This is a great way for audiences of specific ages to play games at Roblox without being scared, and feel comfortable and safe!
However, if soon the feature adds an option for 18+ as the highest age to choose, I can tell that it won’t be good for those children that created an account with the wrong/false birthdate, getting access to experiences that show explicit content that can make parents unhappy and feel unsafe to kids to continue being in the platform. Furthermore, it also breaks the Community Standards > SAFETY > Article. 05:
I am kinda confused with the first question in the questionnaire. Will a game that contains damaging animals and players be considered violence? (Is a survival game)
You just click the tool and then it does damage to the player/animal until it dies and drops meat. It doesn’t have any sort of graphic that makes it look like torture though.
I answered NO for the first question, but I want to know what a staff member thinks about it.
This is a great idea and definitely a step ahead for Roblox, however, 1 in 100 parents actually configure parental controls, and you could expect people to bypass the parental controls.
We all knew the lawyers would step in one day as Roblox grows, it will just happen sooner than you think. Nothing wrong with that, but we all knew the day was coming.
I feel like restricting experiences entirely because of certain content is overkill, especially when developers can easily censor/remove them if given the tools to do so (as we can already do with paid random items)
Also, will games that are NOT suitable to everyone be more heavily recommended/promoted to older audiences than games that are suitable to everyone? I feel like this would help mitigate player/revenue losses whilst also improving discovery for players
Overall I believe this update is a step in the right direction for the platform but I hope there can be more communication on the things I mentioned above
Currently the age recommendation survey only accounts for violence, random paid items, and trading.
Are there any plans to include difficulty into this? I am the owner of a game that markets itself as difficult, yet 5 year old children are allowed to join. The issue here is that the vast majority of them cannot handle losing, they get upset, leave the game along with leaving a bad rating, ultimately tanking our like:dislike ratio.
This is interesting but, doesn’t actually solve the problem that it’s meant to solve. This assumes that kids are being honest about their age. I’m not even a kid and I’m not honest about my age. All a kid has to do is create a new account, change their birthday, and they can get past the restriction. I think that age restriction when you have no real concrete metric other than a birth certificate (which no parent would ever provide a third party) is a bit far fetched and impractical. There’s little that this company really should be doing before Roblox starts to become a virtual “parent”. If parents don’t like their kids playing on Roblox, they should handle that themselves. Not blame Roblox for their lack of oversight / parenting.
Personally, I think this is more reason that Roblox should phase out of child-only and move towards teens / adults. The more Roblox attempts to be a “virtual parent”, the more you alienate those who don’t fall under those ranges.
Informed decisions lose value when the person making said decision aren’t truthful in the first place.
My 15 seconds of Googling suggests that it’s more like 40 in 100 parents that configure parental controls.
In any case though, even if they don’t, the tools are being provided to them to do so. If a parent decides they don’t want to enable the parental controls, that’s their decision.
And in terms of bypassing, there’s not really any bypassing something that’s part of the platform. You can’t bypass the cost of items either, after all. The only time that a problem would arise where a feature like this can be bypassed is through improper implementation.
From my perspective, I think the reason behind making these guidelines a thing is to avoid getting complaints from the parent, other countries maybe ask for a game to be taken down because it breaks the rules, and it could also help them not get sued.
If a kid lies about their age, the responsible will be the parent.
If a developer lies about not having gambling in the game, the responsible will be the developer if the game gets reported and reviewed.
Many other platforms have parental controls already, and besides, it’s not like they didn’t have parental controls in the start (account pin technically was for parents)
There is the problem of people lying about there age though, a pretty big loop hole in a otherwise good idea to keep kids safer from those creeps and weirdo players.
I am kinda confused with the first question in the questionnaire. Will a game that contains damaging animals and players be considered violence? (Is a survival game)
