Create Experiences for People 17 and Older on Roblox

[Update] December 5, 2023

[Update] September 18, 2023

[Update] August 29, 2023


[Update] August 21, 2023


[Update] July 11, 2023


Hi Creators,

Today, we are excited to announce that we are expanding our Experience Guidelines to allow creators to start building experiences for people 17 and over. Only those who have verified that they’re at least 17 years old with a selfie and a photo of their government-issued ID will be able to create or access these experiences.

17 to 24 year-olds are the fastest-growing group on Roblox, and in 2022, people over 17 made up 38% of our daily active users. We’ve heard your feedback on wanting to be able to build experiences that feature more mature themes and storylines that appeal to older users. We’ll be highlighting these new experiences in our recommendations to people over 17. As a creator, you will have new opportunities for expression, engagement, and potential earnings.

In the coming weeks, eligible users will begin to see this new content. We will update this post once 17+ experiences are live.

Age verification using government ID and live selfie. Interface subject to change.

What do experiences for people 17 and up look like?

In September 2022, we launched Experience Guidelines with the Age Recommendations of All Ages, Ages 9+, and Ages 13+. We’re updating our Experience Questionnaire and Guidelines, Community Standards, and the 17+ Policy Standards to add Ages 17+ as a new Age Recommendation.

Mock image of 17+ experience with guidelines

Here is a summary of the updated Experience Guidelines:

Age Recommendation Description
All Ages Content is generally suitable for all ages. May contain occasional mild violence and/or light unrealistic blood.
Ages 9+ Content is generally suitable for ages 9 and up. May contain repeated mild violence, heavy unrealistic blood, and/or mild crude humor.
Ages 13+ Content is generally suitable for ages 13 and up. May contain moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, and/or unplayable gambling content.
Ages 17+ Content is only suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain strong violence, heavy realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content and/or the presence of alcohol.

What’s prohibited for any experience:
Our priority for rolling out 17+ experiences is safety and civility. Therefore, we’re taking an incremental approach to what types of content are allowed on our platform. Strong language will not be permitted at this launch but we are exploring ways to enable it in the right context for future iterations.

Just like before, your experiences should not depict any of the content below or any other content that would violate the Community Standards and the 17+ Policy Standards:

  • Sexual content or nudity
  • Depictions of drugs and tobacco

Creating an experience for people 17 and over

To build a 17+ experience, you must follow the following steps:

  1. Prior to adding 17+ content in an experience:

  2. Ensure that all of your promotional materials including and not limited to descriptions, thumbnails, and videos are appropriate for all ages;

  3. Collaborate with other age-verified 17+ creators to create your experience;

  4. Make your experience public when ready!

Note: 17+ Experiences will be unavailable for users in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Asset creation guidelines for 17+ experiences

Currently, we do not support 17+ assets on the platform. You will need to create 17+ experiences without using mature assets directly. If you upload a 17+ asset before we enable them on the platform, it will be subject to asset moderation.

To create 17+ experiences without the support of 17+ assets, you can combine assets, animations, and scenes suitable for under 17 users to depict 17+ content in your 17+ experiences. Here are some examples of how you can create 17+ experiences using under 17 assets:

  • Today we allow the depiction of weapons. To depict stronger violence, creators can have avatars carrying realistic weapons and fighting with vivid animations and audio effects like gunshots and screams.
  • Today, we allow realistic blood assets. To depict gore, creators can combine multiple realistic blood assets to create more intense scenes.
  • Today, we allow red plastic cups. To depict alcohol consumption, creators can combine these assets within animations in a club scene.

Examples of assets that are currently prohibited include and are not limited to:

  • Alcohol assets such as beer cans, a glass of wine, or alcohol bottles explicitly labeled as beer, wine, and/or alcohol.
  • Graphic violence and depictions of severe bodily injury or real-world events.

Please refer to 17+ Policy Standards and Community Standards for what content is permitted or prohibited on the platform.

Updating our policy on simulated gambling

Our Community Standards prohibit gambling activities that include exchanging real money, Robux, or in-experience items of value. For a variety of reasons, including the complex global regulatory environment in which this policy falls, we reviewed our Community Standards and decided to adjust them to foster more age-appropriate interactions.

Specifically, simulated gambling will no longer be allowed on our platform. Any experience that has simulated gambling (i.e., playing with virtual chips, simulated betting) will no longer be allowed on our platform. By September 18th, 90 days from today, all experiences that include simulated gambling content will need to be updated to comply with our new guidelines or will be subject to moderation consequences.

Experiences will still be allowed to have unplayable gambling content (e.g., show a casino or people playing cards). Additionally, experiences that have games of luck or chance that are not casino or gambling based will still be allowed, such as bingo or arcade style games. Provided that they comply with our Community Standards, paid random item generators and lootboxes will still be permitted.

Get started

We’re excited to see any engaging experiences you can now create with these new guidelines. Check out these resources before you get started:

You can learn more about our vision for experiences for people 17 and over on our blog.

Known issues and upcoming fixes

As we are prioritizing enabling 17+ experience creation as soon as we can, there are a few known issues that we are actively working on resolving such as:

  • In Studio, under the “Recent Games” view, the 17+ icon doesn’t show for 17+ experiences, but is visible in other views.
  • In Studio, in the “Group Games” view, the archive button still shows up for under 17 users for 17+ experiences but this is just a UI bug and those users are not able to archive.
  • If an existing experience is converted to 17+, we will remove all members from a Team create session, in the future we’re working on only removing members who aren’t 17+ and age-verified.
  • At this time, only the owner of a 17+ experience can playtest it through the Play button on its public details page.
    • All other verified 17+ collaborators can continue to playtest in Studio.

Let us know if you are experiencing other issues and we will work hard to resolve them.

Thank you.


FAQ

Click here to view the FAQ

How do I verify my age?

Where can I see the updated Experience Guidelines?

  • You can view the Experience Guidelines at this link.

Why aren’t you launching 17+ assets at the same time?

  • We want to give you the freedom to make 17+ experiences as soon as possible, but it will take some time for us to properly launch 17+ assets on the platform. In the meantime, you will be allowed to make 17+ experiences by combining assets to make contextually more mature experiences.

If I don’t fill out the Experience Guidelines questionnaire, what age recommendation will I receive?

  • Experiences that haven’t completed the Experience Guidelines questionnaire are treated as 13+ experiences. These experiences may not include 17+ content.

What does this mean for advertisers and ad publishers?

  • There are no changes to our Ad Standards including our Prohibited Advertising Content on Roblox.
  • Only people over 13 will see ads.
  • We are taking an incremental approach with advertising and 17+ experiences.
  • This means that at launch:
    • Advertisers: Creators will not be able to advertise their 17+ experiences using Immersive Ads, User Ads or Sponsored Experiences.
    • Publishers: 17+ experiences will not be able to publish Immersive Ads units within their experiences. This is consistent with our approach of rolling out Immersive Ads with an initial set of experiences that are likely to be appropriate for a broad range of advertisers on Roblox.
  • Our long-term plan is to eventually allow 17+ experiences to advertise on Roblox and reach 17+ audiences in a way that is safe and respects user privacy.

Update 8:20PM PT

See this reply for answers to many of the questions asked on the day of the announcement.

592 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

WOW. Um. Idk what to say other then this is going to be a big problem some how and I can already just imagine <13 or 13+ users taking there parents ID then taking a picture of them or something. As for “17 to 24 year-olds are the fastest-growing group on Roblox” It is so easy for a 5 year old to put a fake birthday then that messes up your statistics.

211 Likes

It’s not Roblox’s fault if a child decides to do that. That responsibility falls on the parent to prevent their child from gaining their ID and using it illegitimately.

365 Likes

Woohoo! Another milestone down for experiences, given this is verified properly.

What’s the word on inappropriate language being used in 17+ experiences, i.e. profane words?

132 Likes

W FEATURE I can’t wait to see games use this

102 Likes

Im kinda confused. Does this mean games like Phantom Forces, Arsenal, and other shooters would need to be 17+?

Also, how are the analytics determined? Is it by Photo ID or is is by birthday of the Roblox user? If so, it kind of makes sense, when I was younger, I always made myself exactly 18 years old when I lied on websites.

86 Likes

Will there be more loose chat filter in 17+ experiences?

94 Likes

What counts as “severe bodily injury”, when does the graphic violence that this update allows cross in that descriptor

This is an oddly vague rule that needs some more clarification.

The other thing I was wondering was, will developers who seek to create 17+ experiences get support from Roblox so they know if they’re crossing into stuff that isn’t allowed anywhere on the platform, regardless of age

71 Likes

Yes you have to be 17+ to create a 17+ game

66 Likes

I’m kind of confused - how are we supposed to make money off of something that is so heavily guarded? Developers and players need to be 17+ and prove it with a government ID, you’re removing Parental Consent and basically making it impossible to succeed on the platform as a 17+ experience whilst waving hands doing magic tricks trying to convince your very passionate developer-base that you’ve actually given us a superior creative outlet.

On top of those limitations; there is limited marketing potential, there is limited money-making potential, and you’re not going to allow us to make our games popular on the platform. What’s the point?

This is akin to saying “Yeah, feel free to make 17+ games, but it’s only for passion projects, and you’re destined to lose all your money making it!”

Truly a great update.

120 Likes

This update is awesome i can’t wait to make and experince 17+ experinces with my friends and not be bothered by children joining.

I don’t understand why specifically the infamous “Red Solo Cups” are allowed and not any other alchol drinking implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_Cup_Company these cups are almost entirely only used in north america and it seems ethnocentric to force places with alcohol mentions to only use solo cups, and not actual bottles of beer or wine.

This policy also doesn’t make sense. I get no sexual content but what is the point of making romantic experinces if users aren’t allowed to romantically communicate with each other, flirt with each other, or try to make relationships with each other?
image

64 Likes

As stated in the post, they are trying to explore ways to permit that in the right context for future iterations.

45 Likes

While I love the idea of ageing up Robox, I don’t like this idea where you have to verify your ID to play. Games are free, games cost money, not many games require a government ID…

Edit: You, as a Roblox player that has already verified your ID, may not find the idea of requiring an ID to be all that dystopian.
If you were someone that hasn’t touched Roblox before and you see an ad for a cool looking game with an * that says “Government ID verification required to play”, would you play it?
I don’t have a problem with Roblox restricting non 17+ people from playing 17+ games, I do have a problem with having to market a dystopian idea alongside my game.

The idea of needing an ID to play a game is weird to non Robloxians.

  • Government ID verification required to play.
86 Likes

This is nice! I waited for this long time.

This reminds me of this

40 Likes

I want to know about this too.

Roblox’s voice chat moderation has been very triggy happy as of late and I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or joke about anymore. If I’m an adult swearing around another adult (i.e. civil and in good taste, not harassment) I don’t want to be subjected to automatic moderation. Context is critical, and this was never an issue during the voice chat beta. In fact, it was understood and stated to be okay when they were first introducing voice chat.

One of my acquaintances GunFireDev got his account randomly terminated because of someone behaving inappropriately in proximity to him in a voice chat game. I don’t think anyone should be getting terminated without a thorough review of the context and circumstances.

102 Likes

Kinda dissapointing. My game currently has (and i might have to remove it fully) a “casino” that lets players spin the slots with gameplay currency and has nothing to do with anything of value. This change just makes me wonder what in the heck im supposed to do. Replace it with an arcade and toss out all of the progress i made so far? What a joke, i just don’t know what to do. And letting paid random items stay is just like adding insult to injury, THAT is literal gambling.

53 Likes

Since ROBLOX is a COPPA-compliant site, I’d suppose that’s why they require ID verification, to combat underage children accessing adult/mature-themed experiences. Other game platforms like Steam, for example, aren’t exactly directed to children, and the majority of its users are over the age of 13.

I am not exactly sure what’s the reason behind this, but I’d suppose it’s something along these lines.

42 Likes

Along with these new restrictions, please allow age changes with ID verification even when under the age of 13:

40 Likes

The last thing anyone would want is for someone under 17 to play a game intended for players 17 and older. Locking it behind age verification seems like the best thing (not the perfect thing) you can do to truly know if someone is above 17 or not. The flaw I can see in this is children using the IDs of their parents but I can’t think of a solution to prevent that to be honest.

51 Likes