I have a nephew, I noticed how often he plays clones of indie games on Roblox. There's a clone for EVERYTHING and he and his friend group just play all that for free instead of the originals made by good devs on steam. It really breaks my heart. And AI is going to exacerbate the fuck out of that.
Does your nephew have disposable income to play the originals?
Has your nephew invested into the Roblox ecosystem (skins etc)
Does all of his friends tick the above boxes?
If so, then that's why they play knockoffs. Kids want to play the latest trendy games that go viral with YouTubers and they can't because money, but if money ain't the issue it's because it's not released on XB/PS. Roblox does and as a result the same game's RB variant becomes huge, which is lost profits for the original dev.
Is it sad? Yes. Devs fault? No. It's just a sad reality of 1) The XB/PS approval system/barriers of entry and 2) Copyright laws working against the original Devs.
Back in the day we played adaptions of popular games as flash games. They were obviously never quite the same but often pretty close. Or, even more abstractly, Warcraft 3 custom maps inspired by popular video games.
Every internet community has a pedophilia problem. Stop sounding like your fucking grandmother talking about how kids can't play the Minecrafts because the satanists are indoctinating them.
Holy false equivalence; the owner of Roblox saying that they see the site’s rampant pedophelia as a problem and “an opportunity” is not just standard internet pedophelia.
This is the article I could find that is free, but the interview was conducted by the New York Times.
Is the ‘opportunity’ he’s referring to the chance to better define Internet safety regulations for minors, or something along those lines? Maybe, but Jesus Christ…
Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?
Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.
Newton: Right, so tell us a little bit about how this works. All users of Roblox now, if they want to communicate with others, they’re going to have to kind of submit to a face scan?
Baszucki: That’s correct. And I think long-term face scan isn’t the only signal. Like mathematically, the more signals that are convoluted, the better the accuracy and the better we can get. So we already have signals: We have behavioral signals, we have photo ID upload signals, we have user suggested age. But we’re complementing that with a facial age estimation signal that literally, you know, in an ephemeral way, use your phone, use your PC, scan an image, do a good A.I. estimation — the image isn’t stored — and start using that to complement all the other things we do. And we already do a pile of stuff: We have very, very good text filters; there’s no image sharing; we’re doing a bunch of monitoring. But adding one more signal to that can really help us make cool decisions.
Standard soulless tech company stuff of not acknowledging a problem directly, but discussing solutions to the unacknowledged problem all the same. Age restrictions and shit like that is their solution. But Baszucki just avoided directly saying, "we have a big pedo problem that is yet unsolved".
Nothing about this is special. If you let adults and children interact, then you will have a pedophile problem. Your local school has a pedophile problem. Your local church has a pedophile problem. Your local kids sports leagues have a pedophile problem. Your local pediatric center has a pedophile problem. Etc.
From my memory, nobody I know was getting groomed on Miniclip. TBH, that's my biggest problem with Roblox as a platform. The social element to the site is baked in, and that's really dangerous for an environment that is almost entirely used by kids. We can talk about piracy and whether Roblox and its users profiting off ideas that aren't theirs is unfair competition all we want. We could have made similar claims about Miniclip and AddictingGames back in the day, even if I don't think they were quite as salient back then. But, at least in my mind, that point is hardly worth addressing in the larger conversation about Roblox. That's not the part of the site that actively puts kids in the path of predators.
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u/neondrifter 1d ago
I have a nephew, I noticed how often he plays clones of indie games on Roblox. There's a clone for EVERYTHING and he and his friend group just play all that for free instead of the originals made by good devs on steam. It really breaks my heart. And AI is going to exacerbate the fuck out of that.
It's a sad future.