Last month my 11-year-old son was having a rough time at school, so my wife and I decided to cheer him up with a $50 Roblox gift card. We had only the best intentions, but the whole episode has turned into one huge drama.
First, yes, I know Roblox is not the ideal platform for kids his age (or any age) to be playing on. I'm as aware of its shortcomings as anyone. But Roblox is the default communications platform for 11-year-old kids where we live. It's the place everyone hangs out in after school, talks shit and checks out each other's stuff, so with some safeguards in place--he's on a monthly stipend of Robux and we monitor which games he's playing--he's allowed to play.
The problem here wasn't with the games, but the platform and company itself. We bought him a physical card because it felt like more of a gift, something we could hand him and say "here you go, buddy" and have it mean more than just dumping some Robux into his account. We gave it to him on a Friday afternoon, and he loved it: he was ecstatic after a pretty shitty week at school and all seemed well!
We watched him pop the card off its cardboard backing excitedly, peel back the sticker protecting its code, punch the code in and...ah, fuck. Instead of adding $50 (or however much that is in Robux) to his account, we were greeted by some red text and the words INVALID CODE. After a quick google it seems this is pretty common, and mostly happens when you enter the wrong parts of the code in (like using "B" when you were supposed to use "8"). But after some substitutions on the most suspect characters, we were still getting INVALID CODE.
Another popular cause for this code (according to forums and Reddit at least) appeared to be when the retailer you bought it from didn't activate it properly at the register, so we jumped in the car and drove back to the department store where we bought the card in the first place. There we were told by customer service that it had been activated, and that if we were having any problems to please contact Roblox support.
I'd been trying to avoid that, given the track record of megacorps like this when it comes to customer service, but with little other option we emailed in--there was no phone number in Australia, of course--provided the details of what we'd run into and waited for a response. Eventually a Roblox representative named "Freddy" got back to us and asked for some photos of the card and receipt and my son's username. It felt like we were only hours away from a resolution.
We were, just not the one we were after. "Freddy" told us that the code had already been redeemed to a different account, that was that, and to have a nice day. Freddy, we were not having a nice day. We had not redeemed the code, that was...why we were contacting you in the first place. My son, now distraught, kept saying "but why can't I just get my $50", and while my wife and I knew the world was more complicated than that, his basic point was correct: why couldn't he just get his $50? Despite several follow-up questions, Freddy went silent, and we received no further response from Roblox.
Our son had done everything right. We had done everything right. We'd been right there as he opened the card and typed it in, so knew that he hadn't redeemed it to the wrong account. We'd bought the card legally, paid legal tender for it and gone to all the right places for support. And still, we were shit out of luck, through absolutely no fault of our own. We'd been wronged and, like so many other places on the internet, there was no recourse. We were left feeling powerless as customers in a way that feels decidedly and depressingly modern.
This is what happened to us, at this particular point in time and this specific scenario, but we all know what it's like. Whether it's a cancelled flight, a shopping return, insurance dilemma or an issue on Facebook, in more and more aspects of our daily lives we're running into problems that you simply cannot solve because there is not a human being there to listen to you, and emails, bots and FAQs are not up to the task. Companies that make billions in profits, with operations around the world, are selling us goods and services and failing to provide even the most basic level of customer service, and I fucking hate it.
Roblox made over $2 billion last year, I'm sure they could afford an Australian call centre or two so I could explain my passions in person. Instead I get some Australia-specific rules that essentially tried to wash Roblox's hands of it and I got "Freddy", who for all "his" inflexibility and canned responses could have been an AI for all I know.
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. After days of silence and a number of unanswered emails to Roblox, I reached out to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, our federal government's consumer watchdog. I explained to them my situation and told them I thought Roblox had a duty to make good on my purchase, especially since they'd been unable or unwilling to answer my follow-up questions.
A few days later--such timing!--we got an email from a different Roblox rep, "Debby", who broke the company's silence to tell us that "as a one time courtesy" they were going to credit my son's account with $50. You know, a courtesy, to just give him the thing we paid for then went to all this hassle over.
In all, this process took over two weeks. Two weeks! I could have spoken to a human and sorted this out in minutes, but no, because Roblox either want to save money on call centres, eliminate human conversation in their customer service entirely in order to make ripping kids off easier or both, I had to email, drive back to a department store then involve the government to try and get my $50 back.
And the lesson I learned at the end of it? However terrible you think Roblox is, whether it's because of the fascists or the child gambling or the labour exploitation, there are always fresh and new ways to discover it sucks!
