Roblox CEO Says the Amount of Predators in Their Game Is an ‘Opportunity’
An opportunity to do what, exactly?
Published 3 weeks ago in Wtf
If your kid uses Roblox, well, get them off of that immediately. The game has long been accused of being a hub of exploitation — from the underpaid people who design games on the platform, to the sheer number of creeps who go into the virtual world to meet little kids.
While this has been an open secret for some time, the pressure is rising now that Roblox is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $63.6 billion.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Roblox CEO David Baszucki was asked about their new age-gating policy and the problem of predators on their platform. From that moment on, the interview became a slow-motion car crash. Baszucki repeatedly discussed how excited he was about how they’re innovating censorship, while the interviewer kept reminding him that adults literally go to his platform to meet children.
While there are many bone-chilling parts of the interview, a detail that particularly irked internet users is that Baszucki described the predator issue not as a problem, but as an “opportunity.”
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time?” Baszucki asked.
The rest of the interview did not provide an answer. Instead, Baszucki tried to defend his company in the limpest way possible. He even got agitated and challenged the interviewer at one point — then realized he was getting too mad on camera and tried to diffuse the situation by offering the interviewer two high-fives.
Baszucki also lamented that he “thought we were going to be talking about fun, funny things in the industry and all of that.” Sorry, bud, little hard to do that when your platform is begging for a Chris Hansen appearance!