My perspective

I personally welcome the decision made by the National Labor Relations Board with former employee Joshua DeBoer. As an employee of any organisation, it’s important to be paid well for your work and that you can operate freely to discuss your conditions to better for everyone; as well as to have an appropriate work life balance to avoid excessive hours and crunch. I am here to purely discuss my opinion at my time at Silicon Digital. This statement represents Dave Brown’s opinion only and is not an official statement by GameFam or Silicon Digital.

As a Silicon Digital employee, I have and continue to deeply enjoy my employment at the organisation. From the moment I negotiated and signed my contract with Silicon Digital, I’ve had free ability under England and Wales law to discuss my wage to the public and have done so upon request multiple times on social media. I understand from speaking with my fellow colleagues that this restriction is not limited to myself as a public figure within the Roblox community.

For the public record today, I earn 40,000 GBP per year working 30 hours a week, this is average for my role here in the UK. This is merely base salary and I earn additional regular bonuses and stock options, although I have not been with the organisation long enough to fully establish typical additional salary against my colleagues. On top of UK bank holidays, Silicon Digital requires me to take at least 20 paid days off with unlimited additional time off as approved.

As someone who just graduated from their BSc with Honours, getting a job like this out of the door is an amazing opportunity and that I would not have accepted it if I felt that the contract was unacceptable. My job as a Quality Assurance engineer is very rare within the Roblox community and is something I feel proud for having, so much so that I would be happy leaving the over 12 years of time on Roblox to keep doing it outside of the Roblox space. I feel great value in my input as a team member, as the expert on what’s best in QA within the organisation. I see the positive change I’ve made within the organisation slowly, but surely as new processes roll out.

It is deeply unfortunate that not every employee did not receive the same sort of experience as I did, requiring the action that was taken. I hope that this result from the NLRB serves as a place to further improve and create enjoyable experiences across the entire of the GameFam organisation, more than just what I feel today within the legally distinct subsidiary that I operate within.

Those improvements come from every stakeholder doing the right thing, harassment and death threats does not help kindle the right environment and culture to improve. Attacking individual employees means that they feel silenced by the community and so can’t be able to do the right thing. I hope by giving them the right message that things change for the positive for everyone. For now, I’ll be busy making sure QA is the best it is and doing what I love.

Thank you,
Dave Brown