Will iOS ever gain 17+ support?
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Any guess on how long it could take until a final verdict is done on SWEARING?
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Between now and the last time product has communicated on this thread, staff have entirely dodged all relevant questions and concerns about this and just jumped straight to telling us that experiences have launched without the proper safeguards, tools or developer support.
This is appalling. Please get someone on communications in this thread, in a new clarifications thread or a Q&A post. Iâm getting really sick and frustrated with product and moderationâs blatant inability to communicate important changes in lockstep with the developer community and this is coming off the heels of much improved communication with the roadmap from the new product leads. Someone at the team needs to follow that example, as well as engineeringâs, and start talking.
Bulldozing ahead with trying to put 17+ experiences in the hands of creators without fully fleshing out policy for some of the major concerns is going to be disastrous in terms of consequences for developers and we have been given zero reassurance that moderation will not annihilate our careers on a hair trigger. Mind you, as Iâve already pointed out several times, the thread encourages bypassing moderation due to the lack of rollout of 17+ assets.
This is getting ridiculous. Call me out for being too hasty for a response prior, but when this is the first staff reply since the âFAQâ (that answered next to nothing), I think my upset is getting significantly more justified here. What happened to the pledge to communication? There is NONE here.
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Just an opinion butâŚ
I feel like Roblox is going to be a little vague regarding depiction to the romantic themes and alcohol rule. Honestly, this update sure is quite great since it allows more space of creativity to creators. However, I sure hope that Robloxâs moderation in the future would be able to handle all of this especially if theyâre going to manage 17+ assets.
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While I appreciate Robloxâs attempt at establishing a space for their older audience, I canât help but feel this new age rating as nothing but an inherently flawed idea that goes against the core of Roblox. What is most likely an attempt to introduce a proper 17+ game rating while also remaining COPPA-compliant, users must provide a form of government-issued identification to Roblox before accessing any game with a 17+ rating. While this is a perfectly fine solution if a creator is only interested in creating a secure, mature space for users to interact with, whilst taking full advantage of the relatively miniscule advantages a 17+ rating offers â it comes with a multitude of questions for any other circumstance:
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How is a 17+ game supposed to produce any form of profit or amass any sort of meaningful playerbase, even assuming that Roblox provides additional tools in the future for advertising experiences with this age rating? From what I have read, 38% of Robloxâs total users report being over 17 years old â a minority to begin with. The number of users that are truly honest with the age they set their account to, as well as users willing to provide real-world identification to Roblox is likely much lower than that. Even if a game manages to get every single user actively using the Roblox platform that fits the aforementioned criteria to engage with their experience, the game is destined to accrue practically zero income (maybe if adult Roblox casinos become a trend).
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What is the benefit of marking a game as 17+ beyond a loose description of violent/romantic depictions? I could maybe see the appeal for depicting alcohol; a deeply romantic scene; or a gory mess of an arena, but there is so much overlap between 13+ rated and 17+ rated games, that most games are better off marking themselves as a 13+ experience to still allow a large playerbase to interact with the experience. Especially with no apparent difference between chat filters, there is not even an excuse to be made for a more lax/unregulated adult chatroom. Many games on Roblox display content that could be arguable as 17+ rated, which brings up my next point:
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Will games that do not meet the criteria of an age recommendation be forcibly changed to match their in-game content, whether that is from personal review or mass reporting? As previously mentioned, there are many games that could be argued for a higher age rating, especially when the distinction between âmoderateâ and âintenseâ violence leaves much to be desired. Games such as Criminality, Decaying Winter, Mortem Metallum and games akin to it, and Counter Blox: a game clearly made in the light of Valveâs Counter Strike series; a series that is rated as Mature (17+) by the ESRB â all have strong arguments to be placed in the 17+ age rating category, and all being games that receive thousands of concurrent players. If such experiences were forcibly moved to that category, they are almost guaranteed to lose a majority of their playerbase and revenue, something that hurts both the game and Roblox. If they are not to be moved to a different age category, that only brings up my main question: what is the point of marking your experience with a 17+ age rating?
How I feel about 17+ rated games is how I also felt about Roblox introducing voice chat: a nice feature to have, but meddled with the restriction of ID age verification that, personally, defeats the point of the whole feature. An obvious restriction, yes, but a restriction that ends up hurting the larger potential of the feature. Iâm almost certain that with a majority of users you see with voice chat is because they were invited to be part of the beta program, rather than willingness to verify their identity with Roblox. If a player is to go through that process anyways, itâs going to be for access to voice chat, not to play a 17+ age rated game. Roblox at itâs heart has always been an all age platform, and harshly restricting an experience with very few benefits attached to it, in my opinion, inherently goes against the idea of publishing an experience for users to play and engage with. Maybe there is something that I missed, or maybe 17+ games will soon be granted additional permissions, but from what I have read and corroborated with my personal interpretations â this is my opinion on the usefulness of this feature. With a lack of data to support my claims, Iâd hold this critique with a grain of salt â maybe there is a much larger base of verified players than I originally realized.
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âStarting todayâ
Itâs almost like Roblox JUST enabled 17+ content extremely recently, and previously only had developers working on content for kids, or something.
Iâm not sure the intent of both of your questions, as neither of them have an answer so soon, clearly.
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ofc, it was just falsely removed ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
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Why would any reasonable person set a game to 17+ at the moment when you unlock limited very freedoms and block 99% of your audience?
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I mean if it includes the dying player to point the gun on their head then shoot themselves, probably not, you can however replace actual dying with a water gun or something.
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Hey, weâve been working on a 17+ hangout experience for the past 3 weeks. We noticed the sort was rolled out yesterday and decided it would be a good time to release our first version of the game. I wanted to share our thoughts and experiences thus far.
Issues with Discoverability & Exposure
The âExclusive for Ages 17+â Sort
At first glance, this brand new sort is a great way for 17+ experiences to gain exposure, especially being placed right on the front page for adult players - however in reality, the execution is lackluster.
Many of the experiences included in the initial rollout of this sort are either set to private, have exceedingly low like-ratios, or are extremely low quality (some were even disturbingly inappropriate) - devaluing the overall experience for 17+ players.
We understand that this sort is brand new, but please provide a way for developers of 17+ experiences to apply for this sort or update the sort often enough to allow for new experiences to be added in a timely manner.
Sponsored advertisements and user advertisements
At the moment, discovery for 17+ experiences is non-existent. If your experience isnât lucky enough to make it onto the aforementioned sort, itâs essentially doomed to fail.
User advertisements (box, skyscraper, & banner) currently have no options to select which age group they are displayed to. This essentially means that 62% of total impressions are wasted - as noted by staff, only 38% of Robloxâs DAU are 17+.
Sponsored advertisements seem like the perfect alternative to this issue, as they allow for specific age groups to be targeted. However, once again - you cannot create sponsored advertisements for 17+ experiences. How are we supposed to get our game out there?
Features that need to be addressed
Regarding the text chat filter & voice chat filter
Roblox announced at RDC 2022 they were planning to reduce the chat filter for 13+ players, however - weâve now arrived at the release of 17+ experiences, and the chat filter is just as restrictive as it was before.
The state of voice chat moderation is another point of concern, especially among our early players - they donât know what they can and canât say in 17+ experiences. Of course, filters are necessary for civil communication - but a âone-size-fits-allâ solution is no longer appropriate for the platform moving forward.
Mature asset support and clarity regarding whatâs allowed
While working on our 17+ experience, we never knew if moderation would strike us down and put our experience or accounts in jeopardy because the guidelines of whatâs allowed is vague and moderation does not support mature assets yet.
The original announcement post mentions that mature asset support will come at a later date, but it appears that 17+ experiences are already being released as-is.
With no mature asset support, moderation will continue to pose a constant threat to 17+ experience developers, and heavily restrict the content they can put into their experiences.
Conclusion and final thoughts
As we now have a bit of experience working with 17+ experiences, we hope this provides some helpful insight to any engineers monitoring this thread.
We believe that the selection of 17+ experiences on the platform can flourish if the issues mentioned above are addressed and accounted for in future iterations of this new and exciting feature.
Edit: Engineers may want to consider automatically setting the Allowed Experiences Parental Control setting to 17+ for any users who are age verified as 17 or over, many players were confused as to how to access our experience (as it defaults to 13+)
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What the actual heck are you talking about? Please donât respond to me if youâre going to be unhinged.
Or maybe at least actually reply or address what I say, rather than just angrily posting about how dis-satisfied you are with the fact developers didnât instantly start producing Triple-A games within a few days of 17+ games coming out. You can just not tag me in the reply if you want to do that, you know?
Like seriously what are you even on about. âNice working product teamâ?..
What do you want them to do? They released the ability to create 17+ games. Yes, it is functioning. The fact that there arenât a lot of games yet, or a lot of players yet, has nothing to do with roblox, as roblox does not control, or force, what games get made or what players play.
The fact I have to tell you this is baffling.
If you want to see what actually good feedback looks like, look at Radiakkâs post. But your response ainât it chief.
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tldr: this is a failed idea and it only brought fetish games and/or borderline nsfw games made by azctual predators
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I didnât need a tl;dr. Youâve mistaken me thinking what youâre saying to be nonsense with me not understanding what youâre saying. Try again.
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Relating to privacy concerns: Roblox does not handle the verification process themselves, they use Persona. If youâre worried about privacy then read the privacy policies for both platforms.
Secondly, if weâre being broad, do you want 10 year olds freely playing a game intended for a mature audience? You can blame the parent, but ultimately Roblox has to try to regulate these things somehow.
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I have one important question I seek an answer for.
Making experiences 17+ as of now basically cuts your experience off from a major audience and there are very few players currently that are both 17+ and ID verified.
And I actually also donât want to lock out all the players that are just below the age of 17.
Can we some day get a âCensor Serviceâ or a âAge Serviceâ where we can essentially check if a user is 17+ to determine whether some effects like extreme violence should be turned on or off?
I plan to have graphic levels of blood/violence in a project but wish to have it turned off for <17 users so I donât have to upload my experience as 2 separate places, one being for 13+ users and one for 17+ users.
I want users of both age groups to be able to play on the same servers and same experience but simply turn down graphic visuals for the younger ones.
Will we some time get a special service or tool for this?
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âfailed ideaâ thereâs barley any content made for it, literally less then a page⌠this is a much needed update if the platform is gonna continue to grow. If anyone is breaking TOS the game will be deleted simple as that. Plus why would predators target 17+ exclusive content that is protected with ID verification they wonât find many kids there.
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Thatâd be horrible if that was actually true.
Fortunately it is not.
Anything of the sort, even those borderline games are not a single bit more allowed due to this update.
The rules in the updated strictly forbid anything remotely related sus games, as they should.
Fortunately Roblox did not let anything of the like slip through and I hope they will never allow any of said sus games.
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Why roblox require a passport to prove youâre 17 and older? Thatâs makes no sense.
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Does this 17+ mean youâll be able to use chat without filter or even if there is a filter, just use profanity?
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Seriously,
as a South Korean developer, i am very negative about this update.
they restrict everything for no exact reason. i would like to know a reason for it.
in South Korea, we actually have the following content ratings according to Article 21 (Rating Classification) of the âGAME INDUSTRY PROMOTION ACTâ.
- Permitted for use by all: Game products which can be used by anyone (ESRB: E, E10+)
- Permitted for use by 12 year olds: Game products which cannot be used by those under 12 years of age (ESRB: E10+, T)
- Permitted for use by 15 year olds: Game products which cannot be used by those under 15 years of age (ESRB: T)
- Not permitted for use by juveniles: Game products which cannot be used by juveniles (ESRB: M)
the law already requires content ratings and Roblox already has an ID-verified system, so why on earth is South Korea unavailable the 17+ experience?
if the South Korean government is so lackadaisical about ID-verified, i think it would be better for them to allow 17+ experiences while still attracting a minimum of 17+ players, instead of restricting 17+ experiences by requiring more information.
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