The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
44 Roblox
when she was seven and learned to speak English
by playing games and making friends on the plat-
form, wanted to prevent similar incidents. “If
Roblox had provided the genuine support needed
for this situation, it would have never happened,”
she said.
Roblox told KK that Rachel needed a parent
to lodge a formal complaint. Thirteen days after
Rachel’s mother fi led the complaint (she still
has not told her father about what happened),
Roblox removed Shedletsky’s primary account.
Sonic Eclipse Online remained available for
several months after Shedletsky was banned and
was fi nally deleted on 27 December after Sega
demanded Roblox remove the game for infringing
its copyright. Shedletsky, who now provides only
“narrative consultancy” on the game, told me that
he did not earn any income from Sonic Eclipse
Online. “I have never gotten a percentage from the
game and have never profi ted from it,” he told me.
“All the money the project makes goes back into
paying for assets or developers.” Yet in December
he posted a message to someone on another forum
boasting : “I make more with Roblox than both of
your parents combined.” Roblox declined to com-
ment on this or any other specifi c cases. KK has found the company’s
response gravely lacking. “Roblox’s lack of care for the safety of its
users has opened my eyes,” she told me. “My trust in them to maintain
a safe environment is completely gone.”
DURING AN INVESTOR CALL IN NOVEMBER,
co-founder David Baszucki, known to users as “builderman”,
assured shareholders that safety was at the core of everything the
company built. It was, he said, “what everything rests on”. Laura
Higgins , Roblox’s director of community safety and digital civility,
told me: “You can’t retrofi t safety.” The fi rm employs more than 2,000
moderators around the world who review content uploaded to the
platform, manually check anything fl agged as inappropriate and
escalate incidents of suspected grooming. The company’s machine
technology scans communications for certain keywords.
Under-13s are not able to share personal information or hyperlinks,
while users can self-moderate by blocking other users from com-
municating with them. “We also conduct a safety review of every
uploaded image, audio and video fi le before these assets become
available on our platform,” the company told me. Parents can limit
how much their children are able to spend on Robux, a recent feature
designed to stop kids from racking up stratospheric bills or frittering
away earnings from their games. “There’s a tremendous amount we
do to make sure that it’s safe,” Donato said. “What we do well exceeds
whatever regulations exist.”
Certainly, there are challenges for a company trying to manage
the deluge of content uploaded to its servers each day, the millions
of messages being sent between children on its platform, all while
running a vast experiment designed to replicate the adult workplace
and markets with a user base that, until recently, was predominantly
under 13. None of Roblox’s existing tools, however, would have pre-
vented Anna’s alleged fi nancial exploitation, Green’s alleged labour
exploitation or Rachel’s alleged sexual grooming.
Supporters argue that Roblox provides a helpful introduction to
game-making. The company provides the tools to make games, the
servers to host games, an audience to fi nd and play games, and the
fi nancial ecosystem to enable young developers to profi t from them.
Yet Roblox also refl ects many of the challenges and shortcomings of
the adult games industry: the risk of exploitation, of abusive managers,
of miserly revenue splits and, most prevalently, of worker burnout,
all of which Roblox claims fall outside its responsibilities. The fi rm
has a limited-access talent hub – a kind of LinkedIn for game-makers
to advertise their skills. The hub requires no age verifi cation, has no
mechanisms for drafting contracts or securing a guardian’s consent
and off ers no tools to resolve disputes. “Roblox has no employment
relationship of any kind with the creators who develop experiences
on the platform,” the company said.
For some critics, this is not good enough. “If you’re making or doing
anything for kids, you don’t just have to be as good as the version
made for adults,” said Quintin Smith , a journalist who published a
critique of Roblox’s practices on YouTube last August. “You have to
have more safety, more care for your audience. If we’re saying: ‘Well,
this Roblox stuff sounds bad, but it’s just as bad as adults have it,’
that’s not a great place to be in.”
Anna returned to college to study computer science but quit after
one term because the course was too basic and the siren call of her
previous earnings too diffi cult to resist. She lived off her savings,
working on new Roblox projects she hoped might replicate her former
success. She rarely left the house, lunging from long days of focused
activity to periods of bed-bound burnout. She spent so long staring at
a screen that she says she developed myopia. “Most of my new games
have been fl ops,” she told me. “I’ve only recently realised exactly how
toxic my relationship with Roblox has been and how many years of
life experience it has taken from me, all out of a desire to fi nally build
that one game that makes it.” For now, however, Anna feels unable
to step away from Roblox. “I just need to give my current project a
decent chance at a successful launch, then I can walk away.” • Observer
* Some names have been changed
SIMON PARKIN IS A JOURNALIST AND THE OBSERVER’S GAMES CRITIC LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/GETTY‘He used the fact that
I cared about him a lot
to his advantage. He was
ver y manipulative,
right up to when I left’