As a Roblox Developer, I have seen several articles posted on the internet saying that a kid spent $2000 on Roblox in one day on Robux. Other articles say that some kids spent like $250 on Roblox.
If you were a parent of such kid, what would you do when you find a kid spent ALL YOUR MONEY on your bank account on Roblox?
I have also seen several games give you like 5000 points a month that allowed to you spend for example $50 per month. Nothing more. One even gave you 5000 points and never refilled that – you could only purchase $50 worth of stuff in the game.
So I suggest a points system like this to be added to Roblox, with 3 tiers: (One point equals recharging one Robux.)
2500 points a month for users below 13 years of age
10000 points a month for users above 13 years of age
50000 points a month for users with verified phone numbers (Why? Well, phone numbers aren’t generally given to young kids that could spend $2000 in one sitting.)
Also, these values are the “max point values”. If an user has parental restrictions set up, the parents can lower the limit. For example 400 points if you want kids to spend $5 a month at max. Or 1000 points a month if you want to purchase the $10 Roblox Premium. The values that I specified are the higher limits of monthly points that can be allocated to one account. And no, unused points won’t carry over to the next months.
If Roblox is able to solve this issue, there would be a lot less issues of $2000 charges on your bank account made by a kid.
I’d say that would be Roblox falling under the pressure from media when the parents were the irresponsible ones and that’s terrible.
There are many ways parents can secure their funds and make their iPads/other electronics child-safe. They just don’t do it.
One of the things being that you get notifications on your phone from the bank when you make a purchase. PayPal has that feature as a default and many banking applications such as Citi and Bank of America have that options in their Push Notifications settings. Another thing is to disable easy pay on the Apple Store or Google Play Store and have a password difficult enough for kids to not be able to type it.
Another thing is that Roblox doesn’t refund everyone that go to their local news bulletin to cry about how they were irresponsible for letting their kid spend a few thousand dollars on robux and they haven’t noticed it.
The most important thing is that many children asked why they did it say that they thought it was Monopoly money. It means that parents don’t even teach them the concept of money. I do understand that kids shouldn’t be able to stock trade at the age of 6 but they should at least have some basic knowledge of it.
To summarize: don’t make Roblox take responsibility for irresponsible parents. In the end Roblox isn’t suppose to be a babysitter for your children and neither should you let them have access to your money so freely.
Edit Oct '24:
Looks like this feature is in place. Had a community member reach out to me via our discord ticketing system asking if we can lift the limit. To anyone interested, the limit is 500 USD.
I don’t like this. Just an arbitrary system being put in place to solve a “problem” which really isn’t an actual problem. If someone is a parent and doesn’t want their kid to spend thousands of dollars on Roblox, then they should teach their kid to be a bit of a more intelligent individual than to steal money for Robux. Also, this is not to mention that this would mean Roblox literally putting a system in place where the sole outcome would be outright preventing Roblox from making more money.