The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022

42 Roblox

ANNA* WAS 10 WHEN SHE BUILT HER FIRST

video game on Roblox , a digital platform where young people can
make, share and play games together. She used Roblox much like a
child from a previous generation might have used cardboard boxes,
marker pens and stuff ed toys to build a castle or a spaceship and
fi ll it with characters and story. There was one alluring diff erence:
Roblox hosted Anna’s tiny world online, enabling children she had
never met and who perhaps lived thousands of miles away from her
home in Utah to visit and play. Using Roblox’s in-built tools – child-
friendly versions of professional software – Anna began to learn the
rudiments of music composition, computer programming and 3D
modelling. Game-making became an obsession. When she wasn’t
at school, Anna was rarely off her computer.
As she became more profi cient, Anna’s work caught the attention
of two more experienced users on Roblox, game-makers in their
20s who messaged her with a proposition to collaborate on a more
ambitious project. Flattered by their interest, Anna became the fi fth
member of the nascent team, contributing art, design and program-
ming to the game. She did not sign up to make money, but during a
Skype call the entrepreneurs off ered the teenager 10% of any profi ts
the game made. It turned out to be a generous off er. Within a few
months, it had become one of the most played games on Roblox.
For Anna, success had an unfathomable, life-changing impact. At 16
her monthly income exceeded her parents’ combined salaries. She
calculated that she was on course to earn $300,000 in a year, a salary
equivalent to that of a highly experienced Google software engineer.
Anna cancelled her plans to go to college.
After it launched in 2006, Roblox was, for a while, a relatively
obscure piece of educational software. Co-designed by two engineers,
David Baszucki and the late Erik Cassel , who had become millionaires
in the 1990s by designing and selling physics-simulation software ,
Roblox was built as a playful method of teaching children the rudi-
ments of game-making. The roughly hewn, blocky aesthetics and
ugly text that typifi ed most user-made games on the platform were
off putting to adults. But children loved the fact Roblox off ered access
to an endless stream of new and free experiences – a kind of YouTube
for video games. Best of all, your customised avatar could be used in
any game on the platform – as if Super Mario could also moonlight as
the hero in Fifa Football, Call of Duty or Pac-Man, a feature that made
thousands of disparate games feel like part of the same universe.
Initially, there was little incentive or encouragement for children to
make money. Then something changed. Roblox adopted the slogan:
“Make Anything. Reach Millions. Earn Serious Cash.” The company
encouraged users to create and sell costumes and accessories for
Roblox avatars. These items, the digital equivalent of doll’s clothes,
could be bought using Robux , the platform’s digital currency, which
the company currently sells at a rate of 80 for $0 .99 (the exchange
rate varies depending on the amount bought in a trans action). Roblox
took a 30% cut ; the rest went to the creator and seller.
The shift proved profi table. More than half of all US children now
have a Roblox account, an astonishing statistic for a company that
hardly advertises. Buoyed by the Covid-19 pandemic, by the end of
2021 more than 27m games and experiences had been published on
Roblox, many by children inspired by success stories such as Anna’s
(5% of Roblox players publish something of their own, the company

says ). According to the fi rm’s latest fi gures, an average of 49.4 million

users logged on to Roblox each day in November 2021. When Roblox

fl oated on the stock market in March last year, it was valued at $41bn.

Viewed by some as a blueprint for the next generation of virtual

economies where users can trade artifi cially scarce digital assets,

Roblox has surpassed industry titans such as Activision Blizzard

and Nintendo to become the most valuable video game company in

the world. It is an empire built on the sale of virtual boots and hats

and considering that almost half of its users are aged 13 or under, the

creativity and labour of children.

From the moment she joined the project in 2016, until 2018, when

the game reached the heights of its popularity, Anna saw herself as

a partner in the venture, where her skills proved invaluable. “I con-

tributed basically everything to the project – animations, sounds, 3D

modelling, level design and programming,” she told me. Anna’s transi-

tion from amateur game-doodler to professional developer had been

so imperceptible that she had not thought to ask for a formal contract,

for which she would have required a guardian’s consent to sign. And

even though Anna was a child involved in a project that had made an

estimated $2.6m, no one from Roblox contacted her to provide advice

or support. Anna’s income was reliant on the unregulated benevolence

of the two older entrepreneurs who together owned the account into

which Roblox paid the game’s earnings. They decided unilaterally

how to distribute funds among the rest of the team.

With no contracts in place, the scale of earnings soon caused the

fragile fi nancial arrangement to collapse. The entrepreneurs sched-

uled a call with their young team and announced they were now

making the children independent contractors with fi xed salaries.

Anna did the sums. Her demotion amounted to a 40% pay cut. “I

had no say in the matter,” she told me. It was a wounding betrayal.

Anna and another colleague quit that day and watched as Roblox

promoted the entrepreneurs as a defi ning example of self-made

success on the platform. There seemed to be no one to whom Anna

could turn for advice. Her grandmother urged her to bring a case

against the entrepreneurs, but she was afraid that a lawsuit would

wipe out her savings. “There is no HR to call,” she told me. “Roblox’s

forums would have fl agged any post I made about the situation as

harassment. And, as I wanted to keep making games on Roblox, I was

aware of the reputational risk associated with speaking out against

people who were well regarded within the developer community.”

However, few Roblox games generate substantial income. Craig

Donato , Roblox’s chief business offi cer, told me that while the com-

pany paid out more than $500m to creators last year, only 1,000 games

generated more than $30,000 in 2021.

Proponents argue that by teaching children how to make, market

and sell their creative work, Roblox equips young people with valuable

skills for the digital workplace. Max Entwistle and Simon Burgess ,

24-year-old co-creators of one of the most popular Roblox games,

SharkBite , met on the platform when they were 12. They learned how

to make games together, sharing development responsibilities and

profi ts evenly. Their game, which has been played more than a billion

times, became profi table while they were studying at university and

now generates millions each year. “When I graduated, I wouldn’t have

been able to fi nd a job that was higher paying than what I was already

doing,” Entwistle told me. Roblox provided a fast lane for both men

to co-found a successful studio, something that might have taken

years outside the Roblox ecosystem.

For many of its young users, Roblox is their fi rst experience of the

many challenges of managing a team on any creative project, where

egos jostle and commitment is tested. With so many projects made by

young teams with no previous experience of how to collaborate, little

supervision, and often unrealistic expectations, stories of projects

gone bad abound. Roblox off ers an accelerator programme – a 12 -week

course run three times a year – to educate its users. But these tools