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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.




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