As a concerned Roblox Developer, I was thinking about a way to limit player time for users under 13. As you know, there has been an epidemic of children spending way longer than they should on the computer.
A configurable time limit (hours of play time per every 24 hours) that can be set on accounts under 13 by a parent/guardian would be the answer for this issue. This time limit would affect not only the Roblox client, but the website and Studio.
A timer would show in the top right for the game client, website, and in the top right by your username for studio (that shows how much time you have left for that 24 hours),
When this time elapses, and finally reaches 0, players will be kicked from any game they’ve joined, and prevented from joining new ones. On the website, players will not be able to access the catalog, group pages, avatar customization, game pages/game sort, and the create page/library. The website chat will also be disabled. In studio, players will not be able to access the program itself, as once logged in, an error will appear and studio will quit.
Since Roblox strives to be a kid-friendly platform, why not encourage healthy gaming time?
But, a timer will not help a player pace their gameplay (not to mention, pacing is impossible for round-based games). So, if the timer reaches zero and they’re in the middle of an “unsavable interval” (like how round-based don’t save rounds), they’ll get kicked and that unsaved progress is lost. This can lead them to frustrate over Roblox and potentially just rage-quite entirely.
And also, what’s to stop a kid from creating another account and putting their own E-mail as a parent one?
Again, I love the idea, but there are some inevitable flaws in there.
In addition, virtually every popular operating system has in place systems for parental contros that parents can already utilize to limit gameplay time.
If Roblox really wanted money, they could add a button so that users could pay $1.99 to get extra time.
Jokes aside, there could be a warning prompt or something, that tells users when their time is low. Maybe games could have suggested play times (e.g. This game takes 1 hour to play.), and if a player’s time is too low, they wouldn’t be able to join.
Doesn’t China already have a system like this? If so, Roblox could simply reuse that code with some minor tweaks.
Oh, I meant that China had time limits enforced for games, so all Roblox would need to do is just copy some of that code. I didn’t mean that China let you enable/disable the time limit.
This seems harmful to Roblox for no significant gain; external tools for this already exist that automate the time limit and work across multiple programs. Parents can also already restrict playtime themselves if they think it’s necessary. It’s called parenting and they should be doing light supervision anyway.
As I have said before, this is a parent’s responsibility, not Roblox’s. There’s already tons of ways parents can enforce time limits on their children’s devices. Why would Roblox, who profits more from people being on their platform as long as possible, want to implement this feature?
Having this built-in to Roblox is unnecessary and counterintuitive.