Why would a game, especially one targeting children, encourage the buying and selling of virtual items? Why not just make all virtual items clonable/sharable by anyone?
Instead of teaching children to share, roblox is training a generation of hustlers and grifters.
Simply put, IAP is the business model and has been since long before Roblox became successful (or criticized).
I can only think of two potential alternatives. 1) Advertising, but that would be even more fraught than IAP. 2) Subscription fees, but those would severely limit the reach of the platform.
Reach is somewhat important here. A vast swathe of Roblox players have extremely low-end devices. Roblox provides low end games to match, AND a community composed of the same sorts of players (mostly kids 5-12 or so). These players don't pay and aren't involved in buying or selling anything (just like free games in general, the paying % is very low). The rare items you're reading about in this article are only relevant for a very tiny percentage of users.
The interesting and concerning thing about Roblox is completely unmentioned in this article. That is: the Roblox IAP model is significantly different than the wider mobile game industry model. In mobile games, typically whales are the most important audience; those are the very tiny percentage of users who spend unhealthy amounts on games. On Roblox, whales by and large don't exist, and the early breakout successes on the platform had a very low spending cap, one that perhaps even a skeptical person such as yourself might be OK with. A user might pay $5 - $10 for their favorite game -- and then be unable to pay any more. But more recently (in the past 1-2 years) a number of developers on the platform have become MUCH more predatory, and seem to be gunning to create whales. If Roblox doesn't find ways to curtail them, that's going to become a major problem for the platform.
I wouldn't rely on Vice to report on that, though. This article largely exists because Facebook bad, therefore all related businesses bad.
There are no free toys for kids of any age. Even toys for babies cost money. Literally every single toy any kid of any age has costs money.
Also, Roblox in fact has quite a lot of fully free content. What is special about these games is that kids in fact can play with friends without parents having to pay. With nerf gun, if parents dont pay, you dont get to play.
Well I didn't see the turn signal there. But since you mention it, of course being very young absolves them from paying for anything. We don't make very young people work except as a token, and so their parents are responsible for their expenses.
The act of enticing children into hitting a 'pay' button is wrong, cynical to the point of sinister, and should be illegal if it isn't already.
I didn't mean to suggest that Roblox shouldn't be allowed to sell their product. I only meant that ending the sell of in-game creations would be a good way to stop the kind of scams the article discusses.
Plus, skimming a percentage of kids' virtual lemonade stands is a pretty scummy way for a company to make money.
in-game economies are really an important part of those kind of games imo
i remember being a merchant/speculator/artisan on a MMO as a kid a decade ago, and at some point it was basically my 2nd favorite thing to do after dungeons and really fun/interesting
yeah the fun stopped when my account was stolen, but I don't regret it, it's like saying if you removed tricks from skateboarding no one would ever get hurt...
if you manage to find a better way to fund this kind of billion dollar games you're going to be a rich man soon
Instead of teaching children to share, roblox is training a generation of hustlers and grifters.