Speculators Inside the Slop Factory: Shovelware and Financialized Game Development in Roblox

Abstract

Roblox, launched in 2006 by Roblox Corporation, hosts more than 40 million player-created games and had 85.3 million daily users as of Q3 2024. The platform promotes game creation as an educational tool. Based on interviews with 17 Roblox creators, this article explores how players are drawn into game development. Unlike traditional platform labor, Roblox incentivizes creators through speculative financial gain rather than creative passion. These creators face both the precarity typical of game development and a winner-takes-all dynamic, intensifying cost-benefit calculations around asset use. This environment encourages speculative reuse of assets and manipulation of Robux, contributing to the rise of shovelware: games perceived as unoriginal and derivative because of their excessive use of premade assets. Ultimately, developers respond to transactional and precarious working practices, forged under restrictive platform governance, with churn—producing content rapidly and routinely in large quantities—as a financialized strategy with critical implications for cultural production.