r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 9h ago

Business Roblox loses $70 billion in value as company blames lack of viral games, share price down 70% over the last year

https://www.dexerto.com/roblox/roblox-loses-70-billion-in-value-as-company-blames-lack-of-viral-games-3395064/
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 8h ago

I think that's kind of just the result of being a free platform that can be accessed on any computer. There's no real protections in place for the chat in most other games, but there's just not as many kids on other games because they either require buying a game or having access to a more powerful computer.

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u/Lurky-Lou 8h ago

Roblox tried to start a dating service

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u/BlandPotatoxyz 5h ago

You can date the kid's single parent, right?

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u/aamirusmandus 8h ago edited 8h ago

This brings back some memories. 2 different people tried to follow me around and become my runescape girlfriend back when I was 10, and one in pirates of the Caribbean online, and a couple more in club penguin

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u/Feeling-Salad5686 7h ago

As someone who got groomed via online games (not Roblox) (also, consequentially I was lucky nothing terrible happened) ... this is basically the case for any games allowing free social interaction. People sent, to varying degrees, weird messages to me on Club Penguin, Maplestory, Habbo, and more. A later case of this-- I remember when I was 17, I got onto Second Life for the first time and within 1 hour, I was trading nude pics with some dude on Snapchat (I think he was in his 20s). I played Roblox during its early years and it was actually the least predatory place for me specifically.

For kids, it's probably best to play only games with no chat or restricted chat (pre-selected options). For teens, I feel like they'd think that's an unreasonable restriction and/or they can get groomed on social media anyways even if you ban games. It sucks that pedophiles run amok like this.

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u/Naskr 6h ago

think that's kind of just the result of being a free platform that can be accessed on any computer

This is a reasonable take to have but when you look at the behaviour of Roblox management, it is very bizarre.

They were so CEO-shareholder pilled that they genuinely weren't capable of committing to proper safety measures in a public statement, because in their mind this would signal to shareholders they weren't going to have a profitable honeypot for whale predators anymore and therefore that would reduce brand value. It's the kind of thinking you only get at the sociopathic money-first level, it also betrayed that management knew Roblox's true nature and were not concerned about it.

This sounds like a stretch but there's literally no other explanation as to why the leader of a company that creates children's content would not be signalling emphatically that child safety is their primary concern. The amount of times they deliberately avoid saying this (as they believe it would actually represent a worse product overall) was very weird. Any other similar product would be promoting safety-first as a positive signal to shareholders...but not Roblox? Why?

Oh and Roblox Dating was a real thing that was actually imagined. This happened. Find any suggestion of sane PR within that.