With the recent preview of Age Recommendations we’re able to answer questions based on what our experience contains, such as violence and blood.
As a Roblox developer while this is great and actually something we’ve been asking for, the current system is quite restrictive and doesn’t allow us to tailor our experiences based on the user.
My experience along with many others on the platform have gore / blood as an optional effect that can be disabled (or is even disabled by default). The issue with how things are currently set up is that we’re only left with two options: restrict our audience massively or completely disable blood/gore for everyone instead of only a subset of players.
My proposal is to add a gore / blood option to policy service and allow us to specify in the experience questionnaire if we follow the policy API (as is already done for paid random items and paid item trading). This would allow us to tailor our experiences to younger audiences as well as older audiences, and would allow parents to still specify if blood or gore should be shown.
I agree with this. As a developer who has created experiences with blood and gore, I would like to be able to tailor to everybody when possible.
I’m not sure if anybody remembers, but even the classic Call of Duty BO1 has an explicit content option, in which blood and language could be disabled.
I think settings such as these allow a wider audience to access an experience, and in the end, benefits both Roblox and the creator.
Thanks for the feedback and for sharing the specific use case here! We’ve highlighted this for the Age Recommendations team to take into consideration.
I think this should be high priority especially due to the fact that at the end of the year any games that have not age rated themselves intentionally in order to not limit their player-base will be forced to 13+. Many games I have worked with (many of which are front-page) have a heavy use of violence or gore and are unable to get a rating under 13+ as a result, I’ve talked to the devs of these games and they have informed me that they would happily disable gore for younger players if an API was provided to allow them to do so. It’s incredibly unfortunate that the most popular games on the platform will likely die unless they remove all gore due to this major lack of feature.
Can we have an update on this? When age recommendations were first announced I immediately noticed this gaping flaw. My game has relatively unrealistic blood which is disabled by default. I noted that I would like to turn it off entirely if the user has blood restrictions on their account.
Apparently the moderators think that my blood effect does not count as ‘unrealistic/light’ and therefore rejected my questionnaire. I am now forced to remove blood entirely for all users to make my game playable for 9+.
Adding ways to check the user’s age recommendation settings is absolutely necessary for myself and other devs to create the experiences we want to create without being filtered out of the algorithm.
This is unfortunately true, in order for blood to qualify as “unrealistic” it must be dis-coloured or pixelated, neither of which your game does. A game I personally worked with had major concerns raised when this blood restriction was added as their major audience was children while allowing players to opt-in for blood, they have since been forced to a 13+ rating by DevRel.
This is very unfortunate and I’ve already removed the blood effects much to the dismay of my community. I have had the effect for over two years now. The way the blood works is completely unrealistic and shows no harm on the body. It was a mechanic to see how close to dying a player was at a distance. The way they went about this age restriction update screams preventative action against governmental regulation. I wish they had put more time into thinking about ways to make it easier for devs whose games were previously allowed for all ages to migrate to the new system without a discoverability hit.