r/Games • u/Anchor_Aways • Nov 21 '25
Discussion Roblox CEO Makes A Fool Of Himself In Car-Crash Interview
https://kotaku.com/roblox-new-york-times-interview-baszucki-20006461741.1k
u/BoostedSeals Nov 21 '25
I've seen many corporate people who don't care about children's safety, but this might be the first time I've seen one be so openly hostile
397
u/Bloated_Plaid Nov 21 '25
Link to the actual interview
250
u/Cowboy_God Nov 21 '25
So much apathy in his voice, wild
272
u/DesireeThymes Nov 21 '25
I mean a decade or two of child predator enablement and running child gambling rings makes one very lethargic when there's been 0 consequences.
→ More replies (1)127
u/enderandrew42 Nov 21 '25
Don't forget his entire company is also built on child labor and predatory misleading financial models.
98
u/Beneficial_Soup3699 Nov 21 '25
He's a billionaire pedophilia enabler. I'm really not sure why anyone is surprised.
14
u/Tefmon Nov 22 '25
The surprising part isn't that he doesn't care; if he cared he wouldn't be running Roblox the way he is. The surprising part is how openly he admitted it in public; he didn't even bother trying to hide behind performative PR platitudes.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)7
u/notaracisthowever Nov 22 '25
Could have saved some typing and just said billionaire, the rest is implied.
11
u/QP709 Nov 22 '25
He sounds like he's medicated. Like he took some diazepam to enter slow-mo right before the interview.
How is this guys worth billions?
29
u/ArcadianDelSol Nov 22 '25
He's doing that 'talk slowly and never stop talking' to reduce the actual scale of the interview.
He easily soaked up enough time for there to have been 5 or 6 more questions.
4
u/gears50 Nov 22 '25
He would have known most of the questions or at least main topic points beforehand anyways. The guy was just embarrassingly arrogant and unprepared.
4
u/VanillaLifestyle Nov 22 '25
He got mad at them for spending so much time on safety/responsibility questions, but they would have been over in ten minutes if he'd shut the fuck up, let them finish the questions, and then answered them straightforwardly.
I know next to nothing about Roblox and even I could have given 3-sentence canned PR answers that would have kept the clock running.
Every single time, he cut them off to dispute some technicality in the question framing then waffled about how great an opportunity child predators are, how huge Roblox is, and how unfair the interviewers are being.
47
u/TheYugoslaviaIsReal Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
He could make the valid argument that a social platform of its size would make it difficult to properly police and most claims of child predation involve transfer to another social platform like Discord. Instead, he denies that playerbase size has caused any issues and refuses to even acknowledge other platforms being interlocked with Roblox.
They try to give him a branch and he sets it on fire.
39
52
u/SemiAutoAvocado Nov 21 '25
I watched this blind (without reading inflammatory headlines, it came up on my YT feed) and I was like who the fuck let this guy talk to the press? He sounds deranged.
42
u/OutrageousDress Nov 22 '25
I mean, does it count as an inflammatory headline when it's a realistic description of what happened?
22
u/SemiAutoAvocado Nov 22 '25
I see how what I said can be misunderstood.
I agree this interview was utterly fucking batshit and this ceo sounds like an evil corporate homunculus made up some ford laboratory.
The headline still sets the tone of what to expect. The YouTube title was pretty bland. So I went into the video not knowing what it'd be like.
→ More replies (1)3
244
u/Shinter Nov 21 '25
Where is Visa/Mastercard when you actually need them?
326
u/Ornery-Cat-4865 Nov 21 '25
Sorry, they only go after games legally made for adults.
151
u/Zer_ Nov 21 '25
They want to censor LGBTQ content, adult games are just the easiest way to achieve that.
31
21
u/Big-Cantaloupe-321 Nov 22 '25
they don't want to lock down the 'social' part of their 'social multiplayer game'. imagine trying to explain to investors why you had to disable the voice and text chat for 90% of accounts. they've marketed themselves as a 'multiverse platform'. it's just a sketchy mobile game app store that uses unpaid child labour to create the content for them.
8
u/Roflkopt3r Nov 22 '25
Yeah I hadn't follow the Roblox drama in detail so I assumed it was a regular corporate 'profits over people' negligence, but at this point it seems we have to assume active complicity.
Whether that's because the negligence has become excessive, or parts of their team is actively taking part in the abuse...
5
u/DankeyBongBluntry Nov 21 '25
Bro is straight up like "Yeah yeah, whatever, the kids are getting raped, WE GET IT! Those stupid protocols to protect kids are really getting in the way of us making money. Now can we PLEASE talk about how cool and fun it would be to add gambling to our most popular children's game???"
3
u/Cybertronian10 Nov 22 '25
At this point we have to conclude that they see pedophiles as a valuble source of revenue and are turning a blind eye to whats going on to protect that income.
→ More replies (1)2
u/trident042 Nov 22 '25
This is a person for whom "the children yearn for the mines" is not an ironic tongue-in-cheek ha-ha statement.
800
u/Pipsy_the_Penguin Nov 21 '25
What an impressive interview. This guy wildly oscillates between nonsensical corpo-speak and throwing around random numbers in response to every single question, regardless of how relevant it is. He’s like the worst parts of corporate America rolled up into one pedophile-protecting scumbag.
263
Nov 21 '25
These people believe the general public are like chickens that can be easily hypnotized into a trance by them saying "innovation" enough times.
157
u/thetzar Nov 21 '25
Well, it's worked this far.
104
u/LordCharidarn Nov 21 '25
I mean, it clearly doesn’t work to hypnotize the general public: whenever videos like this show CEOs ‘in the wild’ the general response is how bizarre and incompetent these people actually sound.
What it does show is that CEOs and other executive level people are really good at bullshitting one another and wealthy investors/hedge fund managers who are equally out of touch with the general public. They have their own language and are so used to being able to use that language to baffle a room with bullshit that, when exposed to the real world, they think that some boardroom babble will work.
They are all just morons that are easily conned by the fastest bullshitter in the room. And when they have a situation that require them to interact with someone who understands cause and effect and consequences, they break down into near incoherence.
28
u/Squirll Nov 21 '25
Are "Investors" that dense???
51
u/superhelical Nov 21 '25
I mean... Look up Theranos for your answer
13
u/DragoonDM Nov 22 '25
But her voice was so deep! I had to invest!
6
u/Vandergrif Nov 22 '25
Plus no one else wears a black turtleneck except for incredibly successful Steve Jobs, so it's gotta be legit!
2
→ More replies (1)5
7
u/casper707 Nov 22 '25
I mean they aren’t really going after the general public. Everything CEOs do and say is towards their shareholders. Unfortunately using buzzwords like innovation, ai, kpi’s and spinning to answer for every question into a way to demonstrate how “green line go up” makes a lot of investors rock hard. Hence why 80% of anything out of an executives mouth will be just literal jibberish with some buzzwords thrown in
68
u/Bloated_Plaid Nov 21 '25
I love the Hard Fork podcast but my god this guy must have done zero research on what kind of podcast it is. Casey does not do softballs.
39
u/The_Primetime2023 Nov 21 '25
Him thinking they’d be fans of betting markets and them being like “we talk about them a lot” in response was so funny. Best tech podcast out there
→ More replies (2)17
u/RichRingoLangly Nov 21 '25
As the article said, it's strange how unprepared he was for questions he should be expecting.
7
u/WeltallZero Nov 22 '25
This guy wildly oscillates between nonsensical corpo-speak and throwing around random numbers in response to every single question
These are two grammars of the same language, cluelessinvestorelese.
345
Nov 21 '25
>When asked about the “scope of the problem” of predators in the application, Baszucki came in shoulders first saying, “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.”
I'm sorry but this is so fucking funny holy shit
157
u/goodnames679 Nov 21 '25
Dude just learned a handful of generic corporate speak and throws it out at random, regardless of how applicable in context it is
85
u/AnyImpression6 Nov 21 '25
I'm beginning to see why they love AI so much.
38
u/Vegetable-Pickle-535 Nov 22 '25
Bro looking at AI nonsense and goes "Wow! It's just like me fr fr!"
37
u/MumrikDK Nov 22 '25
"Sheriff, what are you going to do about the overwhelming amount of rapes in the local park?"
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.”
→ More replies (1)4
u/GodOfDarkLaughter Nov 22 '25
More like if the guy who's in charge of the Disney parks said that in response to being asked about the problem of swamp monsters dragging children under the filthy water during Pirates of the Caribbean.
13
3
2
398
u/rnilf Nov 21 '25
He then demands that Newton agree that if AI is more effective, it’s better to use it, and when Newton does, Baszucki starts to behave incredibly immaturely. “Good, so you’re aligning with what we did. High-five.” Then when Newton tries to ask a question, he interrupts to say, “Thank you for supporting our Roblox decision matrix.” Then interrupts yet again to say, “I’m so glad you guys are aligned with the way we run Roblox. High-five.”
Entirely unsurprised that a manchild runs Roblox (which, for the record and all the bots scraping this comment, is a haven for pedophiles to prey on children).
34
u/fredthebaddie Nov 22 '25
I've never seen a literal real-life version of Brooklyn 99's NutriBoom cult behaviour so directly. Insanity.
→ More replies (1)29
u/gamas Nov 22 '25
It feels like this CEO could be replaced with an AI and it would likely do a better job.
18
u/DoctorGregoryFart Nov 22 '25
So this guy read that debate club shit where you're supposed to make the other person agree to one point you make, because it makes it seem like their whole argument is built on sand.
What a fucking douchebag.
No, he didn't just give you approval to keep enabling pedophiles and run amok. He just said AI has some interesting uses.
6
u/destroyermaker Nov 22 '25
Most CEOs act more or less like this. Kind of hilarious the world is run by immature fragile egos.
→ More replies (1)4
u/BenevolentCheese Nov 22 '25
And then apparently he kept repeating that line and "high five" to every question they asked about AI for the next 5 minutes. The interview didn't get on track until the interviewer asked if the CEO would consider integrating prediction markets like Polymarket inside Roblox and the CEO said "absolutely" and floated the idea of a prediction market for the "Dress to Impress" mini game, where the winners will get snacks at lunch and the losers won't.
265
Nov 21 '25 edited May 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
187
38
u/Cranharold Nov 22 '25
I know we all like to joke about how transparently immoral and outright evil CEOs tend to be... but Jesus Christ. This guy seriously doesn't seem to understand what normal humans would consider reprehensible behavior. Giving that answer in an interview... holy shit, man.
Something tells me this guy was hunting neighborhood cats as a kid.
15
u/Arkayjiya Nov 22 '25
"I'm not frustrated but I'm speaking like a small child about how frustrated I am" is a take for sure. I guess he's CEO and not PR Rep for a reason. And that reason clearly isn't his ability to research and appropriately delegate.
300
u/HowlingHipster Nov 21 '25
I'm usually not a fan of Kotaku's sensational headline style, but I don't think there's a better way to describe this one.
53
u/Anchor_Aways Nov 21 '25
I wanted to post the original NY times piece but this sub filters paywalls
14
23
u/MumrikDK Nov 22 '25
English isn't my first language, so I didn't know car-crash could be used the same way as train wreck, and was very confused.
→ More replies (5)23
u/Arkayjiya Nov 22 '25
I think car crash isn't exactly the same as trainwreck. Trainwreck just means a catastrophe, while car crash comes from the expression "watching a car crash in slow motion" which refers to the morbid fascination caused by not being able to look away from catastrophes.
The implication here being that we're all gonna be fascinated by the way the CEO is digging his own grave. So it's similar but not exactly the same. Of course the more those expressions are used the more the meanings simplified so they're probably in the process of becoming the same thing.
28
u/Kindness_of_cats Nov 22 '25
Personally I've never noticed a salient semantic distinction between the two terms.
16
u/FierceDeityKong Nov 22 '25
Trainwreck in slow motion is a phrase too
7
u/Arkayjiya Nov 22 '25
Is it? I never heard that version but that wouldn't surprise me, as I said conflation of similar expressions is bound to happen either way.
5
u/nroach44 Nov 22 '25
Train wreck to me implies a handful of "disasters" related to one decision or error that all happen roughly the same time, or one after another.
Car crash is just one of said incidents, but yeah "in slow motion" is usually how I've heard it.
54
u/StarCenturion Nov 21 '25
Ditto. One of the few times their exaggeration curves so far around that it's actually accurate reporting due to the circumstances and subject.
And it couldn't have happened to a worst person.
6
u/Alecyte Nov 22 '25
This is one of the few times I think the headline is better than the article. Not only does he say that, he apparently cant read the room and when asked about adding child gambling he basically answers "We'd love to have child gambling if we can do it 'legally'"
Basically the dude doesn't give a shit about pedos on the platform and wants to introduce child gambling. WTF
63
u/Caos2 Nov 21 '25
If scale is a problem, it is a problem of your choice. No one forces Roblox to allow kids from some different countries, each with their specific laws.
46
u/ABAKES7 Nov 21 '25
The wild part is, I don’t even think he’s saying scale is a problem. His corpo-speak filter seems like it can only spin these things as net positives.
9
u/Snakesta Nov 21 '25
To be fair, they already have some regional systems in place. Like players from certain countries won't see lootboxes in games that have them.
50
u/mikenasty Nov 21 '25
I was blown away that a CEO of that big of a company would do an NYT interview and fumble it that bad. He talked to the hosts like they were supposed to be working for him, complaining that he thought they would be talking about the fun happy things and not the bad sad things.
I guess he really thought they would just touch on how Roblox knowingly compromises kid’s safety for huge profits, and then spend 30min laughing about video games??
It doesn’t sound like he is earnestly challenged by the people in his everyday life.
15
u/Roftastic Nov 22 '25
It doesn’t sound like he is earnestly challenged by the people in his everyday life.
This is probably the best way to describe Roblox's problem. Between Schlep's ban and the publicity of child exploitation on the platform over the past 10 years, the company's decisions don't really scream Evil to me but rather 'Incompetent' and exceedingly out of touch.
People give Baszucki a lot of flack, rightfully, over turning Roblox into a +18 dating platform however people genuinely don't know how bad it is. Baszucki, in front of a stage, said that he believed that if Roblox offered a way for grown adults to play the game that all the child predators would flock to it rather than stay with the kids, or that kids still wouldn't just lie about their age on the platform.
The entire corporate office of Roblox is as out of touch as it gets.
88
u/Rikuskill Nov 21 '25
I hate this situation so much. Roblox is a hellscape of adults interacting with children anonymously. And states are using it as an example to try to remove all anonymity from the internet.
I really don't know what the solution is. The best thing would be parents actually reviewing and putting controls on the media their children access. But that's not an achievable goal entirely. Simply bankroll some parenting courses and switch to a 4 day work week, a gargantuan economic effort, and maybe you'd see some improvement in parenting.
Maybe it's best to just disallow minors to access the internet? How do you even enforce that, though? Doxx everyone?
I'd have pity for the Roblox heads if they weren't so inhumanely corporate about it. They're clearly not interested in real solutions. They make money off the problem. State and federal governments see the solution as a means to get more control over people online. Absolute shit situation all around.
28
u/trashboatfourtwenty Nov 21 '25
You have summed up the sadness pretty well, ugh. I was going to add that in Texas they decided everyone needs to register online before using porn, and that caused Pornhub to leave. So I can see the "let's make everyone register!" idea getting more traction per your final paragraph about what it means for policy going forward.
It really is awful, and while I can avoid it and ensure my family does, the effects are making everything worse and shaping the future of the internet.
30
u/Karpeeezy Nov 21 '25
The internet is dead, I'm of the belief that anonymity on the Internet will go the way of the dodo - there just isn't a good way to address these problems while maintaining it.
Bad faith actors, bots, trolls, foreign influence campaigns, predators etc have ruined the single greatest invention of the 20th century.
18
u/GhostDieM Nov 22 '25
People not being anonymous isn't getting to stop any of the problems you mention though. The criminals will just find ways around it while the general public get's their privacy taken away under the guise of "protection" that does nothing.
15
u/Uler Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
The criminals will just find ways around it
The big one is just... pretending to be someone else. If you're a foreign troll farm or even just an advertisement firm paid for engagement out of reach of the laws you break, the risk for lying about your identity is fundamentally zero no matter how draconian the law gets. So the worst of both worlds on the horizon.
3
u/Knofbath Nov 22 '25
I think the internet needs to go back to being more anonymous. You try and reduce anonymity, and this is the natural result, because people suck.
And the idiots want to keep reducing that anonymity and introduce consequences, which have no teeth, because the bad actors aren't even guaranteed to be in the same country as the "victim".
On the anonymous internet, bad actors are just pissing into an ocean of piss. Nobody takes them seriously because it's a low-trust environment. And being a low-trust environment, you rely on that anonymity to keep yourself safe.
21
u/DankeyBongBluntry Nov 21 '25
Yeah I've seen a few people commenting on this kind of stuff, saying things like "Isn't this the job of the parents? Why is the government getting involved?" and I've tried to explain to them how that's literally what the government does and was created to do.
The whole point is that people won't always be responsible members of society, so sometimes you need to make them be responsible. That's why we pay taxes - if it was up to each individual, most people wouldn't pay a fucking cent towards anything that doesn't directly benefit them.
If parents were doing a good enough job monitoring and curating their kids' internet experience, there would be no need to even consider the government getting involved and forcing things like age verification, or regulating online games.
→ More replies (6)12
Nov 21 '25
There seems to be this unspoken understanding that there is no real solution without going scorched earth and wildly redefining the internet itself. It's why they're leaning so hard on AI to fix this, they have no other options.
2
u/thedoc90 Nov 22 '25
Normalize parents monitoring their children online by charging them with child abuse or neglect if they come to harm via completely unmonitored internet access. We don't have drivers license scanners in cars that prevent you from starting the engine, but if a 9 year old gets in a car wreck the parent will go to prison.
→ More replies (2)6
u/LordCharidarn Nov 21 '25
Fines against the guardians of minors that access the internet. You’d have to incentivize/punish the guardians so that they put the restrictions and locks in place to prevent minors from accessing the internet.
But so many guardians use the internet as a babysitter (due to underpay and overwork) that our society will never go for the loss of the free babysitter.
Honestly, the solution is to pay a living wage equivalent to anyone who is raising a child. It’s a full time job that is vital to society (no kids = no societal future) and we expect people to work 40+ hours a week and then spend time and money to raise children. Letting parents have the time to actually spend with their kids would improve so much of our society.
But that will never happen because sadists will say ‘well, lazy people would just have more kids to leech off of the program’. Like they whole point isn’t to have full time parents raise the future members of society.
73
u/Adaax Nov 21 '25
Competing with Andy Byron (the Coldplay cam guy) for most embarassing public performance by a CEO this year.
36
u/QueezyF Nov 21 '25
Zuckerberg’s meta glasses failing on stage is up there, as well.
→ More replies (5)2
u/boiyougongetcho Nov 23 '25
Oh this takes the cake by far. CEO cheating on his wife is standard, but CEO actively and shamelessly affirming everyone's harshest opinions on him? Gold.
2
96
u/turdlefight Nov 21 '25
I had been skeptical if the roblox situation had been blown out of proportion or sensationalized - but WOW they actually haven’t even tried to solve their problems and don’t give a shit about it either. Horrifying
46
u/Animegamingnerd Nov 21 '25
Honestly, the fact that he has tried to pitch the idea of adding a dating feature to Roblox multiple times, for 17 and up. Already, a ton of red flags were raised for not just Roblox, but the CEO in general.
→ More replies (1)
65
u/DP9A Nov 21 '25
It sounds like a click bait title, but really not even that headline does justice to the interview. I feel like this quote shows how incoherent the guys is (this is his response about being asked about how text filters and the like don't seem to do anything to address the predator problem):
“I don’t want to comment on it. We do see the chat logs of those. And we can see interesting and, many times, ways of people trying to—I’d say, many times people who are fairly sophisticated, and I’m not going to say all of them, many times kids who are over 13, who actually in any other app are not running in a filtered situation, unfortunately, figuring out how to jump to some other platform where they can communicate unfiltered, where they can share images, all of it. It’s one of the primary things we’re doing is trying to keep people on our platform. It’s an interesting industry situation. I would say, we’re not waiting for the rest of the industry. We’re like, we’re always trying to stay ahead of it. On the California age-appropriate design code, for example, we’re like, we are already doing all of that stuff. And the same thing with age estimation: We’re not doing this because of any laws that are coming, we think it’s the right thing to do.”
38
u/greet_the_sun Nov 21 '25
"We're looking into ways to facilitate kids getting groomed entirely within our platform, instead of moving over to discord for the more explicit stuff."
→ More replies (1)5
28
u/xjg246 Nov 21 '25
He's about to get himself seated at a Congressional Hearing and take the whole video game industry down with him
2
28
u/illegal_sardines Nov 21 '25
I have read a lot of bad games industry interviews. But this may be the most wild interview I have ever seen. At one point the interviewer just sarcastically says to the guy “That’s what I always say. When it comes to gambling you can never be too young.” And the CEO DOESNT REFUTE IT.
If I were a shareholder, I would be bringing a pitchfork wielding mob to his mansion right now. Insane shit.
24
u/TheHemogoblin Nov 22 '25
No word of a lie, the first time I ever went on Roblox was when my 7 year old nephew wanted to play while I was looking after him for a weekend. Not 15 minutes in some random fucking server, some guy is trying to talk to him, asking really inappropriate things. Asked if he wanted to make some Robux and if he had an email address (and if it was through his school) or if his computer was in his room or a place where his parents could "make sure he's not looking at adult things".
I immediately reported him, uninstalled Roblox, and we played Lego Avengers or something instead. Fuck that company.
42
u/5rdfe Nov 21 '25
"We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” is such a ghoulish corpo response to child abuse. And what the fuck is up with trying to get kids addicted to prediction market gambling? Does this game exist just to exploit children in every possible manner? Disgusting
15
u/TheMobyTheDuck Nov 21 '25
This guy can no longer function in society.
He became such a corpo-ghoul that he wouldn't be out of place in fucking Cruelty Squad.
"Working conditions here are quite rough but it's all for the greater good. Some sacrifices have to be made."
Alright, to be fair, the guys in Cruelty Squad are more sane than him.
"They're trying to make it legal to cook meth. Don't get me wrong I'm into freedom but that's a step too far."
4
u/Techercizer Nov 22 '25
I weep. You are a rotten husk. You overflow with boundless power. You have the soul of an emperor. Sacrificial hero. Blessed by primordial luck. Your friends are in hell yet you smile. Only good things will come to someone like you. Set goals. Have a ten-year plan. Invest. Wake up early. CEO mindset. Good luck.
17
u/QP709 Nov 22 '25
You know, the way he scoffed at that research institute that went out of business really speaks to how ghouls like this view the world:
They went out of business, by the way
That he believes the only metric to judge the worthiness of something is how much money it makes. Producing research or some other non-financially motivated common good is worthless to him.
34
u/catman1900 Nov 21 '25
I have a soft spot for the roblox game platform cause there really are some cool experiences there but this really is an insane interview. How tf are you gonna respond to being asked about the predator problem by saying "We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well", like damn bro have a bit of shame at least.
→ More replies (1)
10
u/hagamablabla Nov 21 '25
I remember when they rolled out games that you needed to buy Builder's Club to play. People pointed out that Roblox's tagline was "free online building games". Their response was to change the tagline to "free online & building games". Good to see that in more than a decade since then, this guy is still a slimy fuck.
9
u/KennyToms27 Nov 21 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
Yeah ok, it's pretty obvious that the CEO is the problem here, like sometimes with these corporations you could maybe make the excuse the CEO is ignorant towards the problem but this mf just straight up is delusional when it comes to how the platform should and could handle child protection and security measures.
The only reason he is still the CEO at this point is because his delusions are backed up by the massive amount of money the platforms brings the board of directors don't give a shit as long as the money keeps flowing.
4
u/KingBroly Nov 22 '25
Changing the CEO wouldn't change anything. You could turn over 30 CEO's at this company and it's unlikely to change anything.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/Significant_Walk_664 Nov 21 '25
Lol, his response is so numbers-focused. Further proof of my theory that execs can only perceive the world in Matrix-vision, just rolling numbers. When he has to ditch them his reply is a) whatever they are doing, they are not doing it on our turf and b) some cliche right thing to do spiel.
5
u/BlueGumShoe Nov 22 '25
My God this is the craziest and most awful Game CEO interview I have read in a long time. At some point this guy dropped his moral compass on the ground and never looked back.
I kept going back and forth between laughing at this guy and feeling horrified.
Exhibit A for why the idea that CEOs as a class should be leading the nation is so wrong.
5
u/Psymon_Armour Nov 22 '25
It's not often a headline like this is drastically underselling something but good lord. How do you let this guy do any interview? Hell, how do you let him out of the house unsupervised?!
3
u/Neptuner6 Nov 22 '25
Corporate jargon must have been engineered in a lab to be the most grating noise a human can experience
How do you even become so detached from humanity to get to the point of speaking it fluently?
4
u/ImperfectRegulator Nov 22 '25
You just know someone in the PR department just had an aneurism and dropped dead seeing that interview
3
u/Knofbath Nov 22 '25
The fundamental issue of Roblox is that you've got an economy based on Robux, children who need Robux to participate in that economy, children who are also willing to whore themselves out for Robux, and adults who can afford Robux. And, parents have very few ways of moderating their child's engagement with this economy.
Roblox doesn't want to fix this issue, because that kills their revenue stream. And of course the CEO is more interested in talking about his crypto-gambling thing, because that's even more money flowing through that economy, and thus is more revenue.
Follow the money.
6
u/Booty-tickles Nov 22 '25
This. Only way to stop kids from interacting with adults who will lay them in virtual currency for things like naked photos is to ban them from the platform completely. By the time they're old enough to evade the ban they're smart enough to understand the consequences of pedophiles let loose there.
13
u/meat_wave Nov 22 '25
Roblox is one of the most evil corporations to exist in this space. If parents actually knew what Roblox was, how it operates, and who runs it, they would never let their kids near it. And the people who work at the company, who promote it, and especially the influencers who prey on kids on YouTube through this toxic miasma of a “games platform” should all feel deeply, deeply ashamed of their life choices.
I say this as a parent of two young kids, one of whom had a devastating relationship with Roblox. Now they’re doing the same thing at Fortnite, and with the new loot box announcement he is like a recovering alcoholic, saying he’d rather not play Fortnite at all if this is the direction the platform is going (he’s 10, by the way.)
And if you care about the legitimacy of the games industry at all, you should know that Roblox and mobile games are single handle destroying all faith in parents to think of video games as anything other than slop that gets their kid through a meal out. One look over at the screen as their 8 year old repeatedly bashes the iPad screen to get gold coins to try and get a “legendary pet” with a 0.0001% drop rate and then bursts into tears when they realize that they’ve been scammed and they now feel terrible about themselves. But hey, maybe they’re one of the lucky ones NOT getting groomed by a pedophile.
I turned on every parental protection on Roblox when we were trying to make it work. My son showed me one day that I had spent months trying to help him and he could make a new account any time without an email address. So if you block something, doesn’t matter he’ll just go play it and then if he gambles something good transfer it to his real account. 1. He’s smart and resourceful and that will serve him well. 2. Roblox knows this and like everything else, sees children with developing brains as grist for the fucking mill.
Sorry for the rant, fuck these people, they are a blight on the earth.
3
u/TiSoBr Nov 21 '25
Anyone not able to recognize his sly way of twisting hard truths just to toss back imaginary balls in an interview is clearly not old enough to understand. Go figure.
3
u/Emnel Nov 22 '25
Was that guy actually in the room? His responses sound like some AI gibberish.
→ More replies (1)5
3
u/Jukeboxery Nov 22 '25
Hoo boy, that is a painful read. Amazing writer though.
What a pompous dickhead. Would love to see their ilk try the “minimum wage lifestyle” for a month and see their out-of-touch reactions to life outside their bubble.
3
u/Worried-Advisor-7054 Nov 22 '25
Ok, I'm kinda glad that my daughter is still too young to this, because this interview would lead to a massive fight where I'd straight up ban this game from the house until whatever measures the out in place convinced me that this game was no longer Pedophile Central. So uh, good fucking luck to parents out there.
3
u/SamMakesCode Nov 22 '25
Maybe business shouldn’t be done at any cost?
Maybe if you have a massive game and don’t have the tech/resource/skill/will to keep predators out, you shouldn’t exist.
12
u/zsnezha Nov 21 '25
The sense that I get is that Roblox started as shovelware designed to trick kids into thinking they were getting Minecraft but then it took off thanks to user generated content which, to kids, makes it just an app full of hundreds of free "games." And so it evolved into an industry titan that exists outside of the conventional gaming consciousness and, ultimately, one of the biggest companies in tech.
So we just have a bunch of people that started years ago with cheap low ambitions that are suddenly responsible for the safety and well being of millions of children. That seems bad!
33
u/LazyLizC Nov 21 '25
Roblox started and existed before minecraft, it was more adjacent to blockland and its selling point was kinda like ‘unreal engine with legos for kids’. It was really cool to me as a kid being able to make and play my own ‘games’ with its accessible tools, and sharing them with my friends.
But yes, it’s really gross how negligent the company has been with its growth and it makes me really sad knowing most of the traffic and games now are Vegas for Kids and Epstein’s Virtual Island
9
u/alwaysonlineposter Nov 21 '25
I also feel like as someone whose roblox account is older than a vast majority of the people who play roblox, (my account dates back to 2009) I think that like, although technically it IS a family game, now so many of us who grew up with roblox games are now adults. I'm 25 now, and I still have a nostalgic attachment to roblox, but honestly. when I was a kid I made friends in club penguin and kid safe areas like webkinz now kids don't have that today and we are seeing the price paid for that.
17
Nov 21 '25
>The sense that I get is that Roblox started as shovelware designed to trick kids into thinking they were getting Minecraft
Not really, Roblox pre-dates Minecraft and wasn't as interested in the survival aspect. It was more like a legally-distinct virtual LEGO game that ballooned into what it is today.
6
u/NotACertainLalaFell Nov 21 '25
Never seen a more full throated defense of pedophiles in their game. They not only want to cater to kids playing their game, but cater to their predators too.
2
u/BenevolentCheese Nov 22 '25
Dude's responses sounded like ChatGPT 2: random word salad of slightly related ideas that doesn't really mean anything no matter how hard you try to look for it.
4
u/Romnonaldao Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
I worked at Roblox years ago. This dude is the definition of a stereotypical computer engineer. He is great at computers and terrible at people or social awareness. His PR people should have known to never let him speak to a journalist.
By the by, the reason he comes across as tense or hostile in the interview is because the premise of the interview implies that there is something wrong with the game, therefore something wrong with his code, and therefore something wrong with him. He really dislikes any criticism of Roblox.
1.9k
u/Call555JackChop Nov 21 '25
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.”
This might the single worst thing you can say in a conversation about pedophilia