Roblox is kids with computers choosing to work in an ecosystem that is profiting far more from them than they are profiting from the ecosystem.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us and happy New Year. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Quentin Smith. Quentin is a journalist working with People

Make Games and Shut Up and Sit Down, and he recently did a really extensive and important investigation into

Roblox. Now, if you don't pay close attention to video game news, to Metaverse coverage, or don't

have a kid who plays Roblox really frequently, you might not know a whole lot about this platform,

and that is part of the problem. Roblox is huge. It has more than 200 million players and more than

40 million of those visit the platform every single day. It's a publicly traded company with a

valuation of more than $50 billion, putting it up there with, if not above, companies like

EA, Activision Blizzard, and even Nintendo at times. But this is not just a regular platform where

adults go on to play games and to socialize. This is a platform that is targeted at kids.

It's a place where kids hang out. It's a place where kids have their own avatars that they dress

up with skins and items to look cool among their friends and the other users on the

platform. It's where kids play games, but it's also where kids make games and make items that

then get sold to other kids. And that's part of where the problem comes in. I don't think it's an

issue for kids to be playing games, for kids to be making items and being creative. I think that's really cool actually.

But the problem is that now we have this publicly traded company that is worth more than $50 billion

that is profiting from the work of those kids and from what those kids are buying. In an effort to

maximize profits, it is set up very exploitative structures that not only

promote kids making games, but kids making games in particular to earn money for themselves,

and to buy items, not just to look cool with their friends, but to try to maximize their

revenue if they're making them for themselves, and also to buy

really pricey items so that they can actually look cool when there are limited edition items that

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