People Make Games Exploited Me For Views. Let’s sit down and talk about Roblox.
Recently, a video was released by the popular YouTuber People Make Games pertaining to an article that I had written months ago, one referencing the article in question in a wider criticism about the platform and another where he tries to hone me in on being some sort of lapdog for Roblox’s actions. Whilst some of the claims in the video may be correct, in other cases, it is deliberate slander intended to hurt the company, and my developer friends.
Content warning: In the section “Let’s talk misconduct”, there are images of racism and descriptions and images of sexual misconduct with minors.
His name is Quintin Smith
First of all, I would like to apologise to Quintin himself for misspelling his name. This is a clerical error on my behalf and something that I should have looked clearly more over before publishing. Given the standards that I intend that this video will be at, it will not happen again.
So let’s talk about fallacies. Quinn’s (and by extension his fans’) arguments in both videos mostly revolve around some fallacy that I had somehow committed rather than actual hard evidence. One of the most frequent fallacies involved in their arguments is ad hominem, where for example Quinn nit-picks at my lack of editorial oversight as a result of my lack of labour expenditure from being a one man team funded by nobody rather than the actual evidence and arguments presented in the article such as strawmans and slippery slopes. Here’s a quick rundown on the arguments that don’t stick.
Roblox Limiteds are NFTs [and similar terminology relating Limiteds to NFTs]
Uhh, no. Limiteds are entirely centralised and do not utilise the block chain, being in a similar manner to something like the Team Fortress 2 marketplace. They are not the same thing.
Not being able to cash out Limiteds is a bad thing
This is a point that I’ll cover more in depth later, but one of the reasons why this is a point is because Developer Exchange (or DevEx, where developers can earn money off the platform) is supposed to cover direct developer revenue, not streams of income that are not related to development. It also acts as a way to stop Roblox unknowingly giving out real world cash to those in the black market.
People Make Games consulted with the Roblox community to produce the video
Quintin had various developers, some of them Patrons that were willing to provide consultancy and testimonials, after his first video was released. Unfortunately, all of these offers of help were tossed away and here we are.
You wrote 20 billion instead of 20 million!
Again, the argument of “Not all of the 20 million games actually have players and the number just accumulates over time through various means so don’t use it as a barometer of platform content” still stands regardless of my poor use of SI suffixes. In fact, if we apply simply criteria relating to popularity, a different picture emerges.
You’re just throwing your politics into the crossfire!
The video that I responded to involved labour policies, the video involved a labour activist and multiple other people have pointed out that the video has a clear political slant. Is it not fair to do it back to voice my own political views in response?
All your points were made out of context!
Now, for the more nitty-gritty points that I have an issue with.
First of all: Emil. The eleven year old kid. He glances over the section where I questioned where if he was being treated under PMG in the same way as Roblox did. He claims that he enjoys being part of the People Make Games video much like he enjoyed initially being part of the Roblox developer community — you can see where the link is here. Furthermore, according to him, a large percentage of people who play games and make games on the platform are under 13. As someone who has been developing semi-professionally for over three years and much more professionally for one and a half, I doubt that anybody under the age of thirteen is involved in any serious game development studio or company — rather they’re just learning to code and build to develop their creativity and STEM skills, on the same platform where they can see giants. These kids don’t have to become a big developer on Roblox, they can transfer their skills to other platforms with better pay.
This is then followed by a some generic takedowns of “It’s the biggest video game company in the world, it should pay people more!” in a way which feels like you’re incentivising Roblox’s use as a money bank rather than an actual game development platform where people actually… earn their money.
This reminds me of when YouTube increased the requirements to the Partner Program in early 2018, a program where restrictions are being tightened up all the time, even now, from bumping up the numbers that are required to also introducing new criteria entirely. It’s so that there are enough employees there to check that the money doesn’t go to those who promote those “sex games” that you talked about in your video as YouTube went into panic thanks to sponsors who brought up concerns over the videos which their advertisements appeared on.
This isn’t encouragement for Roblox to raise the requirements for the Developer Exchange. The moves that YouTube pulled off actually hurt smaller creators rather than addressing the elephant in the room but it’s not the types of moves that Roblox has pulled off at all. We developers now have Premium Payouts which are on an upwards trend, an overall increase in payouts in general, developers are no longer restricted by the bracketed system, more opportunities to buy and sell items in different marketplaces etc. It’s not the direction that I think Roblox would pivot. You also don’t need a credit card to buy Premium as People Make Games might suggest — you can buy a gift card or some other stored-value card, buy Premium, get your parents to fill out tax forms and get it to whatever monetary accounts you have.
Now, in regards to migrating to other platforms. This isn’t an obligation that Roblox should provide themselves, rather it is the obligation of the platforms themselves who want to seek developers from Roblox. You don’t see Android phones with a “Move to iOS’’ app developed by Google. It’s Apple who made it to get users into their ecosystem. It is not Roblox’s obligation to provide services to migrate to other platforms. Furthermore, Roblox is making changes to it’s API for greater interoperability with third party services in the future with API keys and the open-source release of Luau, the modified version of Lua on the platform. Another point raised was the as-far-as-I-know proprietary nature of transferring meshes to other platforms presenting complications in regards to transfer of mesh data involving meshes created within Roblox, the context in which this is presented as an untransferable skill is false. Constructive solid geometry is a common modelling mechanism in programs such as Tinkercad, Godot and on a technicality, Blender.
Back to Premium Payouts (or EBP, Engagement Based Payouts as I shall refer to them from now on) and my comparison to Universal Basic Income. Whilst it is true that Premium Payouts is definitely conditional based on premium playtime, this kind of criteria also applies to UBI — live in the jurisdiction where it’s given. There is no barrier for the recipient in terms of income eligibility so that you don’t need microtransactions and lootboxes a la Jeff Bezos to earn Robux in this world, rather there is a greater emphasis on experience quality. I am comparing the two for their shared reasoning for that they solve very similar problems with similar entry criteria.
A day after the videos were released, I received a message in my Reddit inbox.
Quintin Smith apologises for dragging me into this mess, despite not changing anything afterwards given the amount of hate mail that I received. The link to both the video and my article were still in the description and the title of the video still is “Response to Roblox blog post”. Not my blog post, Roblox’s. Roblox runs multiple blogs on their own and calling my blog a Roblox outpost both misassociates me with the corporation and stirs up hatred towards me as a bogeyman. I would like to disclose that at the time of publication, I am not receiving any income from Roblox affiliated activities and my actions are not representative of anyone else other than my own. He explicitly states that since Roblox sent it, they must take the post seriously, as if my actions are somehow represented by the corporation. That’s just attributing the wrong actions to the wrong people to make them an easier target to take down.
This is the reason why I dislike Quintin more rather than Roblox. Roblox’s PR department may have directed Quintin to my original post but it was Quintin himself who not only linked my original post to brigade, which is against the Medium rules as “Engaging in a repetitive or targeted campaign of harassment against someone or a group of people” but also made a 48 minute long video stirring up hatred to spew at respectful discussion.
You’re not calling for condolences. You’re calling for congratulations.
Let’s talk misconduct
Content warning: Images of racism and descriptions and images of sexual misconduct with minors.
In June of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, a controversy emerged from a game called Pacifico 2, owned and developed by the group SynerG and owned by developer phily241. A truck with signboards spouting racist content was added into the game as an admin-only car. After intense public backlash, phily was permanently terminated from the platform and the rest of the Pacifico 2 development team founded UrbanSector to continue development of the game. To my knowledge, there have been no issues with the game since.
So why are we discussing a case of racism in relation to a case of pedophillia? It establishes precedent over the procedures surrounding the terminations of popular Roblox developers and their games. It is clear that if the game is not involved in actions which results in the user’s termination, it will stay up and if there are additional development team members, they will take over development of the games.
Whilst Jeterman does have a Patreon. However, this Patreon is not in violation of the Roblox Terms of Use, as the Patreon rewards are Discord perks, not perks related to the Roblox game. He does have an income from the game but it does not come from Roblox directly. Therefore, Patreon must take action to remove the income of Jeterman by removing his account from their service.
A fact that many people, including Quintin fail to mention is that the case started back in 2017. Whilst the Roblox Terms of Service always prohibited the use of Discord links on the platform, the punishments and the creation and use of the age-limited Game Social Links feature only really ramped up in the last few years. Likewise Discord did not age-gate users until 2021 and even then only at random. Suffice it to say, both platforms have failed at the time to prevent these situations from occurring.
As for his continued existence on Discord. What is Roblox supposed to do here to stop Jeterman going on the Discord? Unless I have missed something, they don’t have the Discord message or channel IDs to send to Discord for a ban and they’ve already pulled most of the levers barring the nuclear one (which is deleting the group and the entire development team, not to mention removing social links). People Make Games also brings up Slack and Google Chat which are more managed by the company who owns the licences. A more apt comparison here would be Guilded, the service that Roblox just bought. Discord has zero affiliation to Roblox. It is not the job of Roblox’s Trust and Safety to police activities on other platforms, it’s Discord’s Trust and Safety team.
Days before 2021 ended, SEGA issued a DMCA notice against Jeterman for his monetisation, resulting in his games being taken down from the Roblox website. However, Jeterman continues to receive funding via Patreon and the social links to his Discord server are still up as these sources are not affected by the DMCA claims. Therefore, we must continue to push for Jeterman’s termination from all platforms that he is associated with and the continued removal of his influence on the Roblox platform.
Limiteds, The Black Market And Iffy Interviews
I don’t claim to be an expert on statistics and even less of an expert on economics and monetary policy but even with that, there are several glaring issues in regards to the video.
First of all, the Limiteds system is not necessarily gambling, much like the stock market isn’t technically “gambling”. If you go in and point at stuff, of course you will going to lose cash but you can make smart moves. It’s not a Pandora’s Box of surprises nor a zero sum game in which the odds heavily skewed towards Roblox. Furthermore, Limiteds in itself a small proportion of clothing items available, even before the introduction of UGC items, not to mention that you can wear these Limiteds in certain places without paying if you really wanted to. Not really “The cornerstone of Roblox’s economy”, is it?
Next, Quintin states that “Roblox always takes away a 30% cut from every sale”. This is incorrect in the case of limiteds. Whilst it is true that there is a 30% cut on the Robux involved in the trade, there is no tax taken based on the value of the item. Robux is just an option whilst trading to sweeten the deal — any Robux that goes in the trading system is invalidated for DevEx when it comes out on the other side.
Now we have Jack, a developer from Australia. Jack created “Secret Pet Hatching Simulator”. Even with the generic title of the game, Jack’s YouTube and Roblox account was locatable through YouTube searches, finding this YouTube comment and going through the DevForums. By using the timestamps on certain YouTube comments, if they were 13 whilst developing the game, then based on the times at which the YouTube comment was posted, Jack will be either 13 or 14 now. This continuous use of 11 to 13 year olds is clearly intended to drive up pathos as has been proven by past videos of Quintin.
In my opinion, Jack’s trading activity is not on Roblox, but unfortunately on him directly. The company really shouldn’t micromanage the finances of the users on the platform. Imagine if you bought a really nice piece of jewellery with your money and then sometimes afterwards the Government steps in and says “uh huh huh! You can’t do that!”. Is this really the way that we should pivot society towards? How do such systems not get confused between someone who will have buyers remorse and someone who doesn’t? People should be taught how to spend their money wisely rather than passing the responsibility on to machine code.
As for the cookie logging. This did not happen directly on the Roblox website. Unless you know the endpoints where you can download files directly off the site, you cannot download files from the website, especially ones relating to your cookies. To explain the scam as it really happened: The scammer sends a message and they receive it. It tells them to go onto Discord or to another link which sends them a file. The scammer now has access to your Roblox account as the file contains the .ROBLOSECURITY cookie which validates user sessions on the website. This isn’t a Roblox specific issue either. Roblox tells you not to run scripts through the output window and they’re not the only ones. Discord does the same. “Don’t run untrusted code” is quite literally Internet 101, and I would expect a game developer to know better.
Quintin’s journalistic integrity starts falling apart after that. First of all, Jack mentions that he spent the money on two faces, a hat and the Silver King of the Night. However, when we jump to before Jack’s account was hacked, you see something odd. We have a Silver King of the Night, and a face, but where’s the other face? There are also now 2 hats, both of them the Perfectly Legitimate Business hat and the two Perfectly Legitimate Business hats are still there, in his inventory, after the hacking. Only the Limited U accessories (Limited quantity accessories with serial numbers) which were the face and the Silver King of the Knight, were traded away. Although I would like to mention for truth’s sake that the 50,000 Robux drop that Jack claimed is actually a 135,000 Robux drop.
In regards to the legitimacy of the hacking claims: the heist could have involve more items. Unfortunately, there is a gap in logging of the two items so that after the gap, the items were given on to two different legitimate users. Roblox does have mechanisms to give the items back but overall neither I nor Roblox can conclusively state the legitimacy of these hacking claims.
Furthermore, Quintin frames this as one of those “it crashes down and stays down” situations with the deletion of his first Secret Pet Hatching Simulator when the reality is that there was not one successful Roblox game that he made, there were 2 successful Roblox games, with Secret Pet Hatching Simulator 2 being the second. Secret Pet Hatching Simulator 2 was created in January 2021 (Although I will caution against using this as the release date. Places get created ahead of time before releases) and was last updated on 14th May 2021, days after the sharp valuation decline of Jack’s account. It isn’t , the timestamps on the YouTube comments suggest that that is a different game entirely therefore there’s no link to it. Games that get taken down also do not preserve their original title, descriptions or thumbnails as seen with the DMCA deletion of Sonic Eclipse Online.
So let’s talk about the original simulator being banned by inserting a model from the Toolbox: If the game was deleted rather than just moderated, there must be a flagrant breach on his end. This was in July 2021. However, by this time, the last update for Secret Pet Hatching Simulator (The Second) had already been released for two months.
The money cow is still there, you just let it starve to death and you whined about your previous money cow dying!
Anyways Jack’s learning Unity now. I’m so glad that he’s going to learn about the real world again. Rather than losing money on collectibles, he learns about capital expenditure instead. Quintin however fails to mention that months after Jack’s account was compromised, he got involved in the trading scene again by purchasing Gucci limited items before selling them months later, with the Limiteds in his inventory remaining as-is leading up to the current day. This is misleading because Jack’s story ends on the note on being cookie logged for his limited items purchased from the funds from one game and moving on but he decides to jump back into the quagmire. I think most people can see that while Quintin claims that the only morally correct side is his, it turns out there might be an actual other side with the facts that he doesn’t provide, to skew the situation into the video narrative. However, the factual inaccuracies only gets worse.
R, the venture capitalist, now pops in talks about some definitely dark Web sites such as OP Rewards, rbx.place and Rolimons . Unfortunately, Rolimons does not provide services which breach the Roblox Terms of Use and is therefore not a black market website. Nobody is directing anybody to Rolimons on the Roblox platform and there are no exchanges with real world currencies — it’s just Trade Hangout in website form. You can put up trade ads and get your items valued on the Discord but that’s about it.
Following this, R makes the claim of “[Roblox] cannot track trades through these services”. Why does the transactions page exist then? You can see how Robux changes hands, not to mention that Roblox has the same, if not deeper view on the transactions. They can’t see which service the transaction is actioned on but they can detect irregularities and make actions accordingly.
Now this is the part where the reasoning is out of the window with Quintin getting mad over black markets. How do you expect Roblox to control the black market? You’ve got a help page telling you that doing these things is bad, you’ve got the community telling you that maybe it’s not a great idea, not to mention there have been several instances where Roblox has invalidated email addresses and cookies in order to get users their accounts back. Sure, you can cut off one of the hydra’s heads, it just grows back. You’re also not going to practically legalise getting more buck for your buck. What do you do?
The false pretences are overwhelming with statements such as “Everybody is using these sites, from the top developers down”. First you slander me, now you slander everyone else. I mean you can plug a developer in and check their trade history if they own a Limited item and how their inventory evolved over time.
Another such instance is when R states that “DevEx is a bit of a gamble”. Unless you haven’t earned 100,000 Robux or have had a really major infraction that really shows that you’re a bad actor, you should be able to DevEx. Obviously I can’t speak on a case by case basis and there are very few exceptions, but it is not as much of a gamble as the video portrays.
This isn’t journalism. This is gaslighting.
Being an manager and Insights on the Ecosystem
I think one of the things that the general public fail to realise about us developers is that we are humans. We were once kids. We make mistakes which might screw other people over. Case in point: my tenure at a game development group that collapsed before anything was released.
Greater Winkirk Railway (GWR) was started by one of my former friends to create an alternative for other railway experiences on the platform. During my tenure at the group, I built some stuff, wrote some guidelines and just did management of the group in general. One area that I was struggling to do however is hiring a scripter. It didn’t help that we had no Robux or hard cash upfront, no lawyer, not much of anything. Probably because we were teenagers and teenagers generally don’t have that stuff but just want someone (hopefully a teenager) to join our team and work together as a happy band of nomads. After my difficulties hiring a person and trying to have a hand at it myself, I packed up and left the shop. The group collapsed after that. I started my own shop, made some games and here we are.
So why am I bringing up my experience? Well, this section of the video focuses on the managers. I think my previous management experience is quite useful in determining the truthfulness of the accounts that Quintin decides to share with us today
At the start, he charges through by claiming that one of Roblox’s goals back in ’06 was to give developers money, even though Robux wasn’t even introduced back when the game initially launched.
And oh man, I love the pictogram where apparently there are more contributors than testers. It’s the other way around.
Furthermore, nobody’s forcing people to develop in teams. Scratcher Studios is currently a solo development group — I call all the shots. There are many successful solo and duo developers on the platform. Of course teams can be beneficial for large projects but all the drama and squabbling in smaller groups may prove to be a disadvantage. At the same time, it’s an opportunity for kids to develop skills in business and entrepreneurship, not to mention game development which all can be used in the real world to get real money.
Now, Quintin states that “…kids making games for Roblox” This is just misframed. They are making games on Roblox not for Roblox. We’re not employees of Roblox Corporation. This is a continuous unidiomatic error that runs through the whole series which is intended to shape the audience’s perception that Roblox, not the individual kids themselves, are fuelling the development of games on the platform to play into the narrative of children being exploited workers (when in reality it is by choice and they can easily move onto other platforms).
Quintin follows this up by criticising the lack of resources that children have with statements such as “sometimes no contracts at all and might be a child themselves”. Of course children don’t know how to sort legal stuff out or how to write a contract or have the money to pay a lawyer to sort these issues out. You do realise that professionals generally stay well clear of being involved with a development team of children, as you might imagine for reasons that we have already covered, although development teams of children don’t exist. There are also various filtering options on the Talent Hub to ensure that you’re getting hired at a responsible workplace. Also, this sentence implies that people older than children are working on Roblox. Is it exploited children making games for Roblox or is it all ages? Can you stick to a consistent narrative?
More pejoratives continued to be used against third party development communities, such as “totally unregulated cluster of virtual communities”. Why is Roblox responsible for the activities of the bosses on Discord? They can’t verify anything on Discord — it’s also not their responsibility. Also, Roblox doesn’t have the contracts that they sign and they can’t tell you anything about the working conditions because they don’t control work environments. Like, this is the parent’s responsibility because any reasonable workplace would give the contract to the parent to sign, not the children.
Here we have yet another interview, this time with Jordan, a developer of a game that reached the #1 spot. Which #1 position? There isn’t just 1 sort on the Roblox webpage, there are multiple and the order of games on these sorts are randomised. Furthermore, there are various different market sectors. You’ve got first person shooters, driving simulators, it’s too difficult to give a response based on this information provided alone.
In regards to Jordan themselves, where are they situated in the business hierarchy? Manager closer to the top given that they are managing a game? Are the managers the ones at the top in this scenario? Because those at the top are executives, not middle managers. In this case the manager is being screwed by the executives! Roblox are not the executives because again, they do not control work environments! This confusing and muddy depiction of the group’s hierarchy has led many in the community to gloss over this point, the ones who know how companies that use Roblox are structured.
Even then, the questions about what the real situation actually is just keep piling on. “Quit. And keep quiet” — This isn’t the community that I remember. The community incentivises speaking out whether through pure engagement or actually changing the situation for the employee. It doesn’t feel factually correct, except that it’s a video claiming to be news. There is simply not enough evidence for judgement.
This is followed up with a misinformed claim of “No obvious outreach program for Developer Abuse” Well, if the situation started on the Talent Hub, you can report them there. Individual Discord servers have individual lists and procedures in regards to their rules otherwise nobody would use them. These Discord servers are definitely not as “unregulated” as Quintin portrays them to be.
Quintin then deliberately ignores the Developer Forums being a professional avenue of discussion by taking one of the Developer Forum rules out of context as “Talking about what your boss did to you on the Developer Forums counts as harassment”. ignoring that these forums are not an area where schmucks run amok with wild claims to smear their enemies. This is not meant to belittle victims of actual labour law violations, it’s just what happens when you have a bunch of people when puberty hits in this one area. There are better and more professional avenues to seek recourse. Not to mention, the Developer Discussion (hidden to non-users of the Developer Forums) section is supposed to facilitate professional discussions in regards to standards and issues on the Roblox platform.
Quintin furthers his false accusations with claims such as “No platforms to talk about these shady practices”, ignoring the various third party platforms where it is allowed such as Twitter, the Developer Forums and the various other third party platforms with their individual rules and regulations. For every third party developer community, there’s generally a Roblox sanctioned alternative to the third party. You don’t need to go on these platforms if you don’t want to. We can talk about the third party platforms, but your video is focussed on Roblox the corporation not Roblox the community.
Conclusion
As I dig more into the story, it doesn’t seem like Quintin actually cares about the users on Roblox itself. Rather, he exploits the gaming industry’s lack of knowledge of the platform to direct harassment to users who say the contrary to him, not to mention, big corporation. He offers messiahship to those who agree with him but the only messiah in these videos is himself. With this lack of knowledge, he can present evidence which is at best, half true and at worst, straight up incorrect.
Worse, it has seemed that these more extreme tactics are playing a role in the response, burning down bridges between Roblox and the wider video game industry which will not be rebuilt, at least in the near future, if ever. We have been abused too many times by those in power in the wider community to even consider switching platforms. It has become clear that if we want to advocate for clear change of the Roblox platform, it must be done without the middle-man of bad faith, for it hurts the platform as a whole with many innocents being slain, rather than any of the main parties. Now leave me alone.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on everyone.
This is an article adapted from the script of the video “People Make Games Exploited Me For Views. Let’s sit down and talk about Roblox.”
