Day 118 - Roblox
Immersive Sim, Mobile Trash, Horror ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Well, happy Monday everyone. We’re kicking off this week with a (terrible) surprise!
ROBLOX WEEK
That’s right, this week we will be playing Roblox - all week! I personally can’t wait to find out what potential zoomer inner-me has missed out on all these years.
The first thing I realize upon creating my account is the lack of email required to sign up. You just need a username, a birthday, and a password. I wager this is because Roblox’s target audience is children, and children generally don’t have emails. This would also explain the million devices it also advertises on the sign-up page. I’m sure phones and iPads and Xboxes are much easier to access for younger kids than a PC would be, but I’m old, I don’t really know anymore.
I sign-in and head straight to the avatar editor. You aren’t going to catch me looking like a nerd in Roblox - it turns out there’s a pretty extensive character editor:
Well, there isn’t much to pick from right now, but it looks like I can unlock customer animations, new clothing, different shaped heads, etc.
I dress myself up. I have a transformation similar to that movie where they make Anne Hathaway hot again because she removes her glasses. I’m looking cool as hell:
I headed to my inventory to see if there was any other cool stuff I missed that I could equip. I am met with an empty page, and list that gives a sinking feeling of how deep the cosmetic rabbit hole truly goes:
There’s another very important part of this page - you might have also noticed:
Ahh, there it is. I can’t wait to see what cool items I can use my parent’s credit card to purchase! I’m going to be the coolest looking guy this side of the Robloxissi.
I added some of the top few items to my cart. As far as I could tell, the only way to tell the price of something was to add it to my cart - I don’t like this, as it takes one step out of purchasing. The cart is just a little dropdown menu that also places a big green “PURCHASE” button that didn’t seem to actually lead to a checkout, but rather was trying to take money from the payment information I didn’t have set up. Essentially, if I was a child and my parents ignorantly gave me their credit card to purchase one item for my birthday or something, and didn’t remove that card from the account, I would be just 2-clicks away from purchasing a 7 dollar cosmetic item. I looked into it a bit and there does seem to be a password protection parents can set up to restrict purchases. My point here is how easy they make it to purchase things.
The other thing I don’t quite know yet is if you are able to earn Robux (what Roblox calls their currency) just by playing the games it hosts. If this is the case, then I don’t think the cosmetic system is as predatory as I initially thought. Also, it seems like the cosmetic items might be user generated as the marketplace contains items like a Kanye and Homelander head.
I don’t know if Roblox would take a portion of what it’s selling for (similar to the Steam marketplace) or if Roblox only takes profits from selling the Robux. I will say, I added some of the top items from the marketplace and a surprising amount of them were actually free:
However, I did add the top items of the marketplace, so there’s a good chance those were only at the top because they were free, and mostly everything else will cost money.
I’m talking about this because I find the mechanics of the economics of free-to-play games fascinating. I also feel like they are often predatory and utilize unethical tactics to squeeze as much money out of the game as possible, especially when they are targeted towards children.
Now, I don’t see any indication that the games cost any money to play, and my opinion will change if that is the case. From where I’m standing now, it seems like all the purchasable items are cosmetic, and the games are free. I think this is one of the best ways to do free-to-play games, but maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by Dota 2 and Valve. I have no issue if some kid wants to spend a dollar on a Homelander face as long as they don’t get an advantage over others and it’s just cosmetic. I have a feeling that if the marketplace is user generated, the games might largely be user generated as well. I’m picturing something like Garry’s Mod servers where the users might be able to set up a monetary pay-to-win system into the game. It might not be fair to blame Roblox for any of this, but rather the individual games. I think making the Garry’s Mod connection helped me understand what Roblox really is - people can use Roblox assets to make their own games and share them. At least that is my current running hypothesis. We will be playing Roblox all week, so I’m intentionally not researching too deep into all of this. I’m all for the joy of discovery.
Alright, after that tangent, let’s reel it back in. After spending zero dollars in the shop, I head over to my profile page to set that up - I have to have the coolest “About Me” to match my really cool avatar:
After hitting submit, Roblox deemed my About Me “too cool for school” and translated it to convenient twitter hashtag speak:
Alright, now that I’m looking absolutely fly, and the world knows all about how cool I am - I think it’s finally time to get some good old fashioned gaming in!
Wait a second, I can’t find any games. All I see are mobile game ads!
Oh well, perhaps we will try again tomorrow…
Recommend:
Replay Percentage Chance: 100%
Time Played:
Sam’s Take:
I honestly had no clue what Roblox was going into this. I knew you could play games on it. I knew mainly younger folk were into it. I knew there was some online debate about them profiting off of user generated content and paying the creators in table scraps. Like Skeeter, I don’t have the details for how all this works, and I’m not going to pass judgment yet. We got a week to play some games and try to understand this beast a bit more, but I will say I was shocked by the fact that Roblox is a social media site. Friends tabs and everything, I even added Skeeter!
As with any social media site, it’s important to make a good first impression, so I made an avatar that represents the real me:
I continued this theme of honesty with my bio:
Honestly most of my time for this review was spent making our, frankly incredible, Roblox website banner for this week. Scroll up and give that beauty a good look! Skeeter made the day 100 one and our regular one. He’s much better at making banners than I am.
I’m not totally sure how the avatars play into the website. I’m assuming some games use our avatars, similar to some Wii games using Miis, but I’m not confident. Either way I’m excited to finally understand these Skibbidy kids and their gaming L-takes.
[Sam Note: Google Docs auto-corrected my incorrect spelling of “Skibbidy”]
Recommend: I guess we’ll find out.
Replay Percentage Chance: 100%
Time Played: Avatar 2: The Way of Water
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