Some kids get rich creating games for Roblox. Most never see a penny

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Taylor Field-Draper was 11 years old when he came across an online advertisement for a video game called Roblox. “Build anything,” it beckoned. Field-Draper, a Lego-loving kid in Lethbridge, Alta., was intrigued. The game was free, so he created an account under the username Trustmeimrussian and started playing.

It was 2008 and, compared to the era’s hottest games — the violent Gears of War, the vulgar Grand Theft Auto — Roblox was relatively juvenile, with bright colours and janky graphics. Whenever Field-Draper booted it up on his computer, he had access to a never-ending rotation of mini-games, or “experiences,” as they’re known in Roblox vernacular. There were thousands upon thousands of them: obstacle courses, dodgeball simulators, Mario knock-offs. In some games, players ran pizza parlours. In others, they built theme parks. The only thing they had in common was that they were all created by other Roblox users, most of them kids like him.

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Soon, Field-Draper began making his own experiences. Using Roblox Studio, the game’s creation suite, he crafted worlds out of digital building blocks. He started with rudimentary structures, then graduated to intricately detailed subway stations and Art Deco water-processing plants. Eventually, he was making zombie shoot-em-ups and skateboarding games.

Around the time Field-Draper started playing Roblox, the platform rolled out an in-game currency called Robux. Players could trade real-world money for Robux, which they would then spend on accessories — shirts, hats and special weapons — for their online avatars or on special powers that fast-tracked their in-game progress. A portion of those Robux would go to the game’s creator. And if a creator accumulated enough Robux, they could cash them back out — about 60 Robux per Canadian dollar. This meant that Field-Draper could, at least in theory, make a living playing his favourite video game.

The idea excited Field-Draper. His parents, not so much. “Roblox is not a career,” they told him. They encouraged him to pursue more traditional lines of work, so he went to school for carpentry and culinary studies. “But during that time, I’d stay up at night building on Roblox,” he said.

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He advertised his services as a Roblox developer on Twitter (now known as X), online forums and job boards where creators hire other creators for paid commission work. “At first, it was just a couple of maps here and there for little developers and it was paying pocket change. But eventually, word started getting out and I got bigger contracts for bigger games.”

By 2020, Field-Draper was in his early 20s, working as a chef by day and a Roblox developer by night. When COVID hit, he lost his restaurant job, so he decided to spend more time on his Roblox side hustle. A few months later, he was offered his biggest gig to date. Musician Lil Nas X, still riding the wave of his megahit Old Town Road, wanted to perform a series of virtual concerts inside Roblox. The team planning the event asked Field-Draper to help them build it.

Roughly 33 million players attended the Lil Nas X concerts that November 2020, and Field-Draper took home a hefty paycheque. Suddenly, his culinary career seemed a lifetime away. “I didn’t really care to go back to those unstable jobs,” he said.

Field-Draper now makes a full-time living as a producer at Gamefam, a global video game studio that creates maps and mini-games inside Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft. He’s worked with clients such as the NFL, Sony and the Grammy-winning pop duo the Chainsmokers. His once-doubtful parents, he said, are now “very proud.” Not long ago, he used his Roblox earnings to pay off his mother’s credit card. “I don’t say, ‘I told you so,’ but it does feel really cool.”

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Roblox promised ‘serious cash’

Roblox has made more than a few teens rich. Roblox Corporation, the company that created the game, has paid out more than $2 billion to its creators over the last five years. The most successful developers earn tens of millions of dollars a year, and even the thousandth-most profitable creator takes home a respectable US$60,000 annually.

American Andrew Balfanz, who created the ultra-popular Jailbreak experience — a sort of virtual cops and robbers — used his earnings to pay tuition at Duke University. Carleton University computer science student Alexander Hicks was making so much money on Roblox that he dropped out to start his own video game studio. Roblox Corporation loves to tout these kinds of success stories in its promotional materials. Until at least 2021, their website told creators that they could “earn serious cash.”

The truth, however, is that it’s incredibly difficult to make money on Roblox. Most creators never see a penny. That’s because, to cash out, a creator needs to have made 30,000 Robux. A thousand Robux is about $16, so that means developers need to make nearly $500 — a threshold few developers reach. There are more than 15 million active experiences on Roblox. Only a small number of them attract a player base substantial enough to earn that many Robux.

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“You can have the most fascinating, well-crafted world, but if you don’t know how to advertise and communicate with the community, it’s going to fail,” said Bronson Boualavong, a 26-year-old independent Roblox developer in Hamilton, Ont. “There are people who get lucky and end up making a million Robux a month, and they’re making more money than their parents. But that’s like winning the lottery.”

Boualavong, like Field-Draper, belongs to a new class of online creatives, not unlike the legions of professional YouTubers, the influencers who make their living on Instagram, and the people who get paid to post TikToks. Like those platforms, Roblox relies primarily on its community of users to create its content. But what sets Roblox apart is that the vast majority of its users are minors. According to Roblox Corporation, 60 per cent of its 70 million active daily users are under the age of 16.

This has stoked a fierce debate. Is Roblox teaching young people valuable STEM skills, fostering entrepreneurship and remunerating kids for playing a game they love? Or is Roblox, a company worth US$30 billion, luring kids with the illusion of riches and leaning on their labour to prop up its bottom line?

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More than half of children have tried Roblox

If you’re over the age of 30, you’ve probably never played (or even heard of) Roblox. But if you have kids, it’s likely part of your daily life. In 2020, Roblox Corporation said that half of American children had tried it, and it’s likely that a similar proportion of Canadian kids have tried it, too. In fact, the company says it combines Canadians and Americans in its demographic statistics.

Roblox is one of the most accessible video games in the world. Kids can download it for free from app stores on their phones, tablets, computers, Xboxes and PlayStations. The only major console on which it’s not available is the Nintendo Switch.

Roblox is now older than a good chunk of its users. It was launched in 2006, but its origins stretch back to 1989, when its founder, Canadian-born, Minnesota-bred entrepreneur David Baszucki, created a technology company called Knowledge Revolution. The firm had an educational focus, and it licensed out its signature software, Interactive Physics, to schools. In its two-dimensional world, students would simulate cars crashing and buildings collapsing.

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“It was astonishing to see what these kids and teens were designing, and I wanted to replicate that capability on a much grander scale,” Baszucki has said.

Baszucki sold Knowledge Revolution for roughly $26 million in 1998, and several years later teamed up with his late co-founder Erik Cassel to found what would become Roblox, a portmanteau of “robot” and “blocks.” It was, in simplified terms, a gamified version of his previous software, Interactive Physics. It allowed its players to create — and giddily destroy — Lego-like worlds. And this time, they could do it all online with their friends.

Most video games have a finite shelf life. Players might stick with a blockbuster title like Call of Duty or FIFA for a year, maybe two, until developers are forced to release a sequel that keeps fans coming back. Roblox, meanwhile, kept attracting new players with its endless feed of new user-generated experiences. The game grew year after year, becoming available on more and more devices.

When Roblox Corporation went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, it was briefly worth more than US$40 billion. Forbes estimates that Baszucki, the company’s biggest shareholder, is now worth US$2.9 billion. He lives in the Bay Area with his four kids and his wife, author Jan Ellison Baszucki, who helps him run a philanthropic foundation that has pumped millions of dollars into mental health and lymphoma research, as well as environmental conservation.

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Baszucki’s company is now bigger than ever, bolstered in large part by the pandemic. When humanity sheltered in place, people went looking for ways to connect online. Adults took to Zoom; kids flocked to Roblox.

One of those youngsters is Lisa Geimer, an 11-year-old from Markham, Ont. During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, she and her schoolmates, unable to hang out in person, would meet up inside the Roblox experience Adopt Me!, a sort of modern spin on Tamagotchi or Neopets in which players hatch, raise and trade virtual pets.

Lisa’s parents, Erin and Peter Geimer, estimate that 70 per cent of the kids in Lisa’s Grade 5 class play Roblox. When Lisa attends friends’ birthday parties, the most common gifts are Roblox gift cards, which they can cash in for Robux that get linked to their accounts. “I honestly love getting Robux,” said Lisa, “and my mom knows.”

Erin, listening in on our interview, confirmed: “Oh, yeah.” As Peter put it, “Lisa knows more about the value of Robux than she does about Canadian currency.”

Lisa spends her Robux on upgrades for her pets as well as clothing for her in-game avatars — customizations commonly known as skins. You might wonder why anyone would spend real money on virtual attire. But in a recent survey of 1,500 Gen Z Roblox players, 56 per cent of respondents said that styling their avatar was more important to them than styling themselves in real life.

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The average Roblox user spends 2.3 hours on the platform every day, meaning that, for many of them, their in-game appearance — more than their real-world look — is how their friends perceive them. Ryan Solana, a 26-year-old Roblox developer in Toronto, said that players show off their in-game gear in the same way a kid might flaunt a new toy at school.

“There are a lot of players in these games and they’re saying to each other, ‘I have this gear, I have this weapon, and you don’t.’ They take pride in it,” he said. “It drives their ego.”

The Roblox economy

Eighteen per cent of the young Roblox players surveyed were open to spending up to $100 on in-game items per month. That translates into millions upon millions of dollars. Unsurprisingly, big brands have swooped in to get their piece of the pie. Nike, Netflix, Ralph Lauren, Crocs, Gucci, Mattel, Spin Master, Cirque du Soleil and Chipotle — among many others — have their own experiences on Roblox.

These branded experiences, like most of the platform’s most successful games, bombard children with opportunities to make micro-transactions of $2, $5 or $10 worth of real Canadian currency. Within seconds of entering the Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon, for example, players are offered the option to spend Robux to unlock new outfits, furniture and decor. In Walmart Discovered, a shopping cart follows players around as they collect coins, play mini-games and buy virtual clothes and beauty products. In Build-a-Bear’s experience, you can spend Robux as you, well, build bears.

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For these corporations, Roblox represents a relatively easy way into the lucrative gaming market. They may not have the money or expertise to make a full-fledged, triple-A title, but they can hire small teams of developers to put together a Roblox experience relatively cheaply and quickly.

There is now an entire ecosystem of studios dedicated to creating Roblox experiences, including Gamefam, the 200-employee company that employs Field-Draper. Gamefam has created some of the platform’s most successful branded experiences, including Sonic Speed Simulator, which has been played more than 840 million times. On offer in the store’s shop: new characters, rare costumes and spins of a roulette wheel that doles out other upgrades and collectibles.

The Roblox economy hinges on the sale and purchase of these virtual vanity items. If an experience doesn’t offer in-game purchases, it has no chance of making its creator any money.

Ryan Solana had to come to terms with this fact when he decided to turn his Roblox-building hobby into a full-fledged business venture. Three years ago, while he was studying software development at Seneca College, he worked part-time as a security guard. To fill the idle hours he spent at his desk, he built experiences on Roblox. In one of them, Nuclear Bomb Testing Facility, players could either attack or defend an atomic weapons compound. Before long, it had hundreds of regular players. “And I was like, ‘What if these players had more things to buy?’ ” he said.

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What if these players had more things to buy?

Ryan Solana, developer

By then, Solana had used Roblox for over a decade. He’d played enough to know that the most popular experiences used certain tricks to lure players in: showering them with intermittent rewards, nudging them to make purchases once they were hooked. “You can kind of see it like a casino,” he said. “There are a lot of games that don’t provide much value yet charge a lot.”

Solana wanted to make sure users could enjoy playing his game for free, but he allowed them to purchase special privileges within the game. If a player wanted to be a security supervisor, granting them access to restricted areas and giving them greater social power within the game, they could pay 450 Robux, or about $6. To become the head of the facility, they’d have to fork out 3,400 Robux — that’s $55. Solana knew he could introduce more in-game purchases — and, in the process, make himself more money — but he stopped himself. He wanted his game to be fun and fair, not a cash grab.

Nonetheless, Nuclear Bomb Testing Facility eventually earned Solana more money than his security job, so he quit and dedicated himself to Roblox full-time. “I was scared at first,” he said. But now he makes so much income that “there are days I wake up, look at my earnings and say, ‘Do I really have to work?’”

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When Roblox creators cash out their Robux for fiat currency, the company takes a 65 per cent cut. In other words, Solana keeps 35 cents of every dollar his games earn. Reddit and Roblox forums are stuffed with threads criticizing Roblox for this ratio, pointing out that Steam, another games marketplace, takes only 30 per cent of its developers’ revenues.

Solana contends that’s an unfair comparison. “A lot of people who argue with the cut Roblox takes don’t understand the value of what they’re getting on the platform,” he said. “Roblox did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of SEO, marketing and already having the foundation for my game” — support that Roblox’s competitors largely do not provide. “Whether or not the cut it takes is fair, I guess that’s up for debate.”

Some Roblox developers are children

Roblox describes itself as a safe, fun and collaborative space where kids can learn tech fundamentals. Its website extols the ways the game can teach computer programming, animation and other technical skills. After-school programs like Code Ninjas and Code Wiz use Roblox Studio as an educational tool.

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For many families, Roblox delivers these benefits exactly as advertised. This past summer, a father in Toronto who goes by the Roblox username Dahveedeh — and who asked not to be identified by his full name to protect his children’s privacy — teamed up with his son and daughter, ages 10 and 7, to create a Roblox experience called Crazy Mines. Players navigate an army base riddled with hidden landmines. They used the AI tools ChatGPT and Midjourney to help them design, code and market the experience.

The family included the same sort of purchasable power-ups found in other games. Crazy Mines didn’t make any money, but that was beside the point. “It was more about providing an educational experience for the kids,” said Dahveedeh. “Hopefully, they’re going to remember this when they get older and it’s time for them to choose a career.”

For kids who venture into Roblox development without adult supervision, the game can be a less forgiving place. Last year, the Guardian reported that Roblox creators had experienced bullying, financial exploitation and sexual grooming at the hands of their “employers” — that is, other young people who had hired them to help make experiences on the platform. And in December, federal police in Australia warned that extremists were using Roblox to recruit children, creating experiences that featured Nazi concentration camps and, in one case, the recreation of the 2019 terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Roblox Corporation removed these games.)

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Baszucki, Roblox’s creator, has said repeatedly that safety is central to his platform. The company has thousands of moderators who review flagged content and escalate incidents of inappropriate or illegal behaviour. Parents can also access a tool box of safety controls that bar their children from accessing certain types of experiences, making in-game purchases and using the game’s chat functions.

Yet proper payment remains a stubborn issue on the platform. The job board on Roblox’s website is full of postings offering subpar wages. While some jobs can net a creator $750 in real-world currency, others promise 200 Robux — the equivalent of little more than $3 — or a percentage of whatever the game might make, which, in most cases, is no money at all.

Each of the Roblox developers interviewed for this article also had stories of completing commissioned work without being paid. One creator was out a few hundred dollars; another was stiffed $20,000. “That was the biggest struggle I found working as an independent freelancer,” said Field-Draper. “A lot of the time, you’re working with younger people, and they might not have the income to actually give you proper payment. There’s no way to enforce them actually paying you.”

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The community is tight. If you’re a bad actor, you will be called out

Lauren Freeman, Roblox

Lauren Freeman, Roblox’s head of developer advocacy, said that fraudulent financial incidents such as these are rare, and that Roblox provides contract templates and shares other resources with developers about best business practices. “We believe that sharing information is valuable,” she said. Ultimately, she suggested that creators would police themselves. “The community is tight. If you’re a bad actor, you will be called out. There’s not a lot of tolerance for that behaviour in the community.”

In essence, Roblox approaches its relationship with developers much like Uber treats its drivers: it benefits from their labour but does not recognize them as employees, allowing the company to evade responsibility when things go wrong. The difference, of course, is that Uber drivers are adults, while many Roblox developers are children.

This presents an odd problem. In Canada, children are not permitted to work until they’re 13 to 16 (depending on the province, and with some exceptions). Given kids are not supposed to be working, there are few formal avenues for them to fight back if they feel they’re being exploited while completing paid tasks on Roblox.

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“The question of whether or not it’s possible to do labour organizing with children productively is a really bizarre question,” Ty Underwood, an associate professor of game design at Lake Washington Institute of Technology, told the YouTube channel People Make Games as part of a 2021 investigation into Roblox. “It’s a very weird and scary situation.”

Vass Bednar, the executive director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program, suggested that policymakers could play a role in determining how Roblox engages with underage developers. Should the company be allowed to extract profits from content created by an 11-year-old? What duty should the company have to its creators when they get scammed? Should the company be permitted to pay kids in Robux and then dictate how many Robux they need to cash out in real dollars?

Bednar suspects that governments have so far failed to answer these questions, in part because they simply don’t understand Roblox. It’s kids entertainment, which falls lower on the list of regulatory priorities than, say, Netflix or Facebook. “We’ve always been slower or weaker on policy dealing with kids,” said Bednar. The platform’s success, she added, can obscure the harms it may be inflicting on children. “The company and the game are successful, which connotes positivity and safety — like, why would kids play something if it exploited them?”

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The question of how to regulate Roblox has implications for not only the game and its players but also the future of the digital world at large. In addressing the plight of underage Roblox developers, policymakers may also have to grapple with the ways other underage online creators — such as social media influencers and Twitch streamers — are compensated for their work. Roblox is also an early example of a metaverse, and future virtual worlds may well adopt its financial model if there are no laws stopping them. “There’s a big risk in terms of establishing a norm around digital labour not being compensated or valued,” said Bednar. “We don’t want play to be a side hustle.”

We don’t want play to be a side hustle

Vass Bednar, McMaster University

In many ways, Roblox is the empowering educational tool that it claims to be. Millions of children have logged in, learned valuable skills, socialized with their friends and, in some cases, even made a bit of money. But it’s also true that Roblox is blurring the line between work and play. Left unchecked, there may soon be no distinction at all.

The future of video games

In early November, Taylor Field-Draper was sitting in his home office, which is lined with funky wallpaper and littered with pop-culture figurines. A row of lava lamps oozed behind him. Wearing orange-tinted shades and a gaming headset, he talked about both the freedom and the stability his career afforded him. He receives a paycheque every two weeks, but he decides when to grind and when to relax. “The amount of freedom you get working from home making your own schedule, it’s phenomenal,” he said. This, it seemed, was the life he’d dreamt of since he was a teenager.

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What does Field-Draper want the world to understand about Roblox and its growing community of full- and part-time developers? “A lot of media focused on Roblox — it’s almost to scare parents, like, ‘Your kid’s gonna get exploited,’” he said. “I’ve never felt exploited on the platform. I like Roblox. That’s why I stayed up all night, hustling and making a name for myself, getting exposure and building my portfolio.”

Roblox, he said, provided him opportunities he might have otherwise never have had. Before he started making a living on the platform, he’d never left Canada. But when he started working for Gamefam, they flew him down to their head office in Los Angeles. He has presented at international gaming conferences, spoken to university students in Shanghai and worked with titans of the industry such as Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite — all without ever studying computer science or game design. “These cool opportunities that I never thought I’d have arose from being a Roblox developer. It’s opened a lot of doors.”

Field-Draper gushed enthusiastically about the future of Roblox. “It’s only going up from here,” he said. “It’s where the current generation is — and where the next generation, and probably the four generations after that, are going to be.” That, he said, is going to create a lot of roles for talented young creators: 3D modelling, coding, scripting, animating and all the ancillary services that video game studios need.

Still, he was sober about the realities of turning Roblox into a full-time career. “Just don’t get your hopes up,” he advised. “If you come in expecting to make a bunch of money or get famous, it doesn’t always work out. There’s a lot of people, myself included, who have made game after game after game that failed.”

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