Samsung Roblox Event Turns Kids Into Underpaid Workers

thegamer.com:

The latest branded Roblox ‘experience’ is Samsung Space Tycoon. Rather than a prophetic glimpse of a future where we are all space peasants ruled over by our corporate overlords, this is a real game, for children, that encourages them to mine for resources and use the materials to build Samsung products in a space factory full of aliens. This is not a joke, but I wish it was.

It's the latest in a string of branded Roblox games from some of the world’s largest businesses, including Gucci, Vans, and Sanrio (the owners of Hello Kitty). This is an ongoing trend, and it makes perfect sense when you realise that Roblox is the largest video game in the world inhabited by a global audience of mostly impressionable children. Although many of these games are terrible in their own way (marketing Gucci to kids is just wrong), none of them have come close to quite how out of touch Samsung Space Tycoon is. If it wasn’t real, if I hadn’t already played it for 30 dreadful minutes, I’d tell you to stop taking the piss.

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There are five cosmetic items available in the game, and these are what the children are working for. Items like a pair of space wings and a space-themed beer hat that costs 15,000 Starcoins. Keep that number safe. It’s important. To earn coins you need to head out onto three separate space rocks and mine their resources, including Copper, Crystal, and the cheery Rainbow Stone. After the kids have filled their pockets with gems, it’s back to the factory, where you first need to fill the local aliens with lemonade (otherwise they won’t work, sort of, you might say, like paying $0.25 an hour) before they will produce a number of Samsung