reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
That ship has sailed. People can and will just play on old versions if it comes to this. They already do for older versions that have better mod support.
What is the Minecraft online experience like these days? I only ever hear about people playing self hosted servers with friends. Are there still big servers with unique game modes kicking? Seems like it would be hard to keep sustainable
I've been running my own (not-for-profit, for people over the age of 21) server for the past 5 years.
We're basically just a Vanilla+ server, we have no problems finding new people to join (thanks to /r/MinecraftBuddies)
My kids love Minecraft. They often run a curseforge mod (create?) and then open a port so they can play together inside the home LAN.
But, I don't really understand how this works, and I would love to host it in a way that their cousins in another state could join. Do you know how I research this?
I get a bit confused between the curseforge mods, the java edition. Should I start by downloading a JAR of the server and host it on a cloud server somewhere, and then firewall it off to only permit my NAT IP and the cousin's NAT IPs? At some point maybe I can run it all within a wireguard/tailscale network.
How do I get started in my reading? I'm worried I'll get overwhelmed by reading /r/MinecraftBuddies, but perhaps that is a better place to ask?
First off, it's generally a good idea not to port-forward your own home router outside of defaults (Even if it's just 25565; I created a nightmare scenario for the ISP guy back at my parent's house when I was around 13 doing this).
If they're interested in learning the nitty-gritty on cloud computing and hosting (they probably do if they're already learning Curseforge), then get them into the AWS method. If you want something one-and-done, opt for Minehut.
> Though Roblox isn’t profitable, there are some significant caveats to the situation. Over the last twelve months, operating cash flow—a far more important measure than accounting-defined profits—were $650MM, about 20% of revenue. Roblox has been cash-positive for at least twenty-four quarters.
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
I'm referring to companies financial statements where these numbers are reported. It doesn't mean the cash comp isn't high or that a specific job offer won't have a lot of cash comp.
What it does mean is that, in aggregate, Roblox has issued $1B in new shares to employees in the last 12 months, diluting shareholders by 4% or so. This is the most significant factor making the company cash-flow positive while remaining not profitable. It's essentially the same as investors putting more money into the business constantly.
I'm a pretty senior IC at Roblox, and my new hire offer was 40% cash / 60% RSUs. It's now closer to 33/67 with refresher grants.
Roblox pays very competitively (see levels.fyi). The apparent strategy is to try to hire lots of long-tenured L6+ Googlers (seriously, it's crazy how many former Googlers I work with).
Not a good sign for Roblox. Yes, many smart people, but they weren't industry changing (Google almost never loses) and they didn't get or turned down Google's renewal program to retain talent.
Looks like a lot who wanted the high pay, but coast along and leverage their past experience to not be dared questioned.
If you want people who know how to build stable large scale infrastructure it is hard to go wrong by hiring people from Google. Google rewrites all their products all the time, they shut down and launch new internal systems just as often as they do external, and it is still stable, so the people from there has probably been through a few rewrites of some infrastructure part and knows what are required for that to work.
Having lots of ex Googlers could honestly go either way. I wouldn’t automatically assume thats a good thing.
A former mid size company that I worked at had the same scenario and it was definitely not good. They over engineered not just the systems but literally everything else, including the promotion process which involved the whole horse and pony show and was a constant distraction to shipping features while the companys finances struggled.
Roblox's salary ranges from $140861 in total compensation ... Levels.fyi collects anonymous and verified salaries from current and former employees of Roblox.
Total compensation means $700K, some of it being cash, some of it being stock. Company cars are pretty rare in the US, since basically everyone has a car already.
Company cars are really common in some industries, very rare in others. Ive never heard of it in tech, but I know people in sales that its just part of the gig.
I've not owned a car in 7 years thanks to my engineering gig coming with a work truck for getting around construction sites. Quite enjoy that aspect of it.
Total Compensation is the sum of all the different ways you are paid monetarily. This includes, but is not limited to: Base salary, Bonus, Equity (stock) compensation, Benefits
Roblox will not be issuing stock options now and likely stopped doing so for 4+ years already. The equity component of compensation now will be actual stock (shares) and not options.
Another commenter mentioned that cash/equity now has a 33/67 split meaning $700k tc would likely be $230k cash and $470k stocks
Glossing at their financial statements, about half of that is due to deferred revenue (stuff they sold but haven't delivered on, which I'd guess is sales of their currency that haven't been redeemed). No particular insight on that either way.
> if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending
This is a point that's sometimes less obvious with cash flow games. It's possible to have positive cash flow even with negative unit economics, _even when no economy of scale can sufficiently improve those unit economics_ [0], so long as you have enough growth and a good cash flow situation.
That's one of the criticisms Uber has had over the years; are they capable of sustaining their apparent pre-reinvestment profits if they cut out that spending? It's potentially a bit different from the Amazon situation because most of the money is going straight into speculative bets, acquiring competitors, ads, ride subsidies, and other activities designed to lock in the market, and it's unclear if that will give them a meaningful moat, as opposed to, e.g., capital investments in a fantastic, in-house distribution and shipping mechanism.
Can Roblox actually become sustainable by cutting spending somewhere?
[0] Imagine a product with -50% unit ROI. For every dollar in revenue you have two dollars in guaranteed costs. However, suppose the product is paid for fairly early relative to those costs (e.g., the business offers a steep discount on yearly subscriptions if you pay up-front, the costs are incurred linearly throughout the year as the subscription is used, and there's a till-the-start-of-next-month plus 30 days lag on billing for computing resources used). You haven't actually used enough resources to be in the red till 6 months after the subscription starts, and you're not actually on the hook for that last payment till 7 months have elapsed. If you're also able to hit a 2x annual growth rate in your paid subscriber count (not realistic for large companies, not uncommon for a few years with good product-market-fit in gaming or some SAAS products), you've paid for the year's losses before the year has ended and still have an extra month at the end where the money is sitting in your account. As your company doubles its subscribers, your coffers will continue to double as well, even if you have indefinitely negative unit economics.
In the real world you usually have smaller numbers being considered (smaller losses, less growth), allowing the game to go on for many more years.
Almost all games have an inherently limited lifespan. How many games released 20 years ago are still selling well today? Games aren't like other software where you can keep enhancing the product and keep getting new sales. Thus games developers have to focus more on maximizing short term revenue rather than building a sustainable business around particular products.
There are a handful of counterexamples like Madden NFL but only very few.
In most cases, a re-released game is an entirely new game SKU using the same IP, just as a movie remake is a new movie based on a previous one. And similarly, once released, most rereleased or remastered games have a short tail.
Maybe not 20, but still long time CS2(CS:GO really like Windows 11) launch 2012, DOTA 2 2013, LoL 2009, World of Tanks 2010. And more. All still making money and surviving...
In 2000, a 10 year old game was positively prehistoric, some unrecognizable thing only distantly related to the current forms.
In 2010, a 10 year old game was quite old, but a recognizable ancestor of new releases.
In 2020, a 10 year old game was kind of old. You could tell the difference if you had high end hardware and were tuned into certain details, but the new games were essentially the same kind of stuff as the 10 year old games.
The pace of advancement is slowing and game design has reached a mature plateau; games having greater potential to last longer each year. If a game can last more than a few months then there is a reasonably good chance it can survive for several years at least (presuming the publisher doesn't decide to cut it off to sell a new version, which is a popular tactic.)
Given that they are paying their employees with shares (53% of employees compensation are share, only 47% in cash), future growth is indeed keeping the light on.
This feels like reading finance fan fiction (which it kind of is, given the author's profession?) and uses a lot of text to reach the part that lays out the actual problem: the average operating costs based on daily active users are $18 per user per quarter, and the average amount made is only $13. so either operating costs need to come down, charges need to go up, or they need (more, stable) external revenue (e.g. ads).
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
50+ million daily active users pretty much instantly invalidates that claim (hell, even a million daily actives would have, AAA games dream of these numbers =)
It's not for you and me, we just see a garbage "game", but holy shit is there a large demographic that loves what Roblox gives them.
Just because something that sucks is popular doesn’t invalidate the claim that it sucks (and Roblox does suck hard). Junk food is terrible for your health and is also very popular.
Except "bad for your health" is an objective biological fact, whereas saying something sucks is entirely subjective, so that argument too is invalid from the outset. You think it sucks, vastly more people don't. You're welcome to your opinion, but that's all it is.
Except the detrimental impact of Roblox is objectively and widely documented in various links in this thread and elsewhere on the inter webs. Kids don’t think junk food sucks, I guess millions of parents trying to keep them healthy are just going by their “opinions” as well?
Right, and now you're pretending that you said it was bad, not that it sucked.
Of course it's bad: it's factually and objectively bad, there's plenty of investigative journalism that unequivocally demonstrates it's absolute garbage and enables the worst kind of crimes the US can imagine. But, and this is important: that has nothing to do with whether it sucks or not. In fact, it "doesn't suck" enough for millions upon millions of people to use it every single day. Roblox is terrible BECAUSE it doesn't suck: the whole reason it's so bad for humanity is PRECISELY BECAUSE it's awesome enough for a large enough demographic to keep using it, while being opaque enough to the demographic that should be correcting this behaviour to not get it so that Roblox can keep getting away with it.
The absolutely biggest problem with Roblox is literally that it doesn't suck. If only it did, kids would stop playing it!
Roblox has, objectively, a terrible effect on the world. This is demonstrably true. It's not an opinion. But saying it sucks is. Words matter.
Has the definition of “sucks” drifted? When it came up as slang in my childhood, it basically meant “not cool / unpopular to associate with”. Roblox seems the exact opposite.
Yes, I’d say “sucks” means “bad” more than uncool. Clearly using stuff that your friends think is bad is immediately uncool so I can see how these can seem to mean the same thing :)
I don’t see your games, I am sure you care about them sincerely, I see the other “polished” titles and I’m familiar with the Roblox funded development that paid for the creation of the more polished games. I can’t pass criticism on games I haven’t played, such as the the ones you listed. Roblox’s strategy sometimes works sometimes doesn’t, so difficult to generalize. Overall there’s a reason we have never heard of a single game on the platform.
Bloxburg feels like the least janky experience. But overall just moving around using virtual joysticks on a phone is really janky.
Another POV is that the overall catalog of games is very large. Many high quality options to go through before playing your first Roblox game. Even on phones, even free to play. With your level of experience you know that of course every kid would have more fun playing something like Clash Royale or something in the Apple Arcade, the issue isn’t that kids are stupid or tolerate crappier stuff like you imply elsewhere, but that you are not allowed to market expressly to them even in platforms like TikTok where there are many kids.
$18/player is a staggering operating cost. I feel like there must be some easy optimizations to be had that would greatly reduce the overhead. Roblox games are user made! They aren't building the most sophisticated game engine. Sure there are server costs, but that should be pennies. Where is all of that money going?
TL;DR; if you discount the way their accounting is done (which artificially lowers their profits), it's not profitable because Apple and Google are eating 30% of their sales on their App stores.
I mean, it's not even profit hiding is it? Corporation tax is pretty openly an incentive for companies to invest in growth and people, rather than either sitting on cash or paying out to their owners.
It's entirely normal and above board. Desirable even.
The accountants can’t be bothered because your comment isn’t even using basic terms correctly.
Your comment suggests that reinvested cash is being "hidden" as expenses, but in reality, these reinvestments are usually recorded as capital expenditures (CapEx) rather than operating expenses (OpEx), depending on the nature of the investment. While CapEx can be depreciated over time, it is not typically expensed immediately in the way operating costs are.
The implication that companies can completely avoid taxes by reinvesting is misleading. Even though reinvestments may reduce taxable income through depreciation or other deductions, this is a legal and common accounting practice, not necessarily an attempt to "hide" profits. There are also tax laws in many jurisdictions which limit the extent to which such deductions can offset income.
Your understanding also conflates profit with cash flow. Profit is an accounting concept that reflects the net income after all expenses (including taxes). Cash flow, on the other hand, reflects the actual cash generated by the business. Reinvesting profits does not "hide" cash flow but rather allocates it to future growth.
Companies don't simply choose between declaring profit and reinvesting to avoid taxes. The decision to reinvest is often driven by strategic goals, such as expanding operations, developing new products, or acquiring other businesses.
Reinvestment reduces the company's taxable income and thus the taxes owed, but it does not eliminate taxes or "hide" the profits. The company benefits from reinvesting by potentially generating more revenue in the future from the new product, which should generate more tax revenue down the road instead of restricting growth now.
Here is an approximation of your comment translated from accounting into software development, minus the part where you misunderstand essential terms:
> It’s ridiculous that software developers waste so much time writing tests for their code. If the code is written correctly in the first place, you wouldn’t need tests at all. Instead of wasting time on tests, developers should focus on just writing perfect code from the start. It’s clear that the whole idea of ‘unit testing’ is just a way for developers to justify their jobs and take longer to finish projects. Shouldn’t we just hire better developers who don’t need to write tests?
When you’re expanding rapidly and want to grow market share above all. Growing that market share with customer acquisition is economically an investment in the future revenue of the business. Advertising is one example of how this might be done.
You can classify investing in your business through advertising spend as an operating expenditure for accounting purposes. And potentially for tax purposes as well.
Now your large positive cashflow does not generate an accounting profit. Because you spent it on something that won’t be capitalised on the balance sheet.
There it is, the answer to OP’s question.
Note you can’t do that buying property plant and equipment (but some structured finance and leasing people might like a word - airlines don’t own their aircraft.)
Perhaps you can think of some examples where you’ve seen huge, massively cash-flow positive businesses in our field that weren’t generating accounting profit. Facebook, Amazon, ..?
The only other way you could sustain repeated loss ina new, growing business is capital raising.
Someone else on the thread mentioned Aswarth Damodoran’s “Free cash flow to equity” IMHO it’s worthwhile avoiding jargon when explaining things simply and concisely.
If I have a huge market opportunity and I can grow the business by spending the cash flow, I should do that instead of distributing that cash flow as profits. That opportunity will most likely not persist.
What you are proposing is that businesses should pay taxes on their income irrespective of expenses which is just a good way to break a lot of perfectly good businesses, and reduce the ability for businesses to capture new markets.
There are a number of ways where tax law could better capture the participation of large businesses, but this tack you’re on is not one of them.
One cannot avoid using technically correct terms (“jargon”) when discussing this as the categories of capital are critical to both the essential function of a business and the point you’re trying to make.
Limit yourself to interpreting what has actually been said and discussion will probably go better.
Q Where does the money come from if there's no profit?
A There would be profit, but they spent it investing in their business. Answering the implicit question "how can you spend profit investing to make it so there is no profit?" Which is the obvious follow up.
That's it. I did follow it up with "what would you do given this choice in your own business?", "should this choice be possible?", and "how would you change things if you don't think so?" Because once you've understood what is going on these are the next obvious discussion points that come up. I expressed no opinion on any of them.
What I have done is been really, really clear about what is actually going on in the face of some pretty poor responses for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen this before even though it's a very common situation. What I avoided was a credentials size war and still haven't stated any, letting the argument run on merit. Maybe caring at all about it has been a waste of time. But yeah, that's another way of saying do we just give up on HN as being a community decayed too far to still be interesting and useful - especially to the startup-curious. I kinda hope not but YMMV and I could well be prone to wishful thinking.
You don’t understand the terms you’re using in the context you’re using them in, and you don’t seem interested in learning to use them in the same way as everyone else. This steadfast refusal is preventing your understanding from progressing.
Free cash flow and GAAP profit are not the same thing. Jeff Bezos explained Amazon's commitment to this idea 20 (and 27) years ago when many were saying that Amazon could never turn a profit, yet they were already generating enough cash to initiate big bets like AWS and Kindle... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312505...
The bigger question about Roblox is how and why they got their special treatment from Apple. The whole concept of Roblox is in blatant violation of Apple's App Store policies. I believe they are significantly shielded from competition because who else can get that kind of ongoing and reliable relief from Apple's famously picky and capricious App Store reviewers? Maybe Roblox is happy to pay Apple their 30% in exchange for that protection. And this is not a small matter: Roblox is a public company worth 25 billion dollars based in no small part on this special treatment. The SEC ought to be investigating this.
If there is any kind of undisclosed arrangement between Apple and Roblox then there's a clear case for securities fraud IMO. There's a huge risk to Roblox were any such deal to unravel, both from the threat of competition being allowed and from the possibility of Apple starting to enforce their published policies on Roblox. For public companies, risks like that must be disclosed.
> undisclosed arrangement between Apple and Roblox then there's a clear case for securities fraud IMO
not all undisclosed arrangements constitute securities fraud - only those whose intent is to defraud investors do.
As for anti-competitive measures, the investigation ought to be from the consumer protection agencies, like the FCC, or from the justice department regarding anti-trust.
You are right that not all undisclosed arrangements are securities fraud. However, an undisclosed arrangement that represents an existential risk to the company were it to ever change would be securities fraud. You can't go public with huge undisclosed risks like that.
Obviously, like all public companies. But have they disclosed the specific risk that Apple might stop giving them special treatment and stop protecting them from competition or start enforcing the policies they violate? I believe I read their S-1 some time ago and didn't find any mention of special treatment from Apple. It's possible they started disclosing it later, but even that would still expose them to shareholder lawsuits from IPO investors.
Edit: They are also vulnerable to insider whistleblowers. Any whistleblower would be eligible for rewards of 10-30% of any penalty ultimately assessed by the SEC. The SEC has paid tens of millions to single whistleblowers in the past.
"We depend on effectively operating with third-party mobile operating systems, hardware, and networks that may make changes affecting our operating costs, as well as our ability to maintain our Platform which would hurt our ability to operate our business.
For the three months ended June 30, 2024, 30% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Apple App Store and 16% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Google Play Store. Because of the significant use of our Platform on mobile devices, our application must remain interoperable with these and other popular mobile app stores and platforms, and related hardware. We are subject to the standard policies and terms of service of these operating systems, as well as policies and terms of service of the various software application stores that make our application and experiences available to our developers, creators, and users. These policies and terms of service govern the availability, promotion, distribution, content, and operation of applications and experiences on such operating systems and stores. Each provider of these operating systems and stores has broad discretion to change and interpret its terms of service and policies with respect to our Platform and those changes may be unfavorable to us and our developers’, creators’, and users’ use of our Platform. If an operating system provider or application store limits or discontinues access to, or changes the terms governing, its operating system or store for any reason, it could adversely affect our business, financial condition, or results of operations."
Apple can and does change even the written terms of AppStore service on a whim without warning. The risk that Apple suddenly changes its unwritten enforcement policy to your detriment is not that much different than the risk that they just change their Ts and Cs entirely. Apple’s walled garden, Apple’s rules.
ANY publicly traded company that relies on the Apple AppStore for a significant portion of its revenue has an implied ‘so long as Apple continue to allow us to do this’ caveat hanging over their revenue forecasts.
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps.
Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and streaming games but Roblox does not qualify because it is not HTML5 and not streaming. Many people have had their businesses destroyed for far less serious violations of App Store policy.
I believe there are also other rules against putting an app store inside your App Store app. Clearly Roblox is an app store for games, with its own currency. Apple has not been reasonable on this point with other companies: they originally didn't even want to allow cloud game streaming apps to play multiple games in a single app. Their ridiculous plan was to require a separate Apple App Store listing for each game that a streaming platform supported, and they only relented under pressure after Microsoft went public with their complaints: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/11/21433071/microsoft-apple-... And after that debacle they explicitly added exceptions to their policies for game streaming apps. They have never done so for Roblox-like apps, which are still plainly forbidden under their publicly posted policies.
You can make the same argument about Minecraft since servers download you texture packs, data packs or skins. I don't think that Apple should stop these apps, that's their game model.
Roblox games are not comparable to texture packs or skins. They are complete games with assets and executable code, or at least the fancy ones are. Maybe data packs are more similar but it seems like Minecraft for iOS does not support them.
Seems like they use JavaScript and this might qualify for the HTML5/JavaScript exception that Apple has. Also it seems like they are a lot less powerful than Roblox scripts, and there isn't an in-game store allowing you to purchase them without using Apple's in-app purchase flow.
Yup! Soft currency (Minecoins) travel with you with your Microsoft account and can be used on what ever device you sign into (including iOS). You can also purchase more Minecoins in the game its self each platform.
It’s a gray area. If you look at apps like Snapchat, instagram and TikTok, they all have this concept of filters/lens/effect which are effectively <8mb bundles running JavaScript / lua scripts for visual effects and whatnot (see lens studio, meta spark and effect house).
The key seemed to be to not use any JIT compilers and make sure it does not change the code of the app itself but mainly just act as a static runtime / engine for the effect.
One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.
It's not gray. Your examples do not violate policy because Apple has an explicit exception to allow stuff like that when specifically running in WebKit's JavaScript engine. That's why they use JavaScript, to qualify for the loophole. But as I said, Roblox does not use JavaScript or WebKit for running games and does not qualify for that exception. There is also an exception for "plug-ins" which seems like it could cover the case of camera filters, but definitely would not stretch to cover an entire embedded app store full of complete games purchased with a third-party currency.
If you think about it, a scrollable list of tiny free camera filters is not that similar to an enormous searchable catalog of complete and individually purchasable games.
Apple clearly doesn't think these are the same thing either as demonstrated by their explicit policies allowing the former and their attempt to block cloud streaming apps from providing the latter, later turning into explicit policies specifically allowing it for cloud streaming apps and only cloud streaming apps, not Roblox-like apps.
It's allowed if the app doesn't change the main purpose based on the review process! In the past, I'd worked with a company which makes whitelabel apps for churches and does use codepush to fix bugs and implement small improvements, so through codepush the company can not change the app to be about casino games.
Is any Lua run on iOS devices at all? The majority of the Lua code is sent to the server, which then tells the client what to do.
There are Lua scripts intended to run on the "client" (such as camera scripts) but I was under the impression (I could be wrong) that even they were converted by a server into instructions sent to the client, not run as a Lua scripts in a local Lua interpreter on your iPad.
My assumption is that the server either directly tells the client what to display or it converts the “client” code to some kind of bytecode that doesn’t require a lua interpreter.
Or perhaps the lua code is sanitised by the server such that the lua code run on the client is not the same as submitted by the user. Many App Store games do have an embedded scripting system of some kind, just not one that can run code directly inputted by an end user.
Bytecode or not it is still running code inputted by an end user on iOS devices.
The whole point of Apple's rules here are to force app functionality and features to be reviewed when submitting an app to the app store. Anybody can go and make complete games ("experiences") in Roblox and they will immediately be available on iOS without being reviewed by Apple. It's a full game engine that lets you write custom code, use custom assets, and replace everything. Take a look at Frontlines (https://www.roblox.com/games/5938036553/FRONTLINES) as an example of a game that looks nothing like Roblox.
If you were to release an iOS app and push new features and content to it OTA then you risk being kicked off the store if you get caught because you bypassed their review process and the store page may not be accurately describing the app anymore.
I think the same argument could be made for Twitter/X. The app stores by Google and Apple specifically disallow pornographic material, yet the app is full of it. Once you're big and important enough, the rules mostly don't apply for you anymore. Of course, if they tried to circumvent the app store tax directly within the app, there would be consequences, but as long as Google/Apple can make a profit, it's okay it seems.
Can an aggregator/distributor be liable for user created content? You can find porn in Reddit or Google Search and these apps are still in the app store so I don’t think they are getting any special treatment.
There are some protections for hosting illegal data (real illegal, not EULA-disapproved), but they tend to go away if the host does any kind of editorializing (like showing the data through an algorithmic feed).
Google Search is different yet, since they aren't the primary host.
Didn't work out for Organic Maps. Merely allowing to access map data makes you un-family-friendly. Or at least that's what we can assume, since Google won't indulge in specifics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41272925
> I think the same argument could be made for Twitter/X. The app stores by Google and Apple specifically disallow pornographic material, yet the app is full of it.
Reddit is allowed too. imgur, snap, etc.
I assumed you're fine as long as your raison d'être wasn't porn and the content was user generated / supplied.
To add, Tumblr was lambasted for them not properly policing their porn[0], accidentally allowing CSAM, and Apple being the one to inform them of this error. it's what led to them banning all 18+ content, arguably sealing the platform's fate of irrelevancy.
I thought Yahoo's acquisition was what stopped their 18+ content
But perhaps the most catastrophic misfire of all was the notorious ‘porn ban’ that came into place on December 17, 2018 – a policy partly driven by a US law [1] that made websites liable for sex trafficking that might take place on their platform. The ban covers ‘female presenting nipples’, genitals, and any depicted sex acts. Until then, the platform had remained a refuge for a devoted community of users, but this decision affected swift and dire consequences.
And who determines that reason? Twitter seems to work fine with no restrictions but Discord basically has to lock down any server marked as 18+
(regardless of the content of 18+. Don't know how mobile has had 15 years to do granular content warnings based on decades of other medium but app stores still assume 18+ = porn).
Not to be too flippant, but we can guess all we want, but the individual apps signed up to specific terms at the time, and you can almost guarantee that Apple (or anyone else) reserves a lot of leeway to themselves as to how they enforce or otherwise police those T&Cs.
All the conjecture in this bit of the thread seems a bit pointless given none of us are reading it, let alone reading the specific bit that whichever app in question might be held to.
Hence my start to it, as well, these seem to be allowed ...
Roblox gets away with this due to the framing that it’s a single platform with many different experiences:
“To start, Roblox is not a single game. It's a platform that hosts millions of user-generated experiences, such as historical roleplaying games or virtual labs to simulate physics experiments. Because of the diversity of content you'll find on Roblox, we use the term experience to refer to what you play on Roblox.” https://create.roblox.com/docs/education/resources/frequentl...
I think the best argument is that you’re a single player across games, kids speak of “playing Roblox”, there are portals between worlds, etc. This comment makes the point that all games feel the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287780
It’s pretty different from what Epic wanted to do by offering completely separate games in their App Store without paying apple commission.
How were they getting away with it for the 10 years before that when they were still calling them games and were still clearly in violation? It's pretty clear that the name change is just a retconned excuse and has nothing at all to do with the real reason.
All this happened when Roblox was private, I don't believe there was/is any monetary interest beyond whatever executives had from their employers. If it's anything like the story for getting Roblox on game consoles, then it really is executives caring about what their kids also care about, and that gives RBLX a huge leg up.
You may be right, but Apple execs are accredited investors worth tens to hundreds of millions and as such are easily able to invest in private companies, so that doesn't rule it out. Nepotism is another possible explanation if there are any connections there. And while it wouldn't be illegal while they were private, it would still be immoral, and it would become illegal when not disclosed as a risk at IPO.
It could also further jeopardize Apple's standing with regulators, since they profess to apply their rules fairly and equally without secret deals (which is transparently ridiculous but Tim Cook said it in congressional testimony so it would be perjury if proven wrong).
>Even Apple acknowledged this when a marketing head, Trystan Kosmynka, expressed “surprise” that Roblox was approved for the App Store in 2017 in an email. Kosmynka then defended this decision during the trial by saying Apple did not consider Roblox to be a place where people go to play games.
>“I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft,” Kosmynka said. “These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.”
Wow. The damage control was even worse than I thought. So I guess the new UE Fortnite Network would be approved no problem since "it's not a game, it's a UGC platform" (not that Epic cares about app stores anymore). Because Epic isn't making the games anymore. Just offloading the labor to others a LA VR Chat.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what an App Store policy is.
You're reasoning as though the policy is for Apple to follow. No. It's for developers to follow. Apple can put whatever it wants on the App Store, the policies are guidance for developers to give them a fighting chance that their apps will be accepted. If Apple wants an app, it'll go on the store. If they don't, it won't.
So Apple's decisions are arbitrary and capricious? Tim Cook testified to Congress that Apple's policies "are transparent and applied equally to developers of all sizes and in all categories". Did he commit perjury?
There's something weird and sad about Roblox for me as an old-timer who still has silly dreams about free/open software internet utopias for just fun? There's so much creative (programming etc) energy in that place and, for what?
I've had this half-idea for recreating something like Garry's Mod in Godot for a while now. It seems like something someone would have created by now but it doesn't exist yet for whatever reason.
Like, a framework for building first-person FPS-ish game modes and handling all the asset management, sync, etc, like GMod being built around Source does and just letting developers build the game modes without worrying about the annoying tricky stuff.
I took "own" here as "you have control over the entire stack". Seems like the idealized version of Garry's mod. Garry doesn't even own all the assets in Garry's Mod.
I get you perfectly (I play Roblox with my kid almost everyday) but I have another opinion. When I think about what it accomplished, I think Roblox is pretty amazing; actually one of the most amazing software ever made. It accomplished in practice basically what lots of people have been trying to do for decades, since the MUDs from the 70s, and what Zuckerberg wasted billions of dollars with. Sure, most of its content is total crap, but the same could be said of many other great things (the internet for ex.) If you dig a bit you can find really nice puzzle games (“obbys”) for example that require two or three people to collaborate, and there are actually kids there waiting to collaborate with you. So the point is, yes it needs active filtering, but the engagement of players and developers is unprecedented and pretty exciting.
My main criticism right now is this idea of jumping on the LLM buzzwagon. It’s sad that they don’t understand that their success is 100% human-driven, and that using LLMs beyond QoL stuff will be their downfall. The moment we get fully AI-generated games and worlds, it’ll be over.
Why are people OK with this? Because there's a place to spend "money" inside this virtual space?
The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
These kids arent' making anything, they're aphids.
Nice reference to aphids (which are used like cows by ant colonies). So kids make games which require currency from other kids?! Why would they do that? Do they get a cut?
Yes. Like $105 for every ~43,000 robux (~$350-$490, depending on the tier of robux purchased) players spend in your game. Not including the money you get for free just by retaining players with a Roblox subscription in your game.
Top Roblox devs are making millions of dollars. [0]
Yup. I imagine those millions are the ones I see on LinkedIn offering 50-60k for a "Roblox game developer". Even in a UGC platform, the biggest money makers are the ones doing it as a legitimate job.
Because like it or not, this space has basically become a "third place" for many kids. In that regard it has to compete with console games about as much as a lonely arcade machine in some old bar does. They aren't coming for the games alone.
>The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
Yup, but as we know from growing up and seeing the rise of social media: the best, sleekest solution isn't always thr Victor. It's all about network effects.
My kids have recently become interested in Roblox. I installed it on the PS5 but honestly I don't get the appeal. The games we tried are of very low quality. It doesn't have the complexity or interest of Minecraft. It doesn't have the polish of Astro's Playroom (or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which they are too young to play). It reminds me a little of Fortnite's non-battle-royal games, but much worse. Can you give some advice on how to approach it as a parent? I suspect there are some good games in there that we missed.
I play with my kid and my advice is to not look for a game in Roblox, but to play Roblox as it is. It's not going to be about the quality, it's not polished and there are probably 8 game types to it: Clicking, Obby, Tycoon, Survival, Farming, Sports, Shooter and Story.
All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others.
Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it.
The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it.
I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
Your take sounds about right. It's minigames. You can play an exact equivalent minigame in minecraft 98% of the time, but it's easier just to pick one ready from the browser and get started immediately with people doing the same and nothing else. If I was a parent I
'd try to skim ideas from Roblox yourself, make it happen for your kids and their friends in Minecraft, join yourself, talk about it, record yourself playing it, share it with strangers; for full non-Robux-driven wholesome non-mindless experience.
Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
----
As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
It sounds like the platform really matters for Roblox, if it's that much of a creative tool. BTW the first time I'd heard of "ActiveWorlds" (or Uru) was just now from your comment. And it also sounds like my kids don't have the problem Roblox solves! (And I don't really want them standing around in a chat room looking for things to do; absent a compelling reason to look at a screen, I encourage them to do real-world things.)
> It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
There's also the socialization part. My kid's friends are all on Roblox. They don't get together IRL because a lot of them moved away when their parents had to move, and others just live way across town and "meeting at the park" is so 1980s. When new kids come to school, they share their Roblox and Fortnite usernames and that's where they hang out after school to socialize.
Looking at the pages and pages of crap games in Roblox is a bit reminiscent of a long list of horrid software on a dialup BBS.
Everything popular seems to start as a clone of non-Roblox games, and then goes off on it's own direction from there.
Not Roblox's fault, but it's not a good place for kids to make friends; any kind of contact information must be censored. They can play there with friends made elsewhere.
> Unlike other social platforms, Roblox’s revenue is nearly all via user spending rather than advertising. As such, Roblox pays 25% of its revenue to Apple and Google (30% of transactions on those platforms) whereas Facebook, Snap, et al pay effectively 0. Note that Facebook, which has structurally lower costs to service users than Roblox and is far more mature, has an operating margin of roughly 40% — if the company had to pay out 25-30% first, it would never have “tech company” profit margins, let alone profit dollars.
Wow. I've never though about this before, but this is an awful second-order consequence of the high app store fees set by Apple and Google. It essentially incentivizes App makers to treat users as products not customers!
(Not too surprising for Google, but certainly goes against Apple's public stance).
Apple did have conversations about how to profit from Facebook’s apps.
But there’s no evidence that the App Tracking Transparency was a direct result of failure to come to terms with Facebook on some type of revenue share.
Even if a portion of the comprehensive set of protections included in ATT was specifically to target Facebook, Apple did not use it to punish Facebook.
Apple’s customers did.
Because when given a choice, 85-96% of all people across the entire planet did not want Facebook tracking them.
If one was to speculate on The decision-making behind platforms’ leadership, it follows to consider Google’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of Apple with ATT due to google’s own direct reliance on ad revenue.
Apple is no saint, it’s made many compromises on user privacy in the face of business.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that the position of selling products and services, including the distribution of others’ software is by far more consumer friendly than the quiet identification, data collection and targeting of individuals.
Haha, I am imagining the Facebook response to this! :)
In any case I suspect that is too much overreach and would only attract more attention from regulators.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and this is fixing the wrong problem. (The problem being that once I purchase a portable pocket computer, I want it to be mine to use how I want with whatever software I want without asking the manufacturer for permission).
- Get money through the platforms' users and their payment methods, without having to worry about asking for users' credit card information, billing, chargebacks, or individual invoicing: 25% platform tax.
- Get money through your own means, similarly to what Amazon did with Kindle books: no platform tax.
> Get money through the platforms' users and their payment methods, without having to worry about asking for users' credit card information, billing, chargebacks, or individual invoicing: 25% platform tax.
Fair enough. So I guess if I don't mind worrying about all those things, I can simply reach my own agreement with a PCI-compliant payment service provider to charge customers through my app directly and therefore avoid that 25% platform tax, right?
It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
Absolutely, it's better to have a smaller slice of a bigger pie, which is why I'm OK with this.
What I meant by "wild" is that in this case, the dev of the game is the one receiving that ~30% slice. Apple+Google get about the same as the dev does.
Someone in the food chain does take less in some EU countries. Not all.
The commissions are capped by law in some parts, but not others.
As a small sample, in RO i think a large store chain pays like 0.5%. The consequence is credit card reward programs are either non existent or something like 0.1% cashback. The other consequence is you can pay by card almost anywhere.
On the other hand I've been to NL and small stores simply did not take Visa/MC because it was too expensive for them. Guessing the visa/mc charges weren't capped there.
Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are.
They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes.
Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods.
It’s not regulation in NL that blocks small retailers from taking V or MC.
Not sure if you actually been to RO but every small shop has 3-4 payment terminals, each bank branded, and based on the card they use a different terminal thus ensuring minimal charge or even 0.
In DE or NL, you operate via an intermediary ( like payone, etc ) and a single terminal. Maybe here comes the difference.
PS. Larger shops/markets ( like kaufland, carrefour, etc ) have also just one, but I guess they negociate the fee.
They made it compulsory by law to accept cards for B2C if you sold more than like 15k eur/month. But I think you were already in DE.
I think that law also cames with caps on card charges. Or at least there was so much competition between banks for the new market that purchase charges dropped on their own.
You think Steam puts in more effort than providing graphics APIs, system frameworks for everything from networking to controller handling, UI libraries, educational sessions and security critical updates?
Like, one may argue that the 30% isn’t valid (and it’s 15% for the majority of devs) but to say Steam does more is absurd.
I’m curious if people who hold this opinion have actually been involved in the process of releasing apps on either platform.
And to be clear, I know valve does contribute to gaming on Linux but that’s single digit market share, so is definitely a far cry from the 30%.
Steam Deck is mostly standard Linux (although most stuff Valve does is gets merged into the kernel/free packages etc. so it’s hard to disentangle the these, but not exactly comparable to building a platform almost from scratch)
> the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
Just like every other company using the same business model (i.e. ads instead of IAP)?
What I’m suggesting more than asking is, when you say that open source has lifted their development burden, it makes it sound like it’s a unidirectional taking.
And sure, some might be freeloading. But they also do contribute quite a bit to open source. https://opensource.apple.com/
I know your response was more to correct the “developed from scratch” but I still think it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectional. Even in the development of their own platforms, you can find old Usenet discussions of how they were feeding things back. I think they could have gone their own route but Unix compatibility was important.
The history of Next, Apple, and the open source community is very intertwined and unfortunately cannot be reduced so easily.
Webkit (and subsequently Blink/Chromium) and LLVM especially did have a significant impact though.
> didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
Well, no, it’s of course relative I meant that compared to Valve/Steam they did. And it’s not like iOS/macOS is just a collection of open source components slapped together with some small proprietary layer on top. At this point it’s mostly proprietary stuff they had to build effectively from scratch over the years with some open source components here and there.
Literally the last section of my comment addressed that. It’s a single digit market share. How does that play into windows/mac sales then? And what about the decade+ of sales before the SteamDeck?
And in that case, no, Valve didn’t provide all of that. They provided some of it, but AMD did the graphics driver, arch did the OS. Valve still offer less for the 30%. I’m not trying to diminish the effort they put in, but just pointing out the totality of what each store offers behind it is very different.
To your last point, that’s not really relevant to my point. I’m just pushing back on the other person about whether Apple or valve offer more for the 30%. You’re interjecting a completely different argument.
What do you mean by “only”? You can really expect companies to behave irrationally. Pretty much every company funding Linux development do it because they expect this to benefit them somehow.
"I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality." - Gabe Newell
Yeah, the existence of SteamOS, Steam Machines and eventually Proton were a hedge against Microsoft’s perceived shift into locked down distribution .
I think a lot of folk have a hard time reconciling that there may have been non-altruistic intentions behind something that is enjoyed today.
Similarly, Steam itself was a hedge against physical distribution to cut out the middleman. It wasn’t originally envisioned as a store for anyone but Valve.
But here we are today, and both have positive side effects that actually have outlived the original design.
Those APIs are paid for by the owner of the phone. Charging developers (and the consumer) 30% to allow someone to distribute an app is utterly ridiculous. Framing it like Apple built these things and you are only paying 30% is in deep sycophant territory.
1. You assume they’re paid for by the owner of the phone. That’s not necessarily reflective of a companies income stream. Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs for example, and every company has different business models.
2. Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution? The majority of steam games do not use Valves tooling for matchmaking or their engine.
3. Can you go without name calling? Or are you that childish that it’s the only way you can feel like you have the upper hand in a conversation?
4. I’m not defending a 30% cut and already mentioned that. I’m saying that saying steam offers more for the 30% is absurd.
> Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs ...
Is that a new thing, or just for specific products? Asking because I've previously used some of their Azure SDK stuff before and that didn't seem to have a charge for SDK access.
Microsoft have charged for non-individual use for longer than they’ve had the free version. I should have perhaps used commercial non-individual use rather than just commercial.
Meanwhile Xcode is free and has been since the Project Builder days on Next.
I’m not personally saying one is better value or not. Just that the companies have put different values on different parts of their developer flow for many decades now, and one can’t simply say that the money comes from a single source.
Did MS ever make any significant amounts of money from selling VS/MSDN compared to how much the availability f 3rd part software benefited Windows sales/increasing market share?
Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows.
While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an actual income stream).
To your question, that’s exactly my point. Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things. Take this as my response to your other reply as well.
You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do.
Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Again, I’m not saying one is right or wrong. I’m just arguing that it’s a lot more nuanced than any of the comments here suggest. Nobody has enough facts outside the companies bookkeeping and leadership to make these hardline claims.
> Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things
I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.
> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies
Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.
Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.
> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.
Xcode is free if you don't consider the platform cost of needing to have only apple hardware to use it, however (generally) the hardware is cheaper than what MS charges for MSDN/VSE.
Different companies fund things differently and put up different barriers.
Again, for the umpteenth time, I am not making a VALUE judgement. I am just saying they all do things differently and without knowledge of their books, nobody here can say what funds what internally
The SDK's for modern MS products generally seem to be freely available. Maybe it's only their legacy offerings that have some charge to it?
If that's actually the distinction, then my guess is that it's simply "no cost access means higher numbers of developers using them" for the new stuff.
Whereas the legacy stuff probably would cause internal bun-fight's to happen if they changed their licensing model. ;)
Hmm maybe you’re only familiar with their azure SDKs ;)
What makes Windows not modern? The whole point of my comments is that different business eases have different funding.
Azure is a separate business for Microsoft than windows development.
I’m going to guess based on your range of comments that you’re primarily a devops and web developer and not a native app or game developer?
Which leads back to my first response to you: I don’t think you’re actually familiar with developing things for distribution on either steam or an App Store.
> That’s not necessarily reflective of a companies income stream
It is. Anything MS or Apple ever charged for SDKs and development tools was just peanuts compared to their other income streams.
At the end of the day open consumer platforms benefit much, much more from maximizing the amount of 3rd party software that’s available on them than from anything else.
> Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution?
Discoverability, consumer protection, relatively very good UX etc. of course that is much more valuable to smaller/medium developers than to companies like Epic/EA/etc.
Even the App Store and the 30% cut was a great deal for developers and consumers when it came out initially compared to all the alternatives available at the time.
The issue is that at this point Valve/Steam has to actually provide real value to consumers/developers and innovate. Apple can just do nothing and collect free money (consequently the App Store itself sucks immensely as an app/platform) since they don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. What are you going to do? Buy an Android? : D
> You think Steam puts in more effort than providing graphics APIs, system frameworks for everything from networking to controller handling, UI libraries, educational sessions and security critical updates?
Sure. But this has absolutely nothing to do with fairness.
They charge 30% because they can and because developers have no other options.
Anyway consumers paying for HW/OS are the ones that are funding the development of those tools/apis etc. Apple, MS, etc. provided all of that stuff for free (or a nominal fee) for decades because they always needed software developers more than the other way around. Any platform without third party apps would be mostly worthless.
Apple is in an interesting spot because when they released the app store initially 30% was a very good deal compared to how much it cost to publish apps on other phones.
Without an insight into how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS.
I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
And then this gets into every other market choice as well if we’re saying all the stuff is paid for up front by the consumer.
What does Steam offer for its 30%? The majority of games on steam don’t use any steam services unlike apps on the AppStore. Valve doesn’t do educational sessions for developers or provide support for system issues. So is Steam not a terrible deal at double the cost?
But then we get to consoles, where the consumer not only pays for the device but also pays a subscription for online play. If we say that Sony/Microsoft are funded up front by the consumer and then recurring for online fees, then what the value to developers for the 30% (in addition to devkit costs)?
I’m not defending apples cut here. That’s a subjective argument that goes nowhere, but I am saying: if we say Apple’s cut is unfair, why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
> I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
Probably not relative to total revenue. But it doesn’t really change much. To be fair I don’t have a problem at all with 15% or even 30% but with the fact that Apple is running a lite extortion racket by not allowing any competition.
> how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS
I don’t think the exact nuances of internal accounting (even if they do it this way instead of just putting all revenue into a single “pot”) really changes anything.
It’s pretty clear (based on all evidence from the last 30+ years) that platforms can generate significantly higher revenue by maximizing the amount of third party software and by giving away development tools/etc. for free or significantly below cost than by trying to extract as much money as feasible possible from 3rd part developers (and it wasn’t a huge concern anyway since all major desktop platforms have always been mostly open)
> why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
IMHO mainly because Apple has a very large market share and is effectively a monopoly in certain ways.
If you want to develop a mobile app/game you can’t not make it available on iOS. It’s just not an option. This gives Apple a huge amount of pricing power and effectively allows them to exploit developers and consumers by generating a surplus they don’t have to work for.
It a scale of course but no other company is quite in the same position. Steam can lose most of their customers if they stop providing value. Even Google is in a much weaker position (consequently they don’t have such strict controls on iAPs) since phone makers can (and have) make their own app stores, side loading etc. I think consoles are closers but they are purely an entertainment product with a lot of alternatives and substitutes.
Overall I personally believe consumer surplus should most dwarf everything else to an extent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why can’t we apply “arbitrary” rules/standards to corporations based on their size and influence on the market.
Small/medium developers of course benefit much more from the increased reach/discoverability and PC games have a very different business model than mobile ones of course.
But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary (refunds, subscription management, no cc hassle etc.) I don’t think I’m unique in that way so there is some values we’ll just never know what % it’s actually worth until Apple stop restricting third part stores.
Large companies with a “sticky” user-base of course gain absolutely nothing from it.
Not that I’m trying to defend Apple, on the whole they hardly offer anything useful in return for the 30% to the developers at least because they don’t need to. The App Store as an app/platform is a complete pile of worthless garbage compared to Steam..
> But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary
Such an odd take.
I begrudgingly use a Macbook for work - that is the laptop my employer issued for me. I pay for IntelliJ, because I think it is an excellent IDE.
Following your logic, Apple should somehow bite 30% of that yearly subscription, when in truth, I am a customer of JetBrains, not of Apple.
Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore, and you still chose to buy it through the AppStore. That proves you prefer going through Apple's channel and are their customer after all.
In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
Apples to oranges. Card networks have more than three stakeholders to work with per transaction, apply fees indiscriminately from milk to digital music subscriptions, and operate at truly staggering volumes.
Yet Canada has Interac and India has UPI which nationalize all digital transactions while charging even less. In Europe they’re much more heavily regulated and this charge even less than in the States.
So if within their own industry Visa and Mastercard overcharge like crazy, especially when they can, what makes you so sure that they’re a good counter example for a completely different industry? Especially when competitors seem to be charging a very similar rate for a similar service?
That being said, it is a fair point when you consider that retailers and other similar product middle men tend to charge 1-3%, but it’s important to also consider that Apple position’s itself as a luxury product and brand where 30% markup isn’t actually out of line.
Exactly right. I’m not against competitor analysis here. But let’s at least compare against a basket of structurally similar offerings instead of cherry picking companies whose rake happens to be an order of magnitude lower in percentage terms.
My point, which hasn’t really been addressed, is that “more” isn’t a meaningful term when comparing card networks and software app stores, because the markets are structurally different.
> Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction.
I would bet Apple has put more into R&D for iPhones, iPads and iOS than the entire enterprise value of visa and mastercard put together. If anything, they've worked for it more than visa/mastercard who are merely rails with distribution. Most of the heavy lifting, risk and work in the card ecosystem is done by the issuers (banks et. al.)
If desktop pc users saw Microsoft taking a third of every transaction from yourmoms.com to Amazon.com because they did the heavy lifting of popularizing the home pc and web browser usage, I think you’d realize how ridiculous that argument sounds.
They built it to sell something else, operating systems and then some ancillary stuff. They became one of the most valuable companies in the world off just that.
Just like the iOS was built to sell phones. They make plenty off phones. They’ve made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world too. Access to an App Store has become a requirement of a modern phone, so they wouldn’t sell many without it. But it doesn’t mean they should be able to tax the entire economy so heavily. Just like how running a browser is a requirement of modern browsers for an operating system, but that doesn’t mean the operating system should be allowed to tax the entire economy of activity that takes place on said operating system.
Only 3% of the 30% go to payment processing. Hence why they still want 27% when developers choose their own payment system.
The 27% are seen similar to Sony and Nintendo as fees to be on a platform which has wide reach but also gives tools and does stuff to enable app distribution.
Is that too much? I don‘t know but it‘s what all appear to do. The platform politics didn‘t evolve as fast as the tech though. So what about apps like Patreon, Netflix, Spotify, that was never on the table in 2008.
The 3% payment charge is the transaction fee, but that doesn’t take into account the actual handling of the rest of the transaction lifecycle, like managing refunds, or chargebacks. A single chargeback will cost you $25 whether it’s successful or not (plus refunding the transaction if you lose), but on google play and co it’s just refunded.
Google gives you an App Store and maintain the OS that other hardware vendors (and sometimes themselves) implement hardware around. They take a 30% cut for distribution in their special app store and not much else.
Microsoft and Sony take similar cuts for access to their game consoles. In return they provide:
- High quality, robust developer APIs.
- High quality debuggers, graphics debuggers and CPU+GPU profiling tools with in-depth access to hardware counters
- Networking libraries for matchmaking, and a network backend for tunneling network traffic via their online services
- True development kit hardware with expanded resources for debugging tools
- High quality documentation and direct support
- GPU drivers that actually work
- Payment processing
- All for a hardware platform that is typically sold at or below BOM cost for the initial launch of the device
Google provides distribution via the Play Store, and only for about ~4GB of app before they force you to use your own CDN because they have a limit on the size of the app bundle they'll distribute. There's likely things I'm not aware of that Google provides for app developers rather than game developers, but if we're comparing to game consoles then I'm going to compare tool for tool.
Apple's tooling is better, largely because they have way more control over the target hardware and software environment, but they take an additional cost via their highly restrictive app guidelines.
The contrast is stark compared to another of Google's own projects: Stadia.
Much of this comes second hand as I wasn't on this particular team when they were working on Stadia bring-up for proprietary AAA engine (I joined about 2 weeks before Stadia was officially canned).
But the quality of support from Stadia for developers was leagues above what you get from Android. Every few weeks I'll hear from other team members how good it was working with Google for Stadia. The tooling was great. We got developer kit hardware. We had documentation and direct support channels and Google was actively managing outreach and development on tooling to ease transitioning into their systems (Google was one of the biggest driving forces behind DXC's SPIR-V target).
Compare this against the same people commenting on the Android experience and it's the complete opposite. We're left out to dry with poor support while trying to target devices that barely work.
What's the difference? Google actually had to fight to get us to come to their store. They had competition and weren't acting as a toll collector to a captive market. Game developers had the choice to tell Google to kick rocks, Xbox and PlayStation aren't going anywhere. Google had no choice but to play ball with good support and fair pricing. No such pressure exists on Mobile, and they crank the toll as a result.
For the difference between mobile and consoles, it depends on if you have publisher or port team backing or not. Many indie developers do not get devkits, do not get proper access to Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Network, or Xbox Live networking, do not get performance monitoring tools, and do not get any documentation or support. For them the most that happens is they export the necessary files in a reviewable archive format and send it in for approval, hoping that the game engine they chose to use properly functions on the given console and that there won't be any major problems that will cause them to go through the review process again. This also applies to any major updates or patches later on. The consoles treat these indie developers the same way Steam, Itch.io, and GOG treat their developers -- as vendors in a storefront, not as equal business partners vital to the operations of the platform. For these indie devs if you want the above features you have to hire somebody to do the porting for you or you have to go through a lengthy and expensive process to be approved to use them. Most console releases of well known indie games like Celeste, Shovel Knight, and Rimworld are handled by port teams for this very reason. On console, if you're below the AA tier you're paying for the cost of the privileges others get instead of you.
However with mobile storefronts at the start everybody gets treated equally since they all have access to the same limited number of features and get the same level of (some would say neglectful) automated support. For the most part Epic Games goes through the same process of uploading a game or program and waiting for approval that Jimbob does. It's only afterwards that the level of access changes. It's this way by design. Not only because early on there were no big names in the mobile space and so no real tier system was necessary, but also because quantity is valued over quality. There are about a thousand uploads to Google Play a week (I haven't found strict data on how many are only games, but the process is the same for games and apps so it doesn't really matter), versus between twenty to thirty on PlayStation and Xbox. Creating unique avenues and methods would bottleneck things horrifically for mobile. As a developer you get an informal discount for the relative lack of quality control and increased competition you'll be facing.
This cost is very evident in the prices of the games. You won't ever see games that aren't asset flips or shovelware below a non-sale price of $1.99 on Xbox Games Store, but you'll see plenty of $0.79 games on Google Play and Steam.
Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo subsidize the development and cost of their dedicated gaming system from the 30% cut of the store sales.
It's very different on the mobile side: Apple sells iOS devices at full cost. With Android, it gets even more mucky as Samsung, the hardware vendor, gets 0% of the sales on their handset (unless the user, for some reason, uses the Samsung store), and Google gets the full 30% for only their software work. So the fact that Google gets 30% is wild.
> Google gets the full 30% for only their software work
Not that I trust Google (my personal phones are Apple) but how do you think a phone with all software made by Samsung will work? Every time I lay my hands on one of their phones (and I have one on my desk for Android development) something annoys me. They somehow think they know how to do UI/UX but they still haven't learned after all these years of "customizing" Android.
So yes, Google deserves some money. Not 30% but some.
So if you sell your hardware at a profit, you forfeit your right to profit off the platform post-sale? Nintendo never sells hardware at a loss either, by the way.
And your Samsung comment doesn’t make sense. Samsung gets the operating system for free and then sells hardware for whatever profit they can get for it. Plus all of the post-sale platform services profit they can manage, just like Google and Apple. What is wild?
I never meant to imply that once a company sell the hardware for profit, they forfeit the rights to profit off the platform. It's really about market power. The two dominant mobile leaders have enough market power to increase their take to 50%, for example, arguing that's how much traditional retailers take, if not for the risk of attracting government interventions.
The intention is to point out that simple arguments of 'Xbox is charging 30%, so it is fine that the mobile platforms do the same thing' failed to take into account of the nuances of the situation. Isn't it weird that these platforms are all charging 30% even through all these platforms have different business models, with different cost structure and provide different values? I hadn't even talked about how Microsoft has been getting no money off sales on Steam when it is their platform, because they hadn't (yet?) lock down the platform.
Finally, Nintendo did sell the Wii U at a loss. [0]
FWIW, there are large publishers which successfully negotiate with the ilk of Microsoft[1] and Sony[2] to get a better revenue split, as consoles in fact have more functional competition than mobile phone app stores: people who own a gaming console might could reasonably own a second one if they were interested in some game that was only available on one console or the other; this simply doesn't happen with phones, as only a small handful of particularly-crazy power users would ever carry around a second cell phone. If you want to not release on Xbox unless Microsoft gives you a better deal, it doesn't sound anywhere near as ridiculous to tell your potential customers "you'll have to also own a Playstation" as if you tried to explain to people that to use your new social network they have to also own and carry around an Android phone (or, worse, whatever the third option might be... is there even a third option anymore that would make any sense? ;P). You can tell that Apple has some insane amount of fundamentally market-distorting power as they seriously charge large publishers -- the ones you would expect to have the most leverage -- more than smaller ones; and, with maybe a sole exception of WeChat, we have never heard of anyone getting a better deal out of them, ever.
I never get this argument, but following its logic, is Apple and Microsoft being really charitable by not gatekeeping and taking a cut for every paid-for application installed on their respective desktop platforms? To answer my own question, it just seems that the status quo has inertia. In the way that we don't pay for online news, social media, or search, similarly, we've just accepted a large chunk of our purchase is feeding the app store.
Also, from memory, Xbox/Sony consoles are loss leaders to recoup profits from store sales. I'm not sure if that holds for Google and Apple phones, but I'd be more okay with app store fees if it did.
Is the "large chunk of our purchase ... feeding the app store" or is it going to shareholder profits? Appstores seem super inefficient if they cost so much to feed (ie run/maintain).
> feeding the app store" or is it going to shareholder profits
Sure. It's all just revenue growth. Sans some anti-competition regulation, it's the prerogative of a business to charge as much as the market will bear, as much as it can be sustained, by whatever legal means necessary.
They do play a massive part because their platforms are designed to lock users in. You do not really have an many alternatives to using their stores on console or mobile platforms. In case of consoles or Apple there are none.
They don't attract people, they gatekeep solutions/entertainment. It is the exact other way around, the products on their store attract people into their environment.
Apple is not attracting. Saying Apple is attracting with their compute platform would be saying Intel is attracting with their compute platform. Apple is spending next to nothing to attract users to Roblox but is acting as an unwanted gatekeeper to users that paid Apple to use their products.
Ok why doesn’t Microsoft get 30% of revenue of Steam purchases or Adobe CC subs? Why doesn’t Apple get 30% of revenue from purchases through the Safari browser in MacOS?
After all they play a massive part in making those purchases possible.
Ok so why can't I take care of those things myself on iOS? Pretty sure I can handle my own curation, licensing and payment overhead for 30% more revenue.
I’m surprised that Roblox haven’t done what Amazon did with Kindle books. They just stopped book purchases through Kindle iOS app.
At this point it’s safe to assume Roblox is as popular as Apple so they don’t have the problem of discovery. Distribution yes for which they can pay the listing price.
Well, Tencent needs to pay the same Apple and Android tax as well for its gaming business, but guess what, Tencent's gaming business is very profitable. The real difference is that Tencent has a big market share in China(arguably the most profitable gaming market in the world) and Roblox has none.
It also makes it almost impossible to compete if Apple/Google has a similar product. They get 100 % of their own earnings, you only get 70 %, so need a much much bigger operational margin. And they still make 30 % off you, so if you're equally big they in reality make 130 % and you 70 %, almost the double of you while having the same sales.
In my (non-finance, parent of a roblox-player) opinion, the problem that Roblox has is that every single roblox game has a "roblox" essence. Every roblox game is undeniably roblox, and to broaden their market and attract higher-paying users, I think they need to fix that.
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
I'm a dev on the platform and agree that there is a lot of jank in Roblox games.
There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.
Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.
Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.
Sorry to hijack your comment, but could you recommend some kind of guide for someone who wants to start? There are lots of stuff out there but I need a filter.
I would suggest you start like one would with anything programming. Come up with some simple ideas on what to build first and give it a try. Their documentation is pretty good and Lua/Luau is dead simple to work with.
Sure, but it's not like Roblox is special here, compared to Flash games / Blizzard games' custom maps / Valve game's mods / Minecraft-Factorio mods / HTML games / dev's own website / Steam Greenlight / Itch.io / Unity (yuck)...
Roblox got the multiplatform MMO experience dead right. Minecraft is atrocious in comparison; just creating an account is a painful exercise with Microsofts SSO setup and all. And then there is the Java/Bedrock schism which prevents seamless coop play. And don't get me started about modding scene on the matrix of Java/Bedrock and their own version ladders...
I’m not sure… maybe. But at the same time, I think that having access to thousands of games that more or less look and play the same has its advantages and might be a big part of its appeal. If you had Fortnite reimplemented within Roblox, why would you play the Roblox version? I don’t know.
On the other hand, as a Roblox-father also, I do enjoy some of the more polished games, but I almost always fail to get my son to be excited about them enough for us to spend our shared playtime in them instead of the other crap. No free lunch I guess.
There’s been a few high polish games that aren’t Robloxlike. There’s just been very few that are breakout hits on the platform or offer any incentive to an external audience. You’ve got to remember that the main audience right now is kids on low power devices who can’t run a lot of the more polished games so they tend to fall off the discovery cliff.
Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.
I get the impression that they are actively trying to attract older players, perhaps at least teenagers or young adults. I assume because so many young kids play Roblox they are running out of new users on that front. And I agree with your comment and others here; the extreme majority of Roblox games are poor quality and it is very hard to sift through and find anything interesting. I think if Roblox could fix that they could continue to grow even more. Perhaps they could begin to compete with "real" platforms like Steam for attention.
I can't recall the exact company name (Edit: it was TCI), but this was a smart accounting move that made one of the big US telcos frogleap the competition in the race for connectivity.
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
I had one of my wife's relatives in 2013 tell me "I'd never buy Amazon stock. They've been in business for 15 years and still are not profitable!" I tried to explain that it's because every dollar of potential profit was funneled back into R&D and company expansion, and that revenue has been growing steadily, but he just didn't get it.
If he'd bought stock then, he'd have ~10x'd his money in that time, whereas the S&P500 has ~3x'd.
I would have bought stock myself back then, but I was a broke college student.
HN hivemind has already delivered but I've found that for "I can describe it but can't remember the name" an LLM will have a decent chance of surfacing the name given the description (and is usually a very simple case to verify unlike much LLM output).
Just tried with Claude and it got it differently wrong.
My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer.
I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when it's worth trying" at this point.
ChatGPT actually completely misunderstood the description, and cited WorldCom as using “aggressive accounting” to show excess profits, vs. TCI’s supposed “excess losses.” So it didn’t even manage to find another example of a company doing something similar to TCI.
Try doing the math of accepting payment (Apple and Google take 30% off the top), then building, operating, and moderating a globally distributed auto-scaling gaming platform with 350M+ MAUs.
75% may be too high, but comparing it to say Steam’s 30% cut for distribution only is a grossly imbalanced comparison.
Is 75% the minimum taken, only if you don't cash out Robux? Extra yikes.
> the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money
And that 75% math is how much you earn, not a minimum or whatever you’re talking about. If players spend ~$1,000 of Robux in your game, you get paid ~$250.
Good content, but I must say that the site made it a difficult read. It seems serviceable on a phone, but on anything larger, it's questionable.
The width of the text seems odd. It's too narrow on a medium viewport but too wide on a large one. Around 75 characters per line is usually the sweet spot for legibility. The font sizes also seem to be quite peculiar, being done with seemingly unneeded complexity: `font-size: calc((var(--normal-text-size-value) - 1) * 1.2vw + 1rem)`. Not quite sure this is necessary?
My computer also seemed to really struggle rendering the page as it stuttered constantly while scrolling or resizing.
Additionally (and this is moving into nitpicking territory), the navbar strikes me as a bit busy and overwhelming with its 15 items. Perhaps some culling or drop-down menus are in order. I can't say I'm a huge fan of what looks to be a distorted AI-generated header image either.
Why can't they just issue their own device to minimize app store fees. it seems to me the amount money going to app store real estate is more than enough to justify some sort of method of allowing their users to play the game without app store intervening. The total amount spent so far is astounding if viewed in figures. Minus half or quarter of the total time since appearing in app-store for it to be served to the large audience. The other half would have to be too much time spent content. Rest of that half of paid out fees could have more than enough to fund a plan B.
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Don't worry, though, your iPhone will soon be your own to do whatever you want with, thanks to the DMA. It already is, if you live in the EU.
What are you talking about? Last I saw apple mostly won their lawsuits in the US and our government is so captured by late stage capitalists I doubt we're going to see any serious revision of their monopolistic behavior.
Lucky you that the EU actually does stuff to big tech.
Don’t forget about the large amount money being dumped into lobbying on behalf of big tech. It’s effective here due to capitalistic society and government benefit from it ( taxes, money contributions, competing market like( China,EU, etc)). Makes sense for these changes to take place in EU, lobbying isn’t as effective nor the incentives for politicians and government bodies.
Apple just had a fresh anti-trust suit opened in the US, and with Google just getting the stamp as a monopoly, I would say things don't look good for Apple.
So the real reason they’re not profitable is because they’re doing some accounting magic that counts their income spread over the next 27 month, instead of all up front. They are cash flow positive, it’s just that their income numbers are lagging some 2 years behind.
Roblox absolutely doesn’t want to do this “accounting magic”. They originally filed their S-1 with more typical revenue recognition and the SEC forced to change to this frustrating model. [1]
Roblox is a huge problem for me, as a parent of a 8y kid.
Let me explain: I try to block violent apps in his tablet using Google's Family app, however, Roblox internally keeps 'offering' my kid almost any game, whatever if there's violence, drugs, killing others, and so forth.
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
Roblox really needs to create some better parental controls so that it includes the option for a parent to be required to "ok" what they call "new experiences". The various limits you can set on content are great in theory, but they are apparently impossible for Roblox to enforce and as such are meaningless.
I do like Roblox from a creator perspective (I'm not a creator) since it's rather easy to guide your children into building games rather than "just" consuming them. Something which is very hard with basically everything else they do digitally.
My kids use Roblox. There _are_ parental controls you can enable through Roblox. When my twins turned nine, I had to enable 9+ games for them. I believe the age cutoffs are 9+, 13+, and 17+. I think anything with drugs should be 17+, and realistic violence/blood might be 13+? Not totally sure.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Roblox employee, but speaking only on my own behalf, and don't work on anything related to age guidelines.)
I have my kid’s set to “all ages” (the most “restrictive” category with the most “appropriate” content) and he does get gun violence, disturbing and scary games, and games based on non-kid characters (The Amazing Digital Circus).
Sometimes a game is shown and when kid tries to access it he gets a “this game isn’t allowed by your age category” or some such. This is an unbelievably dishonest way to tempt kids into content that’s not for them. If the content is not usable for them it should just not show, period.
If you work at Roblox maybe escalate the fact that content filtering by age category is totally worthless and could use fixing.
It's hilarious how plain Mortal Kombat becomes without the K.
I'm not calling you out for making a typo, I'm simply amused at how much punch (no pun intended) it loses when spelled "right". I guess it's true that Ks are Kool.
Roblox has a joint venture setup with Tencent to enter that market. The Chinese gaming market require a gaming license to enter, and it seems they've figured out a way to do it.
> When a user buys $30 in Robux, the platform’s virtual currency, Roblox recognizes $30 in bookings. An average of $3 of that $30 is spent on a “consumable” (i.e., a single-user or otherwise perishable good), and so Roblox recognizes that $3 as revenue right away. The remaining $27 is spent on “durable” goods such as an avatar. As an avatar can and often will be used over time, Roblox recognizes this revenue over the average lifetime of a Roblox user
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
It could be their active user count is increasing very fast and that is eating the rolling revenues via infra costs, customer acquisition costs, perhaps they are subventing that growth in other ways like discounts to get players into the paying segments etc.
My kids have started playing Roblox recently and they have started asking for some Robux so they can buy crap... I really don't get how so many people are into spending dollars on this stuff. Everything they wanted was ~$10-20 NZD and it was just throw away stuff, like a costume, etc. And then it's only useful in that one game you have brought it for. It blows my mind that it ever got this popular.
Because kids aren't utilitarian. They want shiny things impulsively now in whatever niche game they are playing at the moment. Or want to keep up with their friends who got cool stuff to keep status. Doesn't matter to them that they'll switch games in a week and lose everything.
To add to this, for them money is like ice cream, comes from parents rarely and gives them temporary pleasure. That's why I think it is good to pay your kids for chores or good grades so that they start learning financial responsibility early. Sure they'll blow their money on useless stuff at first but then they'll have none for some other thing they wish they had money for and will learn to choose more wisely in the future
My dad let me gamble my allowance against himself in poker. Lost it all, obviously. Was quite heartbroken he wouldn't give it back, but I sure learned a lesson :)
I concur with this. Our kid can earn robux doing chores, and she only earns them once in a while.
It often leads her to a period of deliberation, where at first she's like 'I so much need this, I must do whatever chores it will take!'. Then gradually as the minutes go by, she gets doubts, and at some point flips into "No. Way. THAT is NOT worth THAT MUCH WORK!"
Whenever this happens, I get sort of proud or satisfied.
A lot of times it doesn't happen, she does the chore and gets the reward.
But other times, especially for costly idiosyncratic choices, she comes to her senses.
The insane spending sprees/binges shrink a lot, when they are expressed in "how much vacuuming and floor washing am I willing to endure?"
> That's why I think it is good to pay your kids for chores or good grades so that they start learning financial responsibility early.
Have you ever read "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn? He states that rewarding for the things you mentioned inhibits the desired behavior in the long run.
Haven't read it but I remember reading about a study where they would watch some kids play with toys, record which were their favorite ones and then in another play session give them sweets for playing with their favorite toys after which those toys would no longer be their favorite.
However even though most people don't enjoy their work we must learn to get past that in order to achieve our goals, might as well learn this early imo.
Personally I hated most of school, pretty much every subject that wasn't math or programming. Rewards did motivate me to learn those things I didn't like.
So maybe only reward them for doing stuff they already don't like doing but would be good for them. If you see your kid doing well in math but poorly in history only reward them for history.
Doesn't inhibit them but makes the activity not pleasant because your mind is attaching the work itself to external motivation. You don't do it because you want to (for the pleasure of it), but for a paycheck and humans don't enjoy activities like that if they're not starving.
Honestly, I don't think there are very many people who wash dishes for pleasure. If you have a kid who loves cleaning for fun, by all means, don't pay them to do it.
It's not only kids that buy these.
I know a lot of 40+ year old men that buy skins and useless junk in video games all the time.
They spend a ton of money on cosmetic junk in short lived video games.
It's puzzling to me, but i see it all the time.
I'm a 40+ year old man who buys cosmetics for CS2 (which has a resale market). If you are going to spend 200+ hours doing something you might as well have a nice environment to do it in.
There's a reason everyone isn't driving a Honda Civic.
Yeah, I'll admit I have and Probbaly will "whale" in my share of mobile games. Though "whaling" amounts can vary vastly on the perception (I'm not throwing down $1000 every time a new character releases. But I do spend triple digits a month).
Key is proper financial management. If I make $10000 post tax (which isnt an impressive figure for a community like this), put 15% in savings, 30% in rent/utilities, and 5% into food, I still have $5000 left. Spending $500 on games won't really phase me.
I 100% agree this isn't something kids would do and balance, though. And I recognize others have addictions and much worse financial planning.
Some time ago I read an article explaining that initially games used to sell upgrades which were making the player stronger in multi-player games. The net result was that the games were loosing players because that mechanic was seen as unfair (pay to win).
So they switched to aesthetics enhancements only and that resulted the correct strategy to have in game sales and not loosing players.
Unfortunately cannot remember further details to prove this memory, sorry.
Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean kids widely DEMAND pay to win, and see people who complain about Pay2Win as "Losers in life", because, to them, it's just two valid paths, and if someone pays to win at a game, then it's just a mark of status. Btw, did you also know that parents in central china have protested over the right to cheat?
Tons of really great stuff in eastern work culture that I miss now back in europe. But that "results-first and call it a systematic right" thing never sat well with me.
Thank you for bringing a different worldview to the discussion. I realize that my comment was Euro (or West) centric, but that wasn't intentional. I appreciate your perspective, as it adds valuable context and enriches the conversation. It's interesting to see how cultural differences shape attitudes toward gaming, and your insights have certainly given me something to think about. Thank you for that.
If that's what the other guy was referencing, then it's a misleading characterization of the situation. The original comment was:
>Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean kids widely DEMAND pay to win, and see people who complain about Pay2Win as "Losers in life", because, to them, it's just two valid paths, and if someone pays to win at a game, then it's just a mark of status. Btw, did you also know that parents in central china have protested over the right to cheat?
The article says:
>In response, angry parents and students championed their right to cheat. Not cheating, they said, would put them at a disadvantage in a country where student cheating has become standard practice. “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,” they chanted.
The comment is claiming cheating is "a mark of status" and "just two valid paths", whereas in the qz article parents wanted to cheat because not cheating would put them at a disadvantage. Those aren't really comparable, because in the latter case they're presumably not supporting cheating in and of itself, only because they don't want to be put at a disadvantage. A parallel would be how in the US, democrats are against voter ID laws, because it would disadvantage minority voters. They don't (presumably) want election fraud (although republicans do think so), they just don't want a regime where their side is disadvantaged.
Ok, I was just providing a link for you. If you wanted to discuss whether cheating is good in this specific scenario, you should have put that as your comment to the parent.
And if you read my last comment more carefully, I wasn't faulting you, only the original characterization.
>If you wanted to discuss whether cheating is good in this specific scenario, you should have put that as your comment to the parent.
I think it's fair game to call the claim misleading, even if the parents are technically protesting for the right to cheat, for the reasons outlined in my previous comment. Again, going back to the example of democrats being against voter ID law, it would be misleading to characterize that as "democrats protesting for the right to commit vote fraud", even though they're technically supporting making election fraud easier.
It's not kids or Roblox specifically, it's gamers and platforms/games with "micro-transactions" etc.
When I was younger and still played online games regularly, I was initially stoked about cosmetic micro-transactions in (competitive) online games. Not because I wanted to buy them, but because these would fund the continuous development of my favorite games without affecting their integrity (no "pay to win" mechanisms).
Later I found this was a Faustian bargain. It turned these games and communities around them into something that I don't want to participate in.
These days I don't mind as much. Because among the sea of predatory, tacky or otherwise low quality crap there are way too many high quality, original and interesting games (typically made by small teams) that I will ever be able to play.
I don't know anything about Roblox specifically. On one hand the comment above is tragic, but on the other hand my understanding is that motivates kids to play around with Lua. If that's the case, then I'm all for it, because for me and many others that kind of thing is how we found our way into our profession as developers.
This is why I don't stress too much about validating game state in server scripts. It lets the kids cheat clientside if they can figure out how to rewrite and load the Lua scripts.
I think you're right on with the micro-transactions, Roblox is particularly bad for it. One of the games on there my boy likes is Rainbow Friends, its some sort of tame horror survival genre which he loves exploring around and playing as the different characters. If I could just buy that game as a 'full unlock' or something I probably would, instead it's $$$ "micro" transactions for every little thing and it really isn't a habit I want to get the kids into.
Yeah, this should be discussed more in my opinion. This entire business is just exploiting kids. I'm pretty worried about how my kids will behave when they get older and they will start to get bombarded by the Algorithm with all this "popular" staff.
Who is "people" here? The children or the parents? The children are literally children; to them the funny numbers we use really are just funny numbers, they don't know how they relate to real value. As for the parents, a few credits here and there to shut them up and keep them out of trouble is probably considered worthwhile. When I was little they got football shirts, yoyos, trading cards etc. Same thing.
I do not know why this is downvoted. The principle is the same. Likewise fidget spinner, likewise trading cards, likewise bag with star wars picture, likewise whatever plastic piece of crap is being sold to kids currently.
It is illegal to advertise to children in Iceland because of this. They have no means to evaluate purchases like this. Modern technology has completely circumvented these laws.
I got my 8-year-old going on Roblox because she asked for it. I had no idea what is really involved with it and as I watched her play it, it all seemed to me to be a big scam.
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
My niece was about $1500 into that game before anyone realized what she was doing. She had been asking for gift cards and what not to get the credits. My sister realized what was going on when she added it all up. She thought it was a harmless game her kid was playing. It has a lot of dark patterns designed to scrape cash. There is nothing more expensive than a 'free to play' game.
We limit our kid's Roblox and Fortnite in-app spending to Christmas and birthday, and she clearly understands she needs to stretch those game-bucks through the whole year. Four years in, it's worked out pretty well so far.
Eh IMO how is it any worse than a video arcade? I really think that's all Roblox is an arcade. Yeah it's the experience is fleeing and ephemeral. But these kids are hopefully experiencing what I felt in my childhood that I can't achieve anymore. I probably dumped 60$ alone over months going to Pizza Inn trying to win at Mortal Kombat.
mario bros didn't ask you for $1 to revive and save your progress every time you died
these are gambling mechanics... if I just pay $1 more I can make it to the end! if you pay $5 you can be better than everyone else! if I buy just one more lucky box it will have the rare item!
arcades had this, but they also had additional friction as a physical location... now little timmy can sit at home every waking hour badgering mom for another quarter to put into the machine and there's the social pressure of bobby and mary having the exclusive $10 youtuber hat
all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
>mario bros didn't ask you for $1 to revive and save your progress every time you died
Nope, that was the decade prior. I guess Street Fighter would be a better example where it monetized both ways. Eat quarters at the arcade, or spend $200 in 1980s moneys for the NES/SNES and anywhere from $50-80 for the full version. The arcade in many ways was as much an ad for "well you know can play this at home 24/7!"as much as an quarter muncher.
>all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
I'm not opposed to rating it M. But all those kids on COD and GTA tell me that that won't be the silver bullet that solves everything. At some level the parent needs to intervene and not buy that for them (like me for GTA).
Thats just being a kid. Their $10 digital costume was some $5 cheap batman figure some 30 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the skin lasted longer.
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
>I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
Easy.
Step 1: Find where your parents leaves their wallet lying around because they don't expect their child to attempt credit fraud.
Step 2: Punch in the numbers on the card into the appropriate boxes in the app because tech companies really don't have a interest in putting up any real barriers to prevent kids from spending money.
It's easy when you put it that way. But I suppose that implies a breakdown of a lot of barriers that were setup early for me.
1. My parent was careful with money. every transaction would be tracked, so anything unusual like Robux would show up quick.
2. 99% of the time a CC would be in a purse or bedroom. Both strictly off limits unless permission was granted (or emergency)
3. I was on general pretty much only allowed to use any allowance (which wasn't much) for food or the occasional school supply. Anything else would require permission. Money given was for necessities, not leisure.
It could just be the outliers popping up in news. But I just can't imagine so many social barriers breaking down over a video game.
I think it has less to do with social barriers and more to do with carelessness. Parents will give their kids video game console and tablets without thinking to turn on any sort of parental controls. Additionally there are any number of YouTube videos that easily findable without any actual effort that will show you the entire Robux purchasing process which means children who you would think might be to young to figure out the process end up figuring out the process. Finally, a lot of people don't go over there CC bill unless things look really out of sorts.
I don't think this is a major break down of society type of thing, more of something modern parents need to be aware of since making a lot of ill advised app purchases seems to be becoming one of those things all children end up doing at least once before being taught not to (or finding out the consequences of disobeying).
"...at a minimum, they will substitute a 30% fee with a 4% credit card processing expense..."
Which large corporation is paying anything close to 4% for credit card processing? Based on what's available to me in my small business, I'd be astonished if anyone doing any significant volume was paying as much as half of this percentage.
Are you selling something with some utility to adults? And as a consequence you have zero to very few chargebacks, because your customers aren't going to be overriden by their parents?
I can imagine there are a lot more problems with kids' spending on Roblox, which would bring the processing fees way up.
w.r.t article. Very wordy, could easily have been summarised.
I guess if your costs are high enough, you can eat any amount of profit.
They clearly need to get their expenses under control (if they care about generating an actual profit). There's only so much you can grow once you get to a certain threshold, and they must be getting near it.
Spending 2b on opex seems kinda crazy (3.2b revenue vs 1.2b income). Most games are opex-light, capex-expensive. Their capex is definitely not cheap either, though that seems to be a tradeoff they choose to have.
Of course, this all presumes the people running the company care about generating a profit (by no means a guarantee!). I'm sure all of the employees are making out like bandits, based on other commenters, and if management is happy to spend the money, well, that's all there is to it. It would be hard for anyone to argue with their success in growing their userbase, if nothing else.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadOf course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
But, I don't really understand how this works, and I would love to host it in a way that their cousins in another state could join. Do you know how I research this?
I get a bit confused between the curseforge mods, the java edition. Should I start by downloading a JAR of the server and host it on a cloud server somewhere, and then firewall it off to only permit my NAT IP and the cousin's NAT IPs? At some point maybe I can run it all within a wireguard/tailscale network.
How do I get started in my reading? I'm worried I'll get overwhelmed by reading /r/MinecraftBuddies, but perhaps that is a better place to ask?
https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-r...
There's tons of options to host servers in the cloud with near absolute control. I used to use a SaaS company called Minehut (https://app.minehut.com/) before I got into cloud computing and using AWS EC2 (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/setting-up-a-minecraft... - like $8/month).
If they're interested in learning the nitty-gritty on cloud computing and hosting (they probably do if they're already learning Curseforge), then get them into the AWS method. If you want something one-and-done, opt for Minehut.
Roblox took the scummy approach of monetizing child labor and taking a cut.
I am so glad, despite the other bad things Microsoft has done with Minecraft, that they haven't taken the Roblox path.
And it was more fun to run the server than play the game
This feels like an example of the phenomenon highlighted in another recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
It's pretty cool to get shareholders to pay your employees so you can be called "operating cash flow positive" as if their comp isn't an expense.
What it does mean is that, in aggregate, Roblox has issued $1B in new shares to employees in the last 12 months, diluting shareholders by 4% or so. This is the most significant factor making the company cash-flow positive while remaining not profitable. It's essentially the same as investors putting more money into the business constantly.
Roblox pays very competitively (see levels.fyi). The apparent strategy is to try to hire lots of long-tenured L6+ Googlers (seriously, it's crazy how many former Googlers I work with).
Looks like a lot who wanted the high pay, but coast along and leverage their past experience to not be dared questioned.
(Btw, some people also leave Google for other reasons.)
This has not been my experience at all.
A former mid size company that I worked at had the same scenario and it was definitely not good. They over engineered not just the systems but literally everything else, including the promotion process which involved the whole horse and pony show and was a constant distraction to shipping features while the companys finances struggled.
does not seem like fu to me
Doea this mean 700k base salary (real cash) + bonus (stock options)?
On a side note, do senior engineers get company cars?
Another commenter mentioned that cash/equity now has a 33/67 split meaning $700k tc would likely be $230k cash and $470k stocks
stock-based compensation
This is a point that's sometimes less obvious with cash flow games. It's possible to have positive cash flow even with negative unit economics, _even when no economy of scale can sufficiently improve those unit economics_ [0], so long as you have enough growth and a good cash flow situation.
That's one of the criticisms Uber has had over the years; are they capable of sustaining their apparent pre-reinvestment profits if they cut out that spending? It's potentially a bit different from the Amazon situation because most of the money is going straight into speculative bets, acquiring competitors, ads, ride subsidies, and other activities designed to lock in the market, and it's unclear if that will give them a meaningful moat, as opposed to, e.g., capital investments in a fantastic, in-house distribution and shipping mechanism.
Can Roblox actually become sustainable by cutting spending somewhere?
[0] Imagine a product with -50% unit ROI. For every dollar in revenue you have two dollars in guaranteed costs. However, suppose the product is paid for fairly early relative to those costs (e.g., the business offers a steep discount on yearly subscriptions if you pay up-front, the costs are incurred linearly throughout the year as the subscription is used, and there's a till-the-start-of-next-month plus 30 days lag on billing for computing resources used). You haven't actually used enough resources to be in the red till 6 months after the subscription starts, and you're not actually on the hook for that last payment till 7 months have elapsed. If you're also able to hit a 2x annual growth rate in your paid subscriber count (not realistic for large companies, not uncommon for a few years with good product-market-fit in gaming or some SAAS products), you've paid for the year's losses before the year has ended and still have an extra month at the end where the money is sitting in your account. As your company doubles its subscribers, your coffers will continue to double as well, even if you have indefinitely negative unit economics.
In the real world you usually have smaller numbers being considered (smaller losses, less growth), allowing the game to go on for many more years.
There are a handful of counterexamples like Madden NFL but only very few.
In 2010, a 10 year old game was quite old, but a recognizable ancestor of new releases.
In 2020, a 10 year old game was kind of old. You could tell the difference if you had high end hardware and were tuned into certain details, but the new games were essentially the same kind of stuff as the 10 year old games.
The pace of advancement is slowing and game design has reached a mature plateau; games having greater potential to last longer each year. If a game can last more than a few months then there is a reasonably good chance it can survive for several years at least (presuming the publisher doesn't decide to cut it off to sell a new version, which is a popular tactic.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market
Which is why large companies are so ideally positioned to do internal ZIRP funding of growth…except they are often culturally unable to do it.
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
It's not for you and me, we just see a garbage "game", but holy shit is there a large demographic that loves what Roblox gives them.
Of course it's bad: it's factually and objectively bad, there's plenty of investigative journalism that unequivocally demonstrates it's absolute garbage and enables the worst kind of crimes the US can imagine. But, and this is important: that has nothing to do with whether it sucks or not. In fact, it "doesn't suck" enough for millions upon millions of people to use it every single day. Roblox is terrible BECAUSE it doesn't suck: the whole reason it's so bad for humanity is PRECISELY BECAUSE it's awesome enough for a large enough demographic to keep using it, while being opaque enough to the demographic that should be correcting this behaviour to not get it so that Roblox can keep getting away with it.
The absolutely biggest problem with Roblox is literally that it doesn't suck. If only it did, kids would stop playing it!
Roblox has, objectively, a terrible effect on the world. This is demonstrably true. It's not an opinion. But saying it sucks is. Words matter.
There are hundreds of millions of users a month who strongly disagree with you.
Bloxburg feels like the least janky experience. But overall just moving around using virtual joysticks on a phone is really janky.
Another POV is that the overall catalog of games is very large. Many high quality options to go through before playing your first Roblox game. Even on phones, even free to play. With your level of experience you know that of course every kid would have more fun playing something like Clash Royale or something in the Apple Arcade, the issue isn’t that kids are stupid or tolerate crappier stuff like you imply elsewhere, but that you are not allowed to market expressly to them even in platforms like TikTok where there are many kids.
* Total expenses: $1,131,492,000.
* Average daily active users: 79.5M, or $14/DAU/qtr.
* MAUs are closer to 375M, QAUs likely somewhat higher let's say 400M?
* So if we're talking about how much they spend per quarter per unique player, it's closer to $3.
* Last quarter they brought in $955M in bookings (revenue is pointless to look at due to the required accounting practices)
[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001315098/785cb7e...
The DOJ needs to crack down on Apple and Google.
1) Make tons of cash.
2) Invest the cash back in the business.
3) Record this investment on the financials as an expense.
4) The expenses inflated by investment spending means you declare no profit and probably pay no tax on that profit you just hid.
The alternative is:
1) declare profit
2) Pay tax on it
3) Reinvest what's left after the taxman took a cut.
Which would you choose if you were raking in loads more money than it was costing you to run the business and you had growth opportunities?
Should this be a choice?
If not, how would you "fix" it?
It's entirely normal and above board. Desirable even.
You also have not managed any explanation at all, which is a shame. Could be interesting.
Your comment suggests that reinvested cash is being "hidden" as expenses, but in reality, these reinvestments are usually recorded as capital expenditures (CapEx) rather than operating expenses (OpEx), depending on the nature of the investment. While CapEx can be depreciated over time, it is not typically expensed immediately in the way operating costs are.
The implication that companies can completely avoid taxes by reinvesting is misleading. Even though reinvestments may reduce taxable income through depreciation or other deductions, this is a legal and common accounting practice, not necessarily an attempt to "hide" profits. There are also tax laws in many jurisdictions which limit the extent to which such deductions can offset income.
Your understanding also conflates profit with cash flow. Profit is an accounting concept that reflects the net income after all expenses (including taxes). Cash flow, on the other hand, reflects the actual cash generated by the business. Reinvesting profits does not "hide" cash flow but rather allocates it to future growth.
Companies don't simply choose between declaring profit and reinvesting to avoid taxes. The decision to reinvest is often driven by strategic goals, such as expanding operations, developing new products, or acquiring other businesses.
Reinvestment reduces the company's taxable income and thus the taxes owed, but it does not eliminate taxes or "hide" the profits. The company benefits from reinvesting by potentially generating more revenue in the future from the new product, which should generate more tax revenue down the road instead of restricting growth now.
Here is an approximation of your comment translated from accounting into software development, minus the part where you misunderstand essential terms:
> It’s ridiculous that software developers waste so much time writing tests for their code. If the code is written correctly in the first place, you wouldn’t need tests at all. Instead of wasting time on tests, developers should focus on just writing perfect code from the start. It’s clear that the whole idea of ‘unit testing’ is just a way for developers to justify their jobs and take longer to finish projects. Shouldn’t we just hire better developers who don’t need to write tests?
When you’re expanding rapidly and want to grow market share above all. Growing that market share with customer acquisition is economically an investment in the future revenue of the business. Advertising is one example of how this might be done.
You can classify investing in your business through advertising spend as an operating expenditure for accounting purposes. And potentially for tax purposes as well.
Now your large positive cashflow does not generate an accounting profit. Because you spent it on something that won’t be capitalised on the balance sheet.
There it is, the answer to OP’s question.
Note you can’t do that buying property plant and equipment (but some structured finance and leasing people might like a word - airlines don’t own their aircraft.)
Perhaps you can think of some examples where you’ve seen huge, massively cash-flow positive businesses in our field that weren’t generating accounting profit. Facebook, Amazon, ..?
The only other way you could sustain repeated loss ina new, growing business is capital raising.
Someone else on the thread mentioned Aswarth Damodoran’s “Free cash flow to equity” IMHO it’s worthwhile avoiding jargon when explaining things simply and concisely.
If I have a huge market opportunity and I can grow the business by spending the cash flow, I should do that instead of distributing that cash flow as profits. That opportunity will most likely not persist.
What you are proposing is that businesses should pay taxes on their income irrespective of expenses which is just a good way to break a lot of perfectly good businesses, and reduce the ability for businesses to capture new markets.
There are a number of ways where tax law could better capture the participation of large businesses, but this tack you’re on is not one of them.
One cannot avoid using technically correct terms (“jargon”) when discussing this as the categories of capital are critical to both the essential function of a business and the point you’re trying to make.
Q Where does the money come from if there's no profit?
A There would be profit, but they spent it investing in their business. Answering the implicit question "how can you spend profit investing to make it so there is no profit?" Which is the obvious follow up.
That's it. I did follow it up with "what would you do given this choice in your own business?", "should this choice be possible?", and "how would you change things if you don't think so?" Because once you've understood what is going on these are the next obvious discussion points that come up. I expressed no opinion on any of them.
What I have done is been really, really clear about what is actually going on in the face of some pretty poor responses for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen this before even though it's a very common situation. What I avoided was a credentials size war and still haven't stated any, letting the argument run on merit. Maybe caring at all about it has been a waste of time. But yeah, that's another way of saying do we just give up on HN as being a community decayed too far to still be interesting and useful - especially to the startup-curious. I kinda hope not but YMMV and I could well be prone to wishful thinking.
If you want any part of any government to investigate, shouldn't you suggest some agency that's supposed to be working for consumer welfare or so?
not all undisclosed arrangements constitute securities fraud - only those whose intent is to defraud investors do.
As for anti-competitive measures, the investigation ought to be from the consumer protection agencies, like the FCC, or from the justice department regarding anti-trust.
Edit: They are also vulnerable to insider whistleblowers. Any whistleblower would be eligible for rewards of 10-30% of any penalty ultimately assessed by the SEC. The SEC has paid tens of millions to single whistleblowers in the past.
"We depend on effectively operating with third-party mobile operating systems, hardware, and networks that may make changes affecting our operating costs, as well as our ability to maintain our Platform which would hurt our ability to operate our business.
For the three months ended June 30, 2024, 30% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Apple App Store and 16% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Google Play Store. Because of the significant use of our Platform on mobile devices, our application must remain interoperable with these and other popular mobile app stores and platforms, and related hardware. We are subject to the standard policies and terms of service of these operating systems, as well as policies and terms of service of the various software application stores that make our application and experiences available to our developers, creators, and users. These policies and terms of service govern the availability, promotion, distribution, content, and operation of applications and experiences on such operating systems and stores. Each provider of these operating systems and stores has broad discretion to change and interpret its terms of service and policies with respect to our Platform and those changes may be unfavorable to us and our developers’, creators’, and users’ use of our Platform. If an operating system provider or application store limits or discontinues access to, or changes the terms governing, its operating system or store for any reason, it could adversely affect our business, financial condition, or results of operations."
ANY publicly traded company that relies on the Apple AppStore for a significant portion of its revenue has an implied ‘so long as Apple continue to allow us to do this’ caveat hanging over their revenue forecasts.
Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and streaming games but Roblox does not qualify because it is not HTML5 and not streaming. Many people have had their businesses destroyed for far less serious violations of App Store policy.
I believe there are also other rules against putting an app store inside your App Store app. Clearly Roblox is an app store for games, with its own currency. Apple has not been reasonable on this point with other companies: they originally didn't even want to allow cloud game streaming apps to play multiple games in a single app. Their ridiculous plan was to require a separate Apple App Store listing for each game that a streaming platform supported, and they only relented under pressure after Microsoft went public with their complaints: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/11/21433071/microsoft-apple-... And after that debacle they explicitly added exceptions to their policies for game streaming apps. They have never done so for Roblox-like apps, which are still plainly forbidden under their publicly posted policies.
They are called "Behavior Packs": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...
You can purchase content that runs behavior packs from the store, but it's all through soft currency purchased with per-platform stores.
Link to some of the content: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog
As for the "not as powerful as Roblox", we're working on it :)
One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.
Apple clearly doesn't think these are the same thing either as demonstrated by their explicit policies allowing the former and their attempt to block cloud streaming apps from providing the latter, later turning into explicit policies specifically allowing it for cloud streaming apps and only cloud streaming apps, not Roblox-like apps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41146779
There are Lua scripts intended to run on the "client" (such as camera scripts) but I was under the impression (I could be wrong) that even they were converted by a server into instructions sent to the client, not run as a Lua scripts in a local Lua interpreter on your iPad.
Or perhaps the lua code is sanitised by the server such that the lua code run on the client is not the same as submitted by the user. Many App Store games do have an embedded scripting system of some kind, just not one that can run code directly inputted by an end user.
The whole point of Apple's rules here are to force app functionality and features to be reviewed when submitting an app to the app store. Anybody can go and make complete games ("experiences") in Roblox and they will immediately be available on iOS without being reviewed by Apple. It's a full game engine that lets you write custom code, use custom assets, and replace everything. Take a look at Frontlines (https://www.roblox.com/games/5938036553/FRONTLINES) as an example of a game that looks nothing like Roblox.
If you were to release an iOS app and push new features and content to it OTA then you risk being kicked off the store if you get caught because you bypassed their review process and the store page may not be accurately describing the app anymore.
Google Search is different yet, since they aren't the primary host.
On Twitter you can find actual porn straight up.
Why was a perfectly fine Unicode Blackboard X filtered out of my post.
I don't have an iPhone, but I know that you can access it via the official app from Google Play.
Reddit is allowed too. imgur, snap, etc.
I assumed you're fine as long as your raison d'être wasn't porn and the content was user generated / supplied.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
But perhaps the most catastrophic misfire of all was the notorious ‘porn ban’ that came into place on December 17, 2018 – a policy partly driven by a US law [1] that made websites liable for sex trafficking that might take place on their platform. The ban covers ‘female presenting nipples’, genitals, and any depicted sex acts. Until then, the platform had remained a refuge for a devoted community of users, but this decision affected swift and dire consequences.
https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-sold-to-wordpress/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA
(regardless of the content of 18+. Don't know how mobile has had 15 years to do granular content warnings based on decades of other medium but app stores still assume 18+ = porn).
the exact language of their T&Cs?
Not to be too flippant, but we can guess all we want, but the individual apps signed up to specific terms at the time, and you can almost guarantee that Apple (or anyone else) reserves a lot of leeway to themselves as to how they enforce or otherwise police those T&Cs.
All the conjecture in this bit of the thread seems a bit pointless given none of us are reading it, let alone reading the specific bit that whichever app in question might be held to.
Hence my start to it, as well, these seem to be allowed ...
“To start, Roblox is not a single game. It's a platform that hosts millions of user-generated experiences, such as historical roleplaying games or virtual labs to simulate physics experiments. Because of the diversity of content you'll find on Roblox, we use the term experience to refer to what you play on Roblox.” https://create.roblox.com/docs/education/resources/frequentl...
From the epic trial, Apple addressed why it allows them in a pretty tortured manner: https://www.polygon.com/22440737/roblox-metaverse-game-exper...
I think the best argument is that you’re a single player across games, kids speak of “playing Roblox”, there are portals between worlds, etc. This comment makes the point that all games feel the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287780
It’s pretty different from what Epic wanted to do by offering completely separate games in their App Store without paying apple commission.
Here's a key part of this: Executives also have kids and they want to play Roblox on the go!
It could also further jeopardize Apple's standing with regulators, since they profess to apply their rules fairly and equally without secret deals (which is transparently ridiculous but Tim Cook said it in congressional testimony so it would be perjury if proven wrong).
>“I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft,” Kosmynka said. “These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.”
Wow. The damage control was even worse than I thought. So I guess the new UE Fortnite Network would be approved no problem since "it's not a game, it's a UGC platform" (not that Epic cares about app stores anymore). Because Epic isn't making the games anymore. Just offloading the labor to others a LA VR Chat.
I think you're onto something. All of the nieces and nephews of mine that play Roblox do it on an iPad.
You're reasoning as though the policy is for Apple to follow. No. It's for developers to follow. Apple can put whatever it wants on the App Store, the policies are guidance for developers to give them a fighting chance that their apps will be accepted. If Apple wants an app, it'll go on the store. If they don't, it won't.
short rant over
Or placed in a less snarky way, capitalism spoils ideals.
Like, a framework for building first-person FPS-ish game modes and handling all the asset management, sync, etc, like GMod being built around Source does and just letting developers build the game modes without worrying about the annoying tricky stuff.
> allowing you to own everything - unlike Roblox, Unreal/Fortnite, and Unity.
makes me worried it's not in the same spirit that GMod is in. Specifically the use of the word "own" there.
My main criticism right now is this idea of jumping on the LLM buzzwagon. It’s sad that they don’t understand that their success is 100% human-driven, and that using LLMs beyond QoL stuff will be their downfall. The moment we get fully AI-generated games and worlds, it’ll be over.
Why are people OK with this? Because there's a place to spend "money" inside this virtual space?
The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
These kids arent' making anything, they're aphids.
Top Roblox devs are making millions of dollars. [0]
[0] https://okmagazine.com/p/teen-ceo-brandon-millionaire-throug...
Because like it or not, this space has basically become a "third place" for many kids. In that regard it has to compete with console games about as much as a lonely arcade machine in some old bar does. They aren't coming for the games alone.
>The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
Yup, but as we know from growing up and seeing the rise of social media: the best, sleekest solution isn't always thr Victor. It's all about network effects.
All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others.
Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it.
The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it.
I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
----
As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
There's also the socialization part. My kid's friends are all on Roblox. They don't get together IRL because a lot of them moved away when their parents had to move, and others just live way across town and "meeting at the park" is so 1980s. When new kids come to school, they share their Roblox and Fortnite usernames and that's where they hang out after school to socialize.
Everything popular seems to start as a clone of non-Roblox games, and then goes off on it's own direction from there.
Not Roblox's fault, but it's not a good place for kids to make friends; any kind of contact information must be censored. They can play there with friends made elsewhere.
Wow. I've never though about this before, but this is an awful second-order consequence of the high app store fees set by Apple and Google. It essentially incentivizes App makers to treat users as products not customers!
(Not too surprising for Google, but certainly goes against Apple's public stance).
But there’s no evidence that the App Tracking Transparency was a direct result of failure to come to terms with Facebook on some type of revenue share.
Even if a portion of the comprehensive set of protections included in ATT was specifically to target Facebook, Apple did not use it to punish Facebook.
Apple’s customers did.
Because when given a choice, 85-96% of all people across the entire planet did not want Facebook tracking them.
If one was to speculate on The decision-making behind platforms’ leadership, it follows to consider Google’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of Apple with ATT due to google’s own direct reliance on ad revenue.
Apple is no saint, it’s made many compromises on user privacy in the face of business.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that the position of selling products and services, including the distribution of others’ software is by far more consumer friendly than the quiet identification, data collection and targeting of individuals.
In any case I suspect that is too much overreach and would only attract more attention from regulators.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and this is fixing the wrong problem. (The problem being that once I purchase a portable pocket computer, I want it to be mine to use how I want with whatever software I want without asking the manufacturer for permission).
Get money from your users: 25% platform tax
Get money from advertisers: No platform tax
- Get money through the platforms' users and their payment methods, without having to worry about asking for users' credit card information, billing, chargebacks, or individual invoicing: 25% platform tax.
- Get money through your own means, similarly to what Amazon did with Kindle books: no platform tax.
Fair enough. So I guess if I don't mind worrying about all those things, I can simply reach my own agreement with a PCI-compliant payment service provider to charge customers through my app directly and therefore avoid that 25% platform tax, right?
...right?
You refund 100% but Apple and Google keep their share.
It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
What I meant by "wild" is that in this case, the dev of the game is the one receiving that ~30% slice. Apple+Google get about the same as the dev does.
Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction.
Not suggesting that this warrants a 30% cut, but unlike payment gateways Apple also provides discoverability and distribution.
Apple seems to be incredibly poor at discovery, so that's not a point in their favour.
Distribution could be done by any number of other CDNs, as will likely be done by the new EU based App stores.
What's the bet those won't be charging ~30% transaction fees to cover things? And they won't even have the same scale as Apple. ;)
If that's what you're meaning, then I simply don't know as I've not heard that before. :)
The commissions are capped by law in some parts, but not others.
As a small sample, in RO i think a large store chain pays like 0.5%. The consequence is credit card reward programs are either non existent or something like 0.1% cashback. The other consequence is you can pay by card almost anywhere.
On the other hand I've been to NL and small stores simply did not take Visa/MC because it was too expensive for them. Guessing the visa/mc charges weren't capped there.
Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are.
They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes.
Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods.
It’s not regulation in NL that blocks small retailers from taking V or MC.
In DE or NL, you operate via an intermediary ( like payone, etc ) and a single terminal. Maybe here comes the difference.
PS. Larger shops/markets ( like kaufland, carrefour, etc ) have also just one, but I guess they negociate the fee.
No, I was born and live there.
My groceries kiosk has just the single terminal.
Where I shop, only Dedeman, Altex and the eMag showroom still ask me what bank is the card from, and they're nowhere near small...
Edit: Hmm. Cozy? Small world...
But yes, is a mix/jungle of options. But I find fascinating that paying with cards has a far more adoption than some places in western world.
I think that law also cames with caps on card charges. Or at least there was so much competition between banks for the new market that purchase charges dropped on their own.
Whereas Apple's relationship seems more predatory/antagonistic (at best).
Like, one may argue that the 30% isn’t valid (and it’s 15% for the majority of devs) but to say Steam does more is absurd.
I’m curious if people who hold this opinion have actually been involved in the process of releasing apps on either platform.
And to be clear, I know valve does contribute to gaming on Linux but that’s single digit market share, so is definitely a far cry from the 30%.
I'm not sure why we are focusing on the 30%, the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
> the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
Just like every other company using the same business model (i.e. ads instead of IAP)?
Are you meaning iOS there?
Of so, please remember they pulled significant amounts of code from Open Source Software in order to lighten their development load. :)
Again, I’m not saying they’re above criticism but I am saying this feels like a very one sided presentation of facts.
Not sure what you're asking?
"Significantly" doesn't seem to be correct. At least, not for the (GPL licensed?) stuff that's been stuck on ancient versions for many years.
Though they have (from my rough memory) made some contributions back to FreeBSD where it seemed to make sense.
All that aside, the point is that they didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
They assembled a lot of pre-existing pieces (many OSS), then built on top of that. It's a common way of doing things.
And sure, some might be freeloading. But they also do contribute quite a bit to open source. https://opensource.apple.com/
I know your response was more to correct the “developed from scratch” but I still think it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectional. Even in the development of their own platforms, you can find old Usenet discussions of how they were feeding things back. I think they could have gone their own route but Unix compatibility was important.
The history of Next, Apple, and the open source community is very intertwined and unfortunately cannot be reduced so easily.
A somewhat unexpected factoid about Apple and OSS, is that Apple doesn't seem to provide hardware to any OSS projects they didn't themselves create.
Not even Homebrew, who (to my thinking) should have been first in line due to the immense benefit they used to provide Apple's users.
> didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
Well, no, it’s of course relative I meant that compared to Valve/Steam they did. And it’s not like iOS/macOS is just a collection of open source components slapped together with some small proprietary layer on top. At this point it’s mostly proprietary stuff they had to build effectively from scratch over the years with some open source components here and there.
And in that case, no, Valve didn’t provide all of that. They provided some of it, but AMD did the graphics driver, arch did the OS. Valve still offer less for the 30%. I’m not trying to diminish the effort they put in, but just pointing out the totality of what each store offers behind it is very different.
To your last point, that’s not really relevant to my point. I’m just pushing back on the other person about whether Apple or valve offer more for the 30%. You’re interjecting a completely different argument.
They only do it because they are painfully aware their rent-seeking behavior is entirely at whims of ms/apple and they want to have some moat.
https://www.neowin.net/news/valve-co-founder-windows-8-is-a-...
Take a wild guess when they started pushing steam on linux, and which version of windows introduced a store.
I think a lot of folk have a hard time reconciling that there may have been non-altruistic intentions behind something that is enjoyed today.
Similarly, Steam itself was a hedge against physical distribution to cut out the middleman. It wasn’t originally envisioned as a store for anyone but Valve.
But here we are today, and both have positive side effects that actually have outlived the original design.
2. Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution? The majority of steam games do not use Valves tooling for matchmaking or their engine.
3. Can you go without name calling? Or are you that childish that it’s the only way you can feel like you have the upper hand in a conversation?
4. I’m not defending a 30% cut and already mentioned that. I’m saying that saying steam offers more for the 30% is absurd.
:(
> Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs ...
Is that a new thing, or just for specific products? Asking because I've previously used some of their Azure SDK stuff before and that didn't seem to have a charge for SDK access.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/d/visual-studio-enterprise-s...
Meanwhile Xcode is free and has been since the Project Builder days on Next.
I’m not personally saying one is better value or not. Just that the companies have put different values on different parts of their developer flow for many decades now, and one can’t simply say that the money comes from a single source.
Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows.
While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an actual income stream).
You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do.
Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Again, I’m not saying one is right or wrong. I’m just arguing that it’s a lot more nuanced than any of the comments here suggest. Nobody has enough facts outside the companies bookkeeping and leadership to make these hardline claims.
I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.
> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies
Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.
Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.
> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.
Different companies fund things differently and put up different barriers.
Again, for the umpteenth time, I am not making a VALUE judgement. I am just saying they all do things differently and without knowledge of their books, nobody here can say what funds what internally
That’s it.
The Azure SDK's aren't charged for access: https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk/
The SDK's for modern MS products generally seem to be freely available. Maybe it's only their legacy offerings that have some charge to it?
If that's actually the distinction, then my guess is that it's simply "no cost access means higher numbers of developers using them" for the new stuff.
Whereas the legacy stuff probably would cause internal bun-fight's to happen if they changed their licensing model. ;)
What makes Windows not modern? The whole point of my comments is that different business eases have different funding.
Azure is a separate business for Microsoft than windows development.
I’m going to guess based on your range of comments that you’re primarily a devops and web developer and not a native app or game developer?
Which leads back to my first response to you: I don’t think you’re actually familiar with developing things for distribution on either steam or an App Store.
It is. Anything MS or Apple ever charged for SDKs and development tools was just peanuts compared to their other income streams.
At the end of the day open consumer platforms benefit much, much more from maximizing the amount of 3rd party software that’s available on them than from anything else.
> Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution?
Discoverability, consumer protection, relatively very good UX etc. of course that is much more valuable to smaller/medium developers than to companies like Epic/EA/etc.
Even the App Store and the 30% cut was a great deal for developers and consumers when it came out initially compared to all the alternatives available at the time.
The issue is that at this point Valve/Steam has to actually provide real value to consumers/developers and innovate. Apple can just do nothing and collect free money (consequently the App Store itself sucks immensely as an app/platform) since they don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. What are you going to do? Buy an Android? : D
Sure. But this has absolutely nothing to do with fairness.
They charge 30% because they can and because developers have no other options.
Anyway consumers paying for HW/OS are the ones that are funding the development of those tools/apis etc. Apple, MS, etc. provided all of that stuff for free (or a nominal fee) for decades because they always needed software developers more than the other way around. Any platform without third party apps would be mostly worthless.
Apple is in an interesting spot because when they released the app store initially 30% was a very good deal compared to how much it cost to publish apps on other phones.
I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
And then this gets into every other market choice as well if we’re saying all the stuff is paid for up front by the consumer.
What does Steam offer for its 30%? The majority of games on steam don’t use any steam services unlike apps on the AppStore. Valve doesn’t do educational sessions for developers or provide support for system issues. So is Steam not a terrible deal at double the cost?
But then we get to consoles, where the consumer not only pays for the device but also pays a subscription for online play. If we say that Sony/Microsoft are funded up front by the consumer and then recurring for online fees, then what the value to developers for the 30% (in addition to devkit costs)?
I’m not defending apples cut here. That’s a subjective argument that goes nowhere, but I am saying: if we say Apple’s cut is unfair, why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
Probably not relative to total revenue. But it doesn’t really change much. To be fair I don’t have a problem at all with 15% or even 30% but with the fact that Apple is running a lite extortion racket by not allowing any competition.
> how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS
I don’t think the exact nuances of internal accounting (even if they do it this way instead of just putting all revenue into a single “pot”) really changes anything.
It’s pretty clear (based on all evidence from the last 30+ years) that platforms can generate significantly higher revenue by maximizing the amount of third party software and by giving away development tools/etc. for free or significantly below cost than by trying to extract as much money as feasible possible from 3rd part developers (and it wasn’t a huge concern anyway since all major desktop platforms have always been mostly open)
> why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
IMHO mainly because Apple has a very large market share and is effectively a monopoly in certain ways.
If you want to develop a mobile app/game you can’t not make it available on iOS. It’s just not an option. This gives Apple a huge amount of pricing power and effectively allows them to exploit developers and consumers by generating a surplus they don’t have to work for.
It a scale of course but no other company is quite in the same position. Steam can lose most of their customers if they stop providing value. Even Google is in a much weaker position (consequently they don’t have such strict controls on iAPs) since phone makers can (and have) make their own app stores, side loading etc. I think consoles are closers but they are purely an entertainment product with a lot of alternatives and substitutes.
Overall I personally believe consumer surplus should most dwarf everything else to an extent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why can’t we apply “arbitrary” rules/standards to corporations based on their size and influence on the market.
Small/medium developers of course benefit much more from the increased reach/discoverability and PC games have a very different business model than mobile ones of course.
But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary (refunds, subscription management, no cc hassle etc.) I don’t think I’m unique in that way so there is some values we’ll just never know what % it’s actually worth until Apple stop restricting third part stores.
Large companies with a “sticky” user-base of course gain absolutely nothing from it.
Not that I’m trying to defend Apple, on the whole they hardly offer anything useful in return for the 30% to the developers at least because they don’t need to. The App Store as an app/platform is a complete pile of worthless garbage compared to Steam..
Such an odd take.
I begrudgingly use a Macbook for work - that is the laptop my employer issued for me. I pay for IntelliJ, because I think it is an excellent IDE.
Following your logic, Apple should somehow bite 30% of that yearly subscription, when in truth, I am a customer of JetBrains, not of Apple.
Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore, and you still chose to buy it through the AppStore. That proves you prefer going through Apple's channel and are their customer after all.
In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
No, that’s not even remotely close to what I said or implied.
> In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
Yes. The overwhelming majority still use Steam due to various rational reasons.
> Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore,
I never said that I think that Apple should have a monopoly on app distribution on their platform.
So if within their own industry Visa and Mastercard overcharge like crazy, especially when they can, what makes you so sure that they’re a good counter example for a completely different industry? Especially when competitors seem to be charging a very similar rate for a similar service?
That being said, it is a fair point when you consider that retailers and other similar product middle men tend to charge 1-3%, but it’s important to also consider that Apple position’s itself as a luxury product and brand where 30% markup isn’t actually out of line.
I would bet Apple has put more into R&D for iPhones, iPads and iOS than the entire enterprise value of visa and mastercard put together. If anything, they've worked for it more than visa/mastercard who are merely rails with distribution. Most of the heavy lifting, risk and work in the card ecosystem is done by the issuers (banks et. al.)
Visa and mastercard are logistical masterpieces.
Think of how much legal work needs to be done in order to be compliant in every country in the world.
I suppose that is just another way of describing "legal work" in this context.
And it would be morally wrong to put that costs on the app developers, without their apps the store is useless.
The lack of apps killed Windows Phone.
They built it to sell something else, operating systems and then some ancillary stuff. They became one of the most valuable companies in the world off just that.
Just like the iOS was built to sell phones. They make plenty off phones. They’ve made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world too. Access to an App Store has become a requirement of a modern phone, so they wouldn’t sell many without it. But it doesn’t mean they should be able to tax the entire economy so heavily. Just like how running a browser is a requirement of modern browsers for an operating system, but that doesn’t mean the operating system should be allowed to tax the entire economy of activity that takes place on said operating system.
And you pay for that when you buy the device. That does not justify paying Apple huge percentage each time when you are paying for an app.
The 27% are seen similar to Sony and Nintendo as fees to be on a platform which has wide reach but also gives tools and does stuff to enable app distribution.
Is that too much? I don‘t know but it‘s what all appear to do. The platform politics didn‘t evolve as fast as the tech though. So what about apps like Patreon, Netflix, Spotify, that was never on the table in 2008.
They do, which is why credit cards take that much, cost of chargebacks is a part of the transaction fee.
Microsoft and Sony take similar cuts for access to their game consoles. In return they provide: - High quality, robust developer APIs. - High quality debuggers, graphics debuggers and CPU+GPU profiling tools with in-depth access to hardware counters - Networking libraries for matchmaking, and a network backend for tunneling network traffic via their online services - True development kit hardware with expanded resources for debugging tools - High quality documentation and direct support - GPU drivers that actually work - Payment processing - All for a hardware platform that is typically sold at or below BOM cost for the initial launch of the device
Google provides distribution via the Play Store, and only for about ~4GB of app before they force you to use your own CDN because they have a limit on the size of the app bundle they'll distribute. There's likely things I'm not aware of that Google provides for app developers rather than game developers, but if we're comparing to game consoles then I'm going to compare tool for tool.
Apple's tooling is better, largely because they have way more control over the target hardware and software environment, but they take an additional cost via their highly restrictive app guidelines.
Much of this comes second hand as I wasn't on this particular team when they were working on Stadia bring-up for proprietary AAA engine (I joined about 2 weeks before Stadia was officially canned).
But the quality of support from Stadia for developers was leagues above what you get from Android. Every few weeks I'll hear from other team members how good it was working with Google for Stadia. The tooling was great. We got developer kit hardware. We had documentation and direct support channels and Google was actively managing outreach and development on tooling to ease transitioning into their systems (Google was one of the biggest driving forces behind DXC's SPIR-V target).
Compare this against the same people commenting on the Android experience and it's the complete opposite. We're left out to dry with poor support while trying to target devices that barely work.
What's the difference? Google actually had to fight to get us to come to their store. They had competition and weren't acting as a toll collector to a captive market. Game developers had the choice to tell Google to kick rocks, Xbox and PlayStation aren't going anywhere. Google had no choice but to play ball with good support and fair pricing. No such pressure exists on Mobile, and they crank the toll as a result.
However with mobile storefronts at the start everybody gets treated equally since they all have access to the same limited number of features and get the same level of (some would say neglectful) automated support. For the most part Epic Games goes through the same process of uploading a game or program and waiting for approval that Jimbob does. It's only afterwards that the level of access changes. It's this way by design. Not only because early on there were no big names in the mobile space and so no real tier system was necessary, but also because quantity is valued over quality. There are about a thousand uploads to Google Play a week (I haven't found strict data on how many are only games, but the process is the same for games and apps so it doesn't really matter), versus between twenty to thirty on PlayStation and Xbox. Creating unique avenues and methods would bottleneck things horrifically for mobile. As a developer you get an informal discount for the relative lack of quality control and increased competition you'll be facing.
This cost is very evident in the prices of the games. You won't ever see games that aren't asset flips or shovelware below a non-sale price of $1.99 on Xbox Games Store, but you'll see plenty of $0.79 games on Google Play and Steam.
It's very different on the mobile side: Apple sells iOS devices at full cost. With Android, it gets even more mucky as Samsung, the hardware vendor, gets 0% of the sales on their handset (unless the user, for some reason, uses the Samsung store), and Google gets the full 30% for only their software work. So the fact that Google gets 30% is wild.
Not that I trust Google (my personal phones are Apple) but how do you think a phone with all software made by Samsung will work? Every time I lay my hands on one of their phones (and I have one on my desk for Android development) something annoys me. They somehow think they know how to do UI/UX but they still haven't learned after all these years of "customizing" Android.
So yes, Google deserves some money. Not 30% but some.
And your Samsung comment doesn’t make sense. Samsung gets the operating system for free and then sells hardware for whatever profit they can get for it. Plus all of the post-sale platform services profit they can manage, just like Google and Apple. What is wild?
The intention is to point out that simple arguments of 'Xbox is charging 30%, so it is fine that the mobile platforms do the same thing' failed to take into account of the nuances of the situation. Isn't it weird that these platforms are all charging 30% even through all these platforms have different business models, with different cost structure and provide different values? I hadn't even talked about how Microsoft has been getting no money off sales on Steam when it is their platform, because they hadn't (yet?) lock down the platform.
Finally, Nintendo did sell the Wii U at a loss. [0]
[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nintendo-still-selling-wii-u-a...
[1]: https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1671981463040819200?s=46
[2]: https://x.com/twthereddragon/status/1672270407179665409?s=46
Also, from memory, Xbox/Sony consoles are loss leaders to recoup profits from store sales. I'm not sure if that holds for Google and Apple phones, but I'd be more okay with app store fees if it did.
Sure. It's all just revenue growth. Sans some anti-competition regulation, it's the prerogative of a business to charge as much as the market will bear, as much as it can be sustained, by whatever legal means necessary.
That's why MS bought game studios to get more games and therefore users to the Xbox.
They don't attract people, they gatekeep solutions/entertainment. It is the exact other way around, the products on their store attract people into their environment.
After all they play a massive part in making those purchases possible.
I know, the big ones are always "evil", but...
How about being real?
Yeah it's great.
At this point it’s safe to assume Roblox is as popular as Apple so they don’t have the problem of discovery. Distribution yes for which they can pay the listing price.
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.
Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.
Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.
On the other hand, as a Roblox-father also, I do enjoy some of the more polished games, but I almost always fail to get my son to be excited about them enough for us to spend our shared playtime in them instead of the other crap. No free lunch I guess.
Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
(I learned about it from HN here a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855)
I read this in a book over 10 years ago, and now 2 articles about the same trick within the same week.
They had lot of profit-less years of growth and they have captured a big part of the market share.
If he'd bought stock then, he'd have ~10x'd his money in that time, whereas the S&P500 has ~3x'd.
I would have bought stock myself back then, but I was a broke college student.
My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer.
I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when it's worth trying" at this point.
>Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
20220707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 (Problems at Roblox)
> Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents.
75% may be too high, but comparing it to say Steam’s 30% cut for distribution only is a grossly imbalanced comparison.
> the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money
And that 75% math is how much you earn, not a minimum or whatever you’re talking about. If players spend ~$1,000 of Robux in your game, you get paid ~$250.
2018 but its still worth listening to.
https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/when-the-platform-is-y...
The width of the text seems odd. It's too narrow on a medium viewport but too wide on a large one. Around 75 characters per line is usually the sweet spot for legibility. The font sizes also seem to be quite peculiar, being done with seemingly unneeded complexity: `font-size: calc((var(--normal-text-size-value) - 1) * 1.2vw + 1rem)`. Not quite sure this is necessary?
My computer also seemed to really struggle rendering the page as it stuttered constantly while scrolling or resizing.
Additionally (and this is moving into nitpicking territory), the navbar strikes me as a bit busy and overwhelming with its 15 items. Perhaps some culling or drop-down menus are in order. I can't say I'm a huge fan of what looks to be a distorted AI-generated header image either.
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
Lmao.
Microsoft tried that and failed. Amazon tried that and failed. The market has enough room for iOS and Android and nothing else.
That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Don't worry, though, your iPhone will soon be your own to do whatever you want with, thanks to the DMA. It already is, if you live in the EU.
Lucky you that the EU actually does stuff to big tech.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-sec-told-roblox-to-chan...
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
I do like Roblox from a creator perspective (I'm not a creator) since it's rather easy to guide your children into building games rather than "just" consuming them. Something which is very hard with basically everything else they do digitally.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Roblox employee, but speaking only on my own behalf, and don't work on anything related to age guidelines.)
Sometimes a game is shown and when kid tries to access it he gets a “this game isn’t allowed by your age category” or some such. This is an unbelievably dishonest way to tempt kids into content that’s not for them. If the content is not usable for them it should just not show, period.
If you work at Roblox maybe escalate the fact that content filtering by age category is totally worthless and could use fixing.
I'm not calling you out for making a typo, I'm simply amused at how much punch (no pun intended) it loses when spelled "right". I guess it's true that Ks are Kool.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
The insane spending sprees/binges shrink a lot, when they are expressed in "how much vacuuming and floor washing am I willing to endure?"
Have you ever read "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn? He states that rewarding for the things you mentioned inhibits the desired behavior in the long run.
However even though most people don't enjoy their work we must learn to get past that in order to achieve our goals, might as well learn this early imo.
Personally I hated most of school, pretty much every subject that wasn't math or programming. Rewards did motivate me to learn those things I didn't like.
So maybe only reward them for doing stuff they already don't like doing but would be good for them. If you see your kid doing well in math but poorly in history only reward them for history.
There's a reason everyone isn't driving a Honda Civic.
Everyone has their thing. I'm sure you spend money in ways that are just as puzzling to others.
Key is proper financial management. If I make $10000 post tax (which isnt an impressive figure for a community like this), put 15% in savings, 30% in rent/utilities, and 5% into food, I still have $5000 left. Spending $500 on games won't really phase me.
I 100% agree this isn't something kids would do and balance, though. And I recognize others have addictions and much worse financial planning.
Tons of really great stuff in eastern work culture that I miss now back in europe. But that "results-first and call it a systematic right" thing never sat well with me.
Source?
>Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean kids widely DEMAND pay to win, and see people who complain about Pay2Win as "Losers in life", because, to them, it's just two valid paths, and if someone pays to win at a game, then it's just a mark of status. Btw, did you also know that parents in central china have protested over the right to cheat?
The article says:
>In response, angry parents and students championed their right to cheat. Not cheating, they said, would put them at a disadvantage in a country where student cheating has become standard practice. “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,” they chanted.
The comment is claiming cheating is "a mark of status" and "just two valid paths", whereas in the qz article parents wanted to cheat because not cheating would put them at a disadvantage. Those aren't really comparable, because in the latter case they're presumably not supporting cheating in and of itself, only because they don't want to be put at a disadvantage. A parallel would be how in the US, democrats are against voter ID laws, because it would disadvantage minority voters. They don't (presumably) want election fraud (although republicans do think so), they just don't want a regime where their side is disadvantaged.
And if you read my last comment more carefully, I wasn't faulting you, only the original characterization.
>If you wanted to discuss whether cheating is good in this specific scenario, you should have put that as your comment to the parent.
I think it's fair game to call the claim misleading, even if the parents are technically protesting for the right to cheat, for the reasons outlined in my previous comment. Again, going back to the example of democrats being against voter ID law, it would be misleading to characterize that as "democrats protesting for the right to commit vote fraud", even though they're technically supporting making election fraud easier.
When I was younger and still played online games regularly, I was initially stoked about cosmetic micro-transactions in (competitive) online games. Not because I wanted to buy them, but because these would fund the continuous development of my favorite games without affecting their integrity (no "pay to win" mechanisms).
Later I found this was a Faustian bargain. It turned these games and communities around them into something that I don't want to participate in.
These days I don't mind as much. Because among the sea of predatory, tacky or otherwise low quality crap there are way too many high quality, original and interesting games (typically made by small teams) that I will ever be able to play.
I don't know anything about Roblox specifically. On one hand the comment above is tragic, but on the other hand my understanding is that motivates kids to play around with Lua. If that's the case, then I'm all for it, because for me and many others that kind of thing is how we found our way into our profession as developers.
And yes, Factorio is great.
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
Addiction triggers and reward center abuse. This, to me, is no different than bright slot machines.
these are gambling mechanics... if I just pay $1 more I can make it to the end! if you pay $5 you can be better than everyone else! if I buy just one more lucky box it will have the rare item!
arcades had this, but they also had additional friction as a physical location... now little timmy can sit at home every waking hour badgering mom for another quarter to put into the machine and there's the social pressure of bobby and mary having the exclusive $10 youtuber hat
all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
Nope, that was the decade prior. I guess Street Fighter would be a better example where it monetized both ways. Eat quarters at the arcade, or spend $200 in 1980s moneys for the NES/SNES and anywhere from $50-80 for the full version. The arcade in many ways was as much an ad for "well you know can play this at home 24/7!"as much as an quarter muncher.
>all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
I'm not opposed to rating it M. But all those kids on COD and GTA tell me that that won't be the silver bullet that solves everything. At some level the parent needs to intervene and not buy that for them (like me for GTA).
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
Easy.
Step 1: Find where your parents leaves their wallet lying around because they don't expect their child to attempt credit fraud.
Step 2: Punch in the numbers on the card into the appropriate boxes in the app because tech companies really don't have a interest in putting up any real barriers to prevent kids from spending money.
Step 3: Profit!
1. My parent was careful with money. every transaction would be tracked, so anything unusual like Robux would show up quick.
2. 99% of the time a CC would be in a purse or bedroom. Both strictly off limits unless permission was granted (or emergency)
3. I was on general pretty much only allowed to use any allowance (which wasn't much) for food or the occasional school supply. Anything else would require permission. Money given was for necessities, not leisure.
It could just be the outliers popping up in news. But I just can't imagine so many social barriers breaking down over a video game.
I don't think this is a major break down of society type of thing, more of something modern parents need to be aware of since making a lot of ill advised app purchases seems to be becoming one of those things all children end up doing at least once before being taught not to (or finding out the consequences of disobeying).
Which large corporation is paying anything close to 4% for credit card processing? Based on what's available to me in my small business, I'd be astonished if anyone doing any significant volume was paying as much as half of this percentage.
I can imagine there are a lot more problems with kids' spending on Roblox, which would bring the processing fees way up.
I guess if your costs are high enough, you can eat any amount of profit.
They clearly need to get their expenses under control (if they care about generating an actual profit). There's only so much you can grow once you get to a certain threshold, and they must be getting near it.
Spending 2b on opex seems kinda crazy (3.2b revenue vs 1.2b income). Most games are opex-light, capex-expensive. Their capex is definitely not cheap either, though that seems to be a tradeoff they choose to have.
Of course, this all presumes the people running the company care about generating a profit (by no means a guarantee!). I'm sure all of the employees are making out like bandits, based on other commenters, and if management is happy to spend the money, well, that's all there is to it. It would be hard for anyone to argue with their success in growing their userbase, if nothing else.
And how is this Roblox better than the (pre MS) Minecraft?