The crux of his argument was that kids these day no longer care for AAA games.
I agree with your post and the dangers of Roblox (although Roblox as a phenomenon is still too new to know what those kids playing it now will do in 5 years time)
But for this specific sentence there is one thing I want to point out: kids not caring about AAA is a self fulfilled prophecy
First, let's be serious, what type of games can we identify as AAA?
Sony's premiere titles? They all very obviously targeting adult (or at least late adolescents) gamers. No kid would care about a sad dad story (without even talking about the overall level of violence), and even something like Astrobot is so nostalgia filled it's hard to not imagine most of its fanbase being mad of grown ups. Even the Marvel titles aren't really targeting the younger audience (and arguably it's not like comic books are that kid focused nowadays either)
AAA(A) titles from Ubisoft, EA, Warner? Swearing, violence, realistic looking graphics. Not exactly kid friendly there
Square, Sega, Capcom? Once again most of their titles are aimed at grown ups, either because of their choices (look at Monster Hunter Stories: with how each new title the protagonist and the cast gets aged up) or because they failed to grow a younger audience at all (like with Dragon Quest, and that ship sailed a long time ago for Final Fantasy). Sonic should have kid appeal, but I don't think it's happening looking at how Rumble is basically dead
Nintendo is the only company that feels like it's trying to target kids. The Mario movies are clearly a way to get more kids into the series, and obviously you have pokemon, but even Nintendo has made mistakes here, Splatoon in particular feels like a perfect "kid friendly" shooter and yet even after 3 titles they never tried to make a real animated series, or expanded the series in some other way worldwide. And even with these examples many Nintendo games are still targeting teens or later like Metroid, Fire Emblem, Xenoblade, and even Zelda (that live action movie is not going to convince kids to play Zelda games, sorry). I do think Nintendo is trying to make their trailers or streams more kid friendly with the "no violence allowed" rule in the last Showcase, but this brings us to the next problem
Most videogame events and streams are also targeted at grownups. The structure, lenght and presentation (and obviously content) are not kid friendly at all, and this means most kids simply know nothing about upcoming games
And obviously we know how some "grown-ups" series have a big kid following, but with the insane push for microtransactions, FOMO and so on it's possible most kids are losing interest in series like CoD, or even games like Fortnite in favor of experiences like Roblox
A company that should be capable of providing kids friendly franchises is Bandai Namco, especially with their stranglehold on shonen Jump titles. Yet once again it feels most of those titles fail to find a younger audience (like the last My Hero Academia titles which looking at its numbers I think it didn't do so great). Obviously this could be an issue of quality, but it could also be an issue of how the younger generations may not be allowed to watch "anime" in the same way the previous ones were. For example here in italy I grew up with series Dragon Ball, and many other similar series, because those series were broadcasted on the main public TV channels. There was that post school 1/2 hours afternoon period were those series were broadcasted to all, and it's not just Shonen series, it also had magical girls shows like Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure, series based on videogames like Sonic X or Mega Man NT, and yes also animated series like Batman TAS (and superman, Spiderman). I loved them, and I'm sure every kid in italy loved them too. But know all those series and most of all, their modern counterparts have been exiled to secondary or tertiary channels (because soccer moms say they're too violent or something), and even then they're broadcasted at very late, post dinner hours. For a kid it's impossible to watch them, and I really don't think kids have the willingness to watch them on Crunchyroll or Netflix or whenever they are streamed now. Maybe this is why those licensed titles are failing more and more despite being based on popular IPs
And ironically, when actual games for kids are made (games based on actual kid series, and even pre-school ones), they're still priced outside of what a parent would pay (and that's if those games don't have clear quality issues), so these kids don't even have the chance to become videogame fans
Really, gaming is being turned into a rich white male hobby, but it's not like that audience is growing so I'm not sure what the end result of this change will be
