As sad as it sounds, video games have always been the focus of many controversies. Some of them have been overblown, like they’re “turning kids’ brains into mush,” which we know isn’t true. Some of them have been focused attacks by those who truly can’t see the wonder of video games and only see the negative, like certain “former lawyers” who went after M-rated games with a vengeance. And then, there are the issues that are legitimate, like the ones with Roblox. This game, especially over the last year, has come under fire for many things, and these issues are heating up on many levels that the dev team can’t fully ignore anymore.
Let’s start with the big one: they’re getting sued…again. You might recall that there have been a lot of “child predator” issues within the game lately, with numerous arrests featuring these predators luring kids to them by using the game’s chat rooms and other communication sources. There was a player named Schlep who worked as a kind of “vigilante” to try to get these predators caught, and the Roblox team responded to his actions by terminating his account and not the accounts of others who were suspected of being predators.
Naturally, Schlep didn’t take that well, nor did the rest of the community, even asking for the resignation of the game’s CEO. Schlep is doing many things on many fronts to try to expose the game for what’s happening within it, including possibly teaming up with Chris Hansen for a documentary!
But he’s taking it one step further by teaming up with “Law By Mike” to do the following:
Yep, they’re going after Roblox. More specifically, Law By Mike is, and the lawyers of Schlep are apparently helping. They’re making a lot of claims, including the dev knowing that their game is a haven for predators, and yet they ignore that to try to appeal to young players because they bring in a lot of money and make up about 40% of their player base.
As if all of this isn’t bad enough, more publications are taking up the flag of calling out the video game and its dev team for its practices, which includes the newspaper of the University of Louisville, which wrote a piece about the “growing problem” that the game has and how the dev team isn’t really working to make things better.
If things keep escalating like they appear to be heading, there could be serious ramifications in the future.