Create Experiences for People 17 and Older on Roblox

What’s stopping me from doing this off-platform as well?

I could just open up Steam (it’s easy enough to create an account) and download Apex Legends, which I believe is rated 16, and I’ve not been asked for any identity information.


This sounds pretty off-topic, but why couldn’t Roblox develop a good parental controls solution? Before the dreadful events of March 28th (27th for people in America), I was browsing through the Wii U eShop’s news section and the USK actively praised their parental controls solution, which isn’t really that complex, only notable thing is that it’s system-level.

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In the country where I live, many people are not familiar with Roblox and technology in general. As a result, some of my relatives have ended up signing up for things they didn’t fully understand, similar to falling for scam calls. It’s surprising, but quite a few people do fall for these kinds of situations.

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It’s pretty awful yeah.

Recently we were having a goodbye party for my friend who was going into the navy and there was someone eating loudly on his microphone. I don’t know who reported them, but we started seeing people drop like flies with voice chat suspensions for stuff that wasn’t even related. We don’t actually know what triggered it but things had been going fine for hours before moderations suddenly started dropping.

Blanketing things under civility is extremely vague and over encompassing. Do we take civility to mean we act corporate and censured? Like we’re in a workplace?

No other platform is this stringent, and I feel it’s following a misguided trend that will cripple communication on the internet in the long run. I’ll remain optimistic and give them the benefit of the doubt, but I’m a bit perturbed.

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That isn’t the point at all. With these guidelines, you can only market to 38% of the platform.

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That’s true, but it still circles back to my original point being that parents are responsible for safeguarding their wallets to prevent their child from using their personal information and/or their financial information. Parents should definitely have this conversation with their children as we are increasingly being more dependent on the digital world, which a lot of the time requires you to use your ID or credit cards to buy products or identify themselves on a website. It’s no different than parents locking up alcohol to prevent kids from using it.

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The key distinction is that Roblox has been specifically marketed toward children for many years. Making this available to a broader audience, would undermine their efforts in implementing chat filtering and maintaining a primarily kid-friendly environment.

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I 101% agree with this, and parents should talk to there kids about this!

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At the same time, they kind of have to grow. We can’t always be stuck with a filter that constantly censors whatever you say, and bans you for something like “yes” or “wow”, for being apparently offensive.

I can’t even say the S word (crap but more vulgar), which people use on the daily now.

This update won’t fix anything though.

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It’s important to note that Roblox within the last few years hasn’t been targeted towards kids, rather users aged over 13. Obviously, there are still a ton of kids using it, but I think parents do need to take better control on what their children are doing online.

Also, please re-iterate the excuse when I gave the Nintendo eShop as an example of a platform, when I’d argue a lot of Nintendo’s content is oriented towards kids. They don’t require me to verify any sort of identity.

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Yeah, I agree but they can’t really do that while the top Experiences are targeted for children.

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From my eyes, it’s safe to assume by now that this is no longer the case and that Roblox isn’t marketing to only children anymore but rather both children and young adults. When 1/3 of your playerbase consists of an older audience, then some changes have to be made to benefit all of the age groups. A less strict chat filter is overdue in my opinion for said older audience, as no one wants to be filtered and/or moderated for saying some swear words in a context that isn’t harmful or insulting.

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What happens if the game gets rater 17+ but the owner is not ID verified?

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Wow… This is interesting. Not something I expected to see this soon. I feel like, even for 17+ content, these are fairly restrictive guidelines, but then again seeing less restrictive stuff on Roblox of all platforms would definitely be a shell shock. I don’t see what the incentive to make these games is, though, since it’s limited to the demographic of ID verified 17+ users and children who managed to get photos and identification of their parents for this sake.

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I don’t think roblox has actually specifically marketed towards children, it’s more been marketed towards all ages rather than children. What makes it seem to be marketed towards children is that it has the ability to host children on the platform as they are COPPA compliant, which not many engines are willing to put in all the effort Roblox has made, to make their platform COPPA compliant as well.

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I’m assuming that it won’t allow you to create a 17+ game in the first place if you aren’t ID Verified, but you can take this with a grain of salt as I am obviously not a Roblox Staff Member.

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Yes, I also see this as Roblox is trying to “age-up” the platform and because on all devices the rating for Roblox is teen.

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Although this is a nice update it doesn’t really appeal to me how this would be considered mature as it is what I would assume is what a 13+ user would do except for the blood and alcohols part but even then 13+ users may see alcohol pretty often.

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That is not Roblox’s fault however, that is up to the developers on their platform. It would be really weird if they just decided to get rid of kid’s games.

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It will only get rated after you publish it so you should still be able to create a game with 17+ content.

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You realize that games like PSX are essentially simulated gambling, right? That’s not even including the fact that you can literally pay for lootboxes with Robux. This feels more like an exception than an actual reason why lootboxes are separate than simulated gambling. I’m not saying to ban lootboxes, but you’ve definitely got an interesting way of keeping the stream of money you get from kids spending real life money on pet eggs.

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