Yes. Roblox absolutely is an amoral system to draw money from children, but it's not particularly focused on whales. Rather, their current big initiative is convincing parents to sign their kids up for a Robux "allowance," which is a monthly subscription that gives the kids a certain quantity of Robux per week or month so they can "learn budgeting."
Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.
Well, prepare to be surprised, I guess. A big chunk of revenue doesn't come from whales (for almost all games, I can't speak for all but know a fair amount about the average platform success story). That's because of the history of the platform and how games were designed: in a lot of them, the only thing to buy was one or a few "gamepasses", which would unlock functionality. Once you bought the gamepasses, that was it, there's nothing else to buy.
The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need, effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve, content that's actually somehow worth playing for that time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel meaty but actually give the player very little.
That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of experienced professionals and very well understood principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in. Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are very different from anything else in the game industry, designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to playtime to conversion rate.
More recently there are some games that are beginning to lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn guy for outreach" thing.
Sure, but look at Roblox experiences like "Adopt Me" or "Bee Swarm Simulator" with gacha mechanics. Keep inserting a dollar and pulling the lever, maybe you'll get the ultra-rare diamond flying rideable pet dragon bee. Those games are very whale-friendly and are pulling serious numbers. Heck, Bee Swarm Simulator has its own line of toys available at Walmart now: https://www.walmart.com/c/brand/bee-swarm-simulator
Yep, you're talking about the games I had in mind when I said some games are beginning to lay the groundwork. Notably, Bee Swarm Simulator was made by a grown-ass man who had (IIRC) mobile dev experience before going to Roblox. And within that genre of games he's been copied more recently by pretty exploitative stuff like Pet Simulator X. But that "simulator" / pet collection genre is one of the only spots on Roblox where you can find that kind of open-ended monetization and if you could see their internal stats, you'd see that they're mainly monetizing through quantity of players like everyone else.
It is worrying to think that kids might end up dropping thousands of dollars on a game, but I think if that does start happening, you're going to see it in the news instantly. Like I said, it is really idiotic of Roblox to even begin venturing down that path; they should be clamping down on that kind of monetization to stop it from growing, but so far they have not done anything except enforce basic loot box legal standards (must show odds).
That doesn’t seem any different from a normal allowance that they buy Robux with? And removes the intermediate step of me needing to enter my credit card details in exchange for my kids cash.
Whether you allow them to buy Robux in the first place is a different question.
Oh, no, it's worse. They assign "premium" status to kids who are on the subscription/allowance program. They get a special premium badge by their names, and games are incentivized to offer special perks to these premium players (the games get a cut if someone subscribes from within their game).
In my mind, premium is significantly better than open-ended free to play monetization. Subscriptions have been used for kids platforms before (e.g. Club Penguin), so it's not some new emergent evil. Roblox incentivizing games to treat subscribers better (and paying them for it; there is a subscriber playtime earnout) is also, arguably, an attempt to push the whole platform toward subcription revenue rather than casino style free-to-play revenue with the whales, addicts and so forth. The more worrying thing is that they might try to support both models, one is clearly worse than the other.
Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.