China’s laws restrict religion. As the oldest and largest online church based out of Roblox, it is unfortunate that we will be left out.
It is also frustrating that since 2019, Roblox has added words such as “Christian,” “Church,” “Jesus,” and “Christ” to its chat filter. This has made it very difficult for my group, a 501c3 non profit, to do the work we have done for nearly a decade on Roblox.
Technically, they aren’t, since you have to make them compatible and compliant yourself, otherwise, China can’t access it. I’m fully with you here, just wanted to point that out.
After reading the Roblox China Terms of Service , I found it extremely amusing, and get where some of this conversation comes from.
Alright, so, in my viewpoint, it basically says anything that’s put on their website is considered as content. This includes any copyrighted works as well.
This one is interesting as well. You grant the ability for the company to take all that content and do anything with it, and the company cannot be liable for anything they do with your content.
So here, anything that comes from the site and studio, the company cannot be held reliable for anything that happens within or because of it.
And here’s an interesting part… Nothing outside of these terms allows users to give an arguement upon. Laws?
Hm…
Yeah I wouldn’t put anything of mine on the Roblox Chinese website. What’s worse is if anything that is yours get put on there, that content now belongs to Tencent, including copyrighted works as said in Section 1.1.
On another point, I’d hate to see peoples’ music rights taken from this, I really love music.
There is ALOT of controversy about China. I do not trust this as many other developers. I 100% do not support this due to China being oppressively towards religions. They show ALOT of racism towards Muslims, they are not trustable, not secure, etc… I will not go into more things but China’s programs just seem… a bit suspicious. I do not trust China’s Roblox one bit. Of course this opinion of mine is not in spite of racism towards China, its the racism from China towards others.
Also, thank you Roblox for making this optional otherwise it would have been chaotic.
This is not only great for more players and accessibility, but this also means more people local to there will learn about game development and will become developers to bring more good creations and good ideas to the platform of ROBLOX.
I understand wanting to expand business and get more money but as others said, Japan would be a much better place to do this, where they don’t mistreat their own citizens.
Also robricks.cn and robricks.qq.com dont redirect to roblox unlike robricks.com
This argument is unproductive. It is each individual content creator’s decision if they would like to enter the Chinese market or not. If they are convinced not to because of China’s ethically dubious reputation, that is for them to decide.
It’s not racism, it’s not bias, it’s a decision that one is free to make in the free world.
Everyone is allowed to make their own decisions, and as content creators that fuel this platform, they are also allowed to dissent.
What is not productive about this conversation is the fact that there are arguments flying (some more sound than others) that have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
I won’t pretend to not have a position on this topic; I am against ROBLOX’s involvement with Tencent and China.
However, as previously asserted, it is each creator’s choice to involve themselves in the Chinese market through ROBLOX or not, and it is ROBLOX’s choice to involve themselves with the Chinese market or not.
Thus, it follows that everyone should not be forced to do this and that those who choose not to should be guaranteed meaningful separation from the Chinese and Tencent per their decision. I believe this is what we should be discussing, and this is what we should be focused on.
Dissenting to ROBLOX’s decision is okay, providing reasons why is alright, but having a full blown argument about the politics around China and its domestic policies is completely pointless because neither side is gaining ground and there’s a low chance ROBLOX will change their decision due to this argument.
The whole point of being a serious content creator on this platform is to make your own business decisions.
Instead of arguing about why someone is making their own decisions, we ought to focus on ensuring that those decisions are respected and that we retain our power to make our own business decisions.
Yeah, because if developers get wind of something like that happening, they wouldn’t want to push their new content to China anymore, which is devastating for a platform like Roblox because it thrives on the content flywheel which is driven by developers. Roblox would want to actively prevent this from happening, also because putting the community first is one of their core principles.
Just because a legal text is on the permissive side doesn’t mean it translates directly to how reality will play out. It’s permissive because foreigners publishing games in China is a big hack to begin with, and it’s totally optional if you aren’t comfortable with it. Power to the people who want to pursue it.
The answer is money, money, and even more money. I am quite ashamed to be honest roblox is just letting china do everything, they do not even try to refuse giving china full control, they just let them do everything for money. Roblox should have at least tried to stand up to China and make Roblox China less censored.
As much as I wish they actually would or could do that, they can’t.
They’re having to do this to abide by China’s laws to get into the market, which, I think the fact that they gave in just goes to show that they are doing this solely for money.
Putting the political stuff aside (ahem), this is a great opportunity for developers looking to further branch out their games into a new audience. Best of luck to everyone who applied 
I’m not exactly happy about Roblox’s push to the Chinese market, but I gotta give credit where credit is due and thank them for making it opt-in.
They do not need to keep up a reputation with western developers once they sufficiently grow their end of the platform. The thing that you should be concerned about is not the near term possibility of such an event happening, but rather the long term possibility. This contract with Roblox is irrevocable and becomes activated as soon as you submit your work to this program and are approved.
If a majority of Roblox games were to publish through Tencent to the Chinese market, what would stop Tencent from doing what they want a few years down the line? It’s not like all of those developers can suddenly say “nope, I actually don’t agree with this piece of legal text I signed, now it’s invalid”. And plus, they would not be as blatant as to take “Phantom Forces” and republish their own version as “Totally Not Phantom Forces 2.0”, instead they would take the codebases of these games and reskin them to create their own versions.
And even if they didn’t, you are ceding major authority over your own intellectual property, and if you are serious about protecting your own IP, that alone should be enough to turn you away. A lot of the Chinese Communist Party and their operations is about control – they may not (and often don’t) use the powers that they have over every company, but the important thing to them is the fact that they have that control when they need it. Same thing applies to Tencent publishing your Roblox games onto the Chinese market. They may not plan on stealing your work, but they want the power to do so if they ever so wished.
Here’s my issue.
Roblox is a corporation. Obviously, as a corporation, your goal is to expand as much as possible to earn more profit and to advance your platform. Roblox is known to let you release you creativity to the audience. Limitless possibilities.
The Chinese Market, (the government in general,) is very strict on what’s determined as acceptable creativity. Even though these restrictions may be cultural, some of which is very alarming, such as giving them permission to pocket the profit from your game that is supposed to go towards you.
Furthermore, without getting into politics, the Chinese government enforces extreme measures that I don’t support. If I were to apply, it would feel like I’m supporting their “controversial” practices.
So as a company, I understand where Roblox is coming from. But from a spectator’s point, this is a bit uneasy to hear 
I think you’ve miss-read it. Tencent only gains the rights to advertise your UGC through various means and the rights to be able to host it in china, nothing more. They don’t gain the right to use it in their own games.
I’m seeing a lot of people not agreeing with this decision considering all of the human rights violations. While I too hate China a lot, I think that it doesn’t really matter whether Roblox takes the opportunity or not, since if Roblox doesn’t take the offer, another company will come and take it’s place.
Thanks for you input! I’ll try re-reading over the terms when I can, and I’ll change my post if I find anything different.
I didn’t realise the dev forum had so many geopolitics experts and qualified lawyers!
I think I trust the legal team at Roblox more than those in this thread.
Spreading out to China sounds like a great idea but despite the market, I don’t think it’ll succeed. China already has many censorship rules in place and it can take YEARS for a game to get approved [just look at MKWii on the NVIDIA Shield, that’s still not approved yet]. Expanding to China just isn’t the right thing, how censored will the chat be for starters?
Most people in China would probably rather use an approved VPN by the government there and use the normal version of Roblox instead.
