Category: Video Games

Roblox Corporation stocks dipped on Tuesday after a new report from investment firm Hindenburg Research, which accused it of deliberating inflating its daily active user stats and fostering what it described as an “X-rated pedophile hellscape” for children.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Hindenburg Research is a well-known short-selling firm known for investigating high-profile stocks and making bets against them, which sometimes leads to investigations by the U.S. Justice Department. Its previous targets have included green transportation company Nikola, India’s Adani Group, and Super Micro Computer.

In its report, Hindenburg Research says Roblox’s claim of 79.5 million daily active users is inflated by between 25 percent and 42 percent, citing a technical consultant that it says monitored 7,200 Roblox games across 2.1 million server, collecting 297.7 million rows of real-time player data. It also notes that in 2023, Roblox told the SEC that it is “unable to identify if a user has multiple accounts,” and claims that a large amount of engagement stems from bot rings operating out of countries such as Vietnam.

“A former data scientist told us that activity in Vietnam ‘inflated a lot of our numbers. Like crazy, insane, in terms of engagement, DAU[s],” the reports says.

Elsewhere, the report accuses Roblox of being a haven for groomers and pedophiles due to its lack of “up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.” In one of its most serious accusations, the report claims to have found a group called “Adult Studios,” which has since been blocked, with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts.

Roblox’s response is an abject failure to address the two core allegations in our report, including:

1. Evidence that Roblox has been systematically lying for years about the number of people on its platform and their genuine level of engagement.

2. That the platform is a… pic.twitter.com/Tj2KiANOnI

— Hindenburg Research (@HindenburgRes) October 8, 2024

A Roblox spokesperson called the report “misleading” in a statement to the Wall Street Journal and accused Hindenburg Research of having an agenda. “We firmly believe that Roblox is a safe and secure platform and in the financial metrics we report.”

Hindenburg Research responded by arguing that the company’s response failed to address the report’s core allegations. IGN has reached out to the Roblox Corporation for any further comment.

Many of the accusations within the report have been circulating for some time now. A 2023 class action lawsuit in California accused the Roblox Corporation of being misleading about “the efficacy of its filtering technologies and its ability to make the site safe and appropriate for children.” A 2021 report by YouTube channel People Make Games alleged that Roblox was exploiting child labor.

“Overall, we think Roblox has adopted the Silicon Valley approach of ‘growth at all costs’, whether by misleading or outright lying to investors about its key metrics or by opening its platform to dangerous
predators and illicit content unsuitable for children,” the report says, with the Hindenburg Group saying that it has taken a short position in shares for the Roblox corporation.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Doctor Who nerds, check out this bigger on-the-inside Magic: The Gathering deal at Amazon for its October Prime Day sale. Down to just $128.99, falling from $199.99, this time-bending discount includes all four of the Doctor Who MTG Commander decks: Masters of Evil, Blast From the Past, Timey-Wimey, and Paradox Power. From one fan to another, these decks are absolutely amazing and worth the pain and trauma Doctor Who has inflicted on me.

Paradox Interactive seems ready to be done with Vampire: The Masquerade — and with RPGs in general — with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja telling PC Gamer that any potential Bloodlines 3 will be “done by someone else.”

Lilja opened up about Bloodlines 2’s development in the course of an unusually frank interview, itself part of a media tour seemingly designed to show how Paradox was being reset after a string of problematic releases and reports of a toxic work culture. Paradox’s overarching message? It’s sticking to what it’s good at, and what it’s good at is strategy games.

“It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game,” Lilja told PC Gamer. “So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us. I would say it’s the sort of strategic way this would work. So it’s still an outlier from what we’re supposed to do, we don’t know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it.”

In short, Lilja considers Bloodlines a “dead end” for the company regardless of how well it does, which is made more awkward by the fact that Paradox Interactive owns Vampire: The Masquerade creator White Wolf Publishing. Lilja didn’t talk about Paradox’s plans for White Wolf, but it seems as if any future Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines RPGs will be licensed out to other developers.

“I think some studios do strategic investments, long term things, because they feel that the cost of not doing it is too high. But, I mean, I think it’s fairly clear, at least to me, and I think to you, even in the best of cases, Bloodlines does not have a super long shelf life. That’s not the way these games behave. You have an influx of players, there’s a bit of word of mouth, and they have a high peak, and then they trail off. And it’s not the type of gameplay that develops over time that much. So I think that’s part of why these types of games are not really that attractive to us.”

Lilja’s comments come amid the still-ongoing development of Bloodlines 2, which was announced back in 2019 as a faithful successor to the original game by Troika Games — considered one of the greatest RPGs ever made. The original development was handled by Hardsuit Labs, but numerous delays and other problems led to its near cancellation before Paradox handed development to The Chinese Room .

“If we hadn’t found The Chinese Room,” deputy CEO Mattias Lilja said, “and seen what they’d done with the early work, [cancellation] would have been the next logical step, because we could not continue as we did.”

The Chinese Room is taking what looks like a very different direction from Hardsuit Labs, boiling it down into more of a straightforward action RPG. Fans have posted various comparisons between the two online, noting the differences between the melee combat among other things.

“Generally, it’s a continuation of the same vision but they had to make it theirs,” Lilja told GI.biz in a separate interview. “When a game has been going this long with a sizable team in Seattle for a number of years before we moved it… It might have commercial challenges, but we liked the direction.”

Lilja says that Paradox is targeting a first half of 2025 release for Bloodlines 2, and that development is currently on track after its suffered yet another delay in August.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.