One of my friends literally got into some cash-app type stuff with a shady tetris to earn money app which showed ads to earn 25$ just so that he can buy minecraft to play on hypixel and the game fundamentally required something impossible and my friend felt so depressed at the time and he's one of the smartest people I know. A) people are easy to scam, B) he and many of us had so much desperation to play on hypixel in general.
You can get an alt (and I used to) for free or very cheap which would work everywhere unless on hypixel which had stricter rules and the difference between account prices could be 10x back or more that at that point its just better to make a minecraft account just for hypixel or similar. (I remember seeing accounts for 3$ or something that would work everywhere except hypixel)
I asked him if I should write a blog post to name and fame the company but he denied and he was truly sad that day :(
All of this combined can show how Roblox truly hits a jackpot with it being a free game. Most people might not pay but because of the perceived fame of the game and the number of people playing it. The people who pay would be more likely to pay and I see some people/kids who really look for ways to make robux online.
So with all of this, its easy to see how these (usually teen developers like us) can make something which can land 100k$ as unachievable that sounds.
one of my friends racked in quite a lot of money making 3d sprites in blender for these roblox people and in exchange used to have them buy blender extensions. Those extensions were truly a lot of money if he had to go buy them.
Though in Roblox's case, there's two additional factors helping the success of games on its platform besides being free to play
- Roblox has become the de-facto portal from which lots of people play games by default, especially on mobile devices like tablets where discovery for other games (that aren't P2W and can spam ads) is very poor
- Multiplayer games are exceptionally easy to develop on Roblox. (With a standalone game you have to grind on an engine for years like what I'm doing. I'm developing thousands of LOC per weekend with a multi-agent setup and there is just so much necessary complexity that launching an alpha build will take months.)
https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20070917/SUB/709170352...
https://mixergy.com/interviews/andrew-fashion/
Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol
1. Make something fun to play
2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio
I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.
Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.
2 decades in the making, they are really hitting their stride. But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators and that's a huge legal and regulatory risk.
My understanding is that the recent improvements are face scans, and communication limited to people within a few 4 year windows.
They've also increased moderation of chat significantly, especially for the lower age windows.
What low hanging fruit do you see? What's the "ideal" system? Seems like a hard problem, if any sort of cooperative communication/play is involved.
It would be an easy problem if the government put in place sensible reforms for age verification.
Implying there's a simple solution that isn't being implemented because they weren't forced to by law. So what is that simple solution?
Children typically don't have any form of government issued ID. You can verify someone is a legal adult (you probably shouldn't, but the point is that you can) whereas you can't easily verify that someone online is a child.
What would these reforms look like?
It's first and foremost a huge risk for kids.
My solution is simple: my daughter (11 y/o) can play Roblox but she must be in a game with another friend (whom I know and whom I know her parents) and she must on a video/conf-call with that friend, using another device, while she plays Roblox. That way I hear everything they're saying.
And they're ecstatic and having lots of fun.
I check the chat once in a while: the rule is "not hiding the chat when parents look or no more Roblox".
Keeps her mostly at bay from predators.
I run a studio that makes Roblox experiences and this is Discord's problem, and will immediately become Telegram's problem the decade where parents and policy makers figure out its Discord's problem
their kid went into an experience within Roblox so I can see that's the branding, the parent paid the kid's allowance in Robux, so I can again see that's the branding
but this is largely a symptom of parents nationwide not paying attention whatsoever
I've talked to many parents, aunts and uncles, they don't know they're the central bank of Roblox of a currency that can be accumulated and cashed out, let alone that its a distributed set of third party experiences.
Roblox Corporation already has age gated talking ability on platform. What specifically should they be doing when everything happens in different communities and off platform?
It doesn't matter that the illegal shit happens off-platform. It is not a good look to be the top of the funnel for traffickers, which is why they put in these invasive restrictions.
If you don't like it, then invest in "creating experiences" for platforms which don't target children. Because asking "what is Roblox supposed to do about their pedo problem" didn't and will never work to placate the people who actually fund the platform.
Not an excuse, not pointing fingers, as a betting man thats the actual answer and any other bet would go to zero, its what happening
Sorry, in order to use this service you will need to visit your local police station and have them verify that you are in fact a child ...
Yeah I'm not seeing how this is supposed to work. I don't think age verification solves very many real world problems. (It does mitigate some, such as alcohol consumption. Just not most.)
App to IdP: is this person 13-15
IdP: yes
There has been a silent shift in the gaming market over a long time now. Roblox is one aspect of it. Another is the absolutely massive amount of money raked in by some free to play mobile phone titles. For example, Playrix has a revenue comparable to Ubisoft, but their main products are a series of match-3 type games for phones.
The idea is that people like playing with their friends and when they can take their friends and make new friends across hundreds of thousands of games they stay for a long time and (they or their parents) make lots of purchases. The social features of Roblox are a huge part of the appeal, even though I was mostly interested in the engine.
Still, if she's anything like other players, she's spent countless hours playing some of the most mindless Roblox games, and we've spent a few $100 on Robux gift cards over the years.
I still got enough robux to DevEx just from premium roblox subscribers playing the game. (If I cash it out i would get a few hundred dollars. Which is nothing for me today but absolutely a lot of money for an aspiring teenage developer.)
edit: looked at the old stats online. a few years back that game was pulling $1,500+ with no effort each month
2. WoW addons
3. Neovim
4. OpenResty
5. NodeMCU
6. Wireshark
7. Lightroom
8. Hammerspoon
9. LÖVE
10. Redis
I love this game, but there's no paid DLC; not sure how they monetize.
Also have to keep up with trends that kids are into
Would be interesting to look at the numbers eg. how many games are created, percentage who gets paid. Like steam releases with free game assets
Out of ~7.5 million creators in 2022, only 11,000 qualified for cashing out.
The distribution is brutal, realistically you have to stick with it for years before getting a hit, if ever. Not to mention the stats probably look worse in the LLM era. You definitely have to like doing it as a hobby.
One caveat is that the creator total likely includes a lot of casual experimentation. If many users make one or two games and then stop (I can see most kids doing this), the 7.5 million figure may overstate how many people are seriously trying to make money from it.
[1] https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2023/07/vision-roblox-econ...
> But the platform’s more successful game makers say they don’t have complaints.
Imagine being a journalist and just accepting this and ending a paragraph with it.
> “In Amsterdam we did get a VIP table at a club overlooking everyone,” Zirschky says. “But we always make sure to try McDonald’s in every country.”
Blind consumerism making up for a lost childhood? Yikes, even for Bloomberg.
Kid is making $400k PER MONTH...and he wants to do this for 10 YEARS before he is comfortable retiring. Apparently his FIRE number is $40M.
Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".
At $5 million, we’re talking more $200k per year. I’d likely still work.
At $10 million, we’re seeing more like $400k.
At $40 million, you can can early at least $1 million/year. This kind of puts you in a new bracket for things you can blow money on.
If you quit working entirely, you will become not very employable so you need to consider that.
> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living
I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.
You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.
But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.
But wanting to change your lifestyle when you retire is incredibly risky, especially if you're young without life experience.
Any misstep costs you a fraction of lifetime earnings, and there's no way to recover it.
Milk that cow for all it's worth.
For reference a worth of $40M puts you well within the top fraction of one percent of all Americans, nevermind the world. If anything given his age it is probably more likely his wealth will become a liability for him rather than an asset. The trope about people who come into that much wealth that young and it creates problems for them exists for a reason. Staying at his desk cranking out more Roblox products might be the best way to keep him away from becoming the victim of his own success.
Anyway good for him. You're right there is a lot of anxiety out there. On some level he should rightly get as much as he can. But let's not pretend you need millions and millions to be safe. We should be working to change that anyway, not merely celebrating massive outliers. I assume since you care about struggling families so much you support his taxation so some of that money can go to people or communities that are struggling? Or since you seem open the idea he needs 40M to survive perhaps you think the government should keep their hands off?
I am teen and I think that FIRE has many terms but This still is like a really really FAT fire.
At some point though, I think that what my generation might forget is that even with Fire, you still live a normal life or you would need tremendously more money if your lifestyle is lavish, something which we see in social media (sometimes even on paid money)
If you want to buy 100k$ watches and 1 Million dollar or more lamborghinis, probably even this money would not be enough for you.
But if you want to live a normal life like you do. even 2-3 years of sustained could be MORE than enough even for some slightly expensive side hobbies say horse riding or minor watch collecting even. But if you are online and you see people flexing their 1 million dollar watch, you are gonna add 12 more years of life on a project to get to that level
I'd say its more of an expectation/comparison issue and I am not even sure if 10 years can satisfy that
My personal Fat Fire number is more like ~2 million and I don't even want Fat Fire particularly because I would be happy doing a job that I might like so more of a lean FAT which can be around 300-500k even.
maybe this changes into what is affordable or not within the more western hemisphere though as things feel even more (unaffordable?) but even that doesn't really explain why he might need 40M from my perspective.
To be honest, it can very well be ambition. Might as well make 10 years of money if possible because then the number feels so absurdly large that I can do anything that I want and then I will make my own game. Not realizing that you would only need a fraction of 40M to realisticly achieve that same goal and we are discounting the fact that 400k is even sustainable in a such long period of time.
I’d 100% blow out all money on some useless crap.
If you are really a teen, who can think so clearly and far-sightedly, you are going to have a really bright future as an adult. I wish you luck and please do something good for this world, instead of chasing high paying job in FAANG.