Roblox Pledges 8.2 Million Dollars to Indonesia, Vows to Mull Over the Violence

Robux might be fake money, but the impact it is having on Indonesia’s economy is, on paper at least, very real. Roblox, the American game company, recently released a report stating it expects to contribute 8.2 million US dollars to Indonesia’s GDP (gross domestic product, the standard measure of a country’s total economic output). ^[1]

For a country that takes its macroeconomic indicators seriously, this is, in the most generous possible reading, real money. In a slightly less generous reading, it is a rounding error in the budget of a single ministry. We will return to which ministry in a moment, but first, the mathematics.

I did the unthinkable. I did mathematics. I took the 8.2 million dollars and, with a calculator, a cup of coffee, and the grim determination of a man who should have stayed in bed, divided it. The result, depending on which creator figure you trust, is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7,900 US dollars per year per active Indonesian Roblox creator. ^[2] Per creator. Per year. The phrase “I contributed to GDP” has, as of this report, never sounded so much like something an accountant says to keep their job.

Whether this means anything to a parent watching their twelve-year-old spend a future inheritance on a digital hat is, of course, the wrong question. The right question is whether the Indonesian government thinks the game contains too much violence. Apparently, the answer is yes.

Roblox, the report noted, is currently in some manner of trouble with the Indonesian government over concerns about violence in its games. ^[3] The exact nature of the trouble — a formal ban threat, a polite letter, a strongly-worded tweet from a ministry account — has not been disclosed. Roblox, for its part, has said it will review age ratings for the platform. ^[4] Which is corporate for “we have heard you, and we would prefer not to be the next TikTok.”

The thing about age rating reviews, of course, is that they tend to work in two stages. First, the company promises to review. Then, if the government is patient and the cameras are still pointed in the right direction, the company actually reviews. We are at stage one. Stage two is where the lawyers earn their retainer.

For now, the platform remains accessible in Indonesia. ^[5] No banhammer has landed. The blocks remain, as the marketing would have it, buildable. The violence, the government hopes, will become age-gated in a way that makes the violence more age-appropriate, which is the kind of phrase that only makes sense in a regulatory press release.

In fairness, the government has a point. Not the point it thinks it has — that one is, broadly, “video games are scary and the children are too loud” — but a more interesting one. Indonesia has spent the last several years developing an increasingly specific relationship with the digital economy. The country wants the GDP contribution. It wants the creator economy. It wants Indonesian children to grow up fluent in platforms that the rest of the world is fluent in. What it does not want, evidently, is the content that comes attached to those platforms. The challenge, then, is to have the platform without the platform, which is the same challenge that comes with most things imported.

It is a difficult needle to thread. The game wants to be everywhere. The government wants the game to be everywhere but slightly less everywhere. Roblox has agreed to review the age ratings, which is the corporate equivalent of agreeing to think about it. The children, one assumes, will continue to build, trade, and occasionally commit simulated violence against one another, as children have done in every medium since the medium was invented.

So: 8.2 million dollars of expected GDP contribution, 7,900 dollars per creator per year, an age rating review, and no ban. The next time a parent asks their child what they are doing on the computer, the answer, technically, is economic patriotism. Whether that answer survives contact with the next regulatory memo is, as ever, a question for whichever part of the Indonesian government is handling the file. The ministry, in turn, has not yet released a statement on the matter, because the ministry is busy. The ministry is always busy.

In the meantime, I am off to log into my own account for the first time in fifteen years, on the off chance that fifteen years of ignoring the platform have somehow left me a fortune in Robux. If they have, I will, of course, be doing my patriotic duty.

Make of that what you will.