Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox

this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.

the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.

the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.

It's a parental thing.

I have children, they have friends. None of them have asked for Robux as a gift.

They play the free games together, chatting after school (and homework!) and stop if they hit a payment limit.

Kids can't be trapped by "dark patterns" into paying, they don't have credit cards or money to spend. It's always the parents who give in.

It's both disappearing opportunities for physical play AND addictive platforms

Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)

As if arcade games weren’t money hungry and painfully punishing purely to get more quarters out of children.

What countries do you have in mind?

To be fair, we've sort f made outside really, really shitty.

Stroads and parking lots galore ain't all that appealing (or safe) to play in.

Kids never want to go outside. My parents locked me out until dinner. Worked fine.

Kids want to go outside if other kids are outside. We are social animals, and the most addictive games for youth are glorified social networks. It helps if other parents in the area are on the same page.

More accurately the kids you're aware of don't want to.

Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.

Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.

Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.

Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.