Starting on January 17th, 2023 experiences without Guidelines will no longer be recommended to users under the age of nine. The age recommendations of experiences will also begin to inform Search & Discovery.
Since launching in September, Experience Guidelines have seen widespread adoption and the vast majority of engagement is now being spent in experiences with completed guidelines. Experience Guidelines help users make more informed decisions on the content and experiences they interact with. Alongside this launch, we upgraded our parental controls to allow parents to customize which experiences their child can join.
This next step helps users of all ages and parents find content that is appropriate for them.
If you have not yet completed your Experience Questionnaire and received your Age Recommendation, we strongly recommend that you do this. You can do this for each of your experiences on the Creator Dashboard. If you fill out the questionnaire and you believe that the rating does not match your intended audience, you can review the content in your experience to see if there are adjustments you can make so that your experience is appropriate for your target audience.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback below!
It’s always great to see updates that improve the safety of young players!
However, I’d like to see a bit more detailed explanation than “The age recommendations of experiences will also begin to inform Search & Discovery.”
This statement alone doesn’t detail if experienced will not appear at all, or if they will appear later in the list. I’d really like more information on the user experience of players searching for my games.
Of course, this is expected as child safety online is more expected in these times, but it is worrying that experience discovery among users is decreasing. It would be nice if users can discover experiences more easily, like the use of a genre sort, or tag system as seen on Steam. This would also be helpful for developers.
For child saftey update. This is a massive win for Roblox but what I sugguest come with this update is when developers try to publish there games display that the game needs to be age rated (but there can be an option to skip)
Discovery is already decreasing months prior to this change. Very noticeable after October though… W for ROBLOX image to parents, but not so much for developers.
In other words, this change would most likely reduce player traffic to your game.
If you think about it, this change is actually good for most developers. If you fill out the questionnaire, player traffic being pushed away from other games will just mean that your game will become more likely to be recommended instead. It will only really negatively affect old games that have developers who no longer update the game.
I didn’t have to think about it because I was affected by the preparation backend update of this change for the past two months. It was not very pleasant, and I have not recovered from it yet. We are talking about losing a 3-5x player count in a couple of days and discovery traffic loss up to 10x randomly. Abnormal behaviors that never happened before until mid-October. I was not the only one affected because someone else filed the report before me.
If I think about it, this tunneling of player traffic will be pushed toward already front-page games rather than other low-mid-tier games.
Not sure how this would make anything harder for smaller developers. The post just says that if you didn’t give your experience an age recommendation, it won’t be recommended to people under the age of 9.
I think it would be great if we can set the age we wish people to be to be able to join our experience (and they must have it verified). It could allow by theory if Roblox allows it, experiences which are like GTA with drugs, swearing and stuff like that. With Roblox wanting to up the age who wants to play I think that it would be a great idea tbh.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but couldn’t any game get recommended to anybody up until now? Maybe I just misunderstood, but it seems like this could affect small devs who make fps or horror games. Sounds a lot like the ad update we had recently…
Yes, but Roblox wants to enforce proper age ratings for games on the site (like ESRB ratings in real life). You can still play any game on the site (unless told otherwise via parental controls).
Experience guidelines have official been around since September and experiences without guidelines are already treated as 13+.
Besides, its not like Roblox just did this out of nowhere, it was mentioned this change was going to happen in the initial post:
I find the introduction of age ratings to search and discovery really concerning.
It frustrates me that games are still not moderated fairly or correctly. Murder Mystery 2 for example is still listed as ‘All Ages’ and no mention of violence in it’s rating. Loot box games such as Pet Simulator & Adopt Me have no mention of gambling in their age rating.
Yet my camping game Backpacking was moderated and told to place Mild Violence in its rating due to bears and SharkBite given a 9+ rating for frequent violence.
It doesn’t seem like all games are being treated equally or some high profile developers aren’t correctly filling in the survey so their game isn’t filtered out of player searches. This now puts developers that fill in the survey fairly at a disadvantage.
Some of those games have removed lootboxes/gambling from the rating because the people in the countries and areas that those aren’t allowed in due to the laws and regulations that have restricted them have them hidden.
If they don’t remove them from the label then the game still get restricted from those users. I hope roblox allows developers in the future to keep it in the rating without region restrictions as long as it is confirmed that the loot boxes are disabled for those in restricted regions.
(Sorry for the confusing wording)
