Roblox creator Jake Shirley is suing Tower Defense Simulator creator Timothy Kim for $35 million after an oral partnership deal collapsed.
The game, which Kim built as “a high school computer science project,” has nearly five billion visits, and players still hunt for new codes (we keep a list updated). The money is absurd, but it’s not unlike that of many other teen millionaires, some of whom make up to 400K a month, as Bloomberg recently profiled.
But Shirley and Kim, who met on Discord in 2017, never put their partnership on paper.
Per the complaint, Kim offered Shirley a 30% revenue share over chats and calls. By 2019, that meant $200,000 a year. The split climbed to 40% in 2020, the pair formed S-corps, quit college, and moved into a penthouse.
When they hired two engineers, they paid them in Robux, stashing about $50,000 every few months in a third account to, as the complaint puts it, “facilitate payroll.”
Things soured in 2022, when Kim asked Shirley to sign an employment agreement once they got an office. Shirley refused, insisting he was a partner, not an employee.
His final payment, $92,749, arrived in September 2023. A November sit-down to “unwind” the partnership went nowhere, and by December he was locked out of the business accounts and “terminated” by email.
Roblox’s top creators average $65.7 million a year but most make far less
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.dexerto.com/roblox/roblox-creator-sues-for-35m-after-business-partner-he-met-on-discord-fired-him-by-email-3411863/
