Hugely popular game Roblox has been down for over 24 hours, meaning child developers who pay publisher Roblox Corporation to advertise their games are losing out.
The game has been down for over 24 hours, causing stress for parents whose children are upset that they are unable to play.
The official Roblox Twitter account has acknowledged the outage and said it is working on a fix. It has also assured people that the outage has not been caused by any specific partnerships with the platform, leading some to speculate a recent Chipotle collaboration could have proved so popular it crashed the game’s servers.
The collaboration promised players Chiptole’s Halloween themed burrito, the “boorito”, for free if they go to the in-game Chiptole and complete the boorito maze there.
Roblox is a video game with over 200million monthly players – over half the children in the US play it according to a report by The Verge. Players can make their own games within Roblox, either for fun or to try and make some money.
Roblox actively encourages players to make their own games within the ecosystem. However, a recent video of an investigation into Roblox reveals that the game could be exploiting its young player-base.
Player-developers – often children – are sold the idea that they’ll “reach millions of players” and “earn serious cash”, though they only get paid in an in-game currency known as Robux. The exchange rate from Robux to US dollars is heavily weighted in favour of the developer-publisher that owns the game.
Roblox is valued at almost £30billion ($41billion), yet these child workers see only a fraction of that money as their labour drives its valuation up even higher. They pay Roblox Corporation to advertise their games within Roblox, so an outage of this size will leave potentially millions of children out of pocket if the company doesn’t issue them with a refund for unused adverts.
In other news, New World has a vulnerability that allows HTML code to be injected into its chat box, and Ubisoft workers have criticised the company for failing to act on their demands.
The post Roblox’ suffers day long outage, costing young developers real money appeared first on NME.
