Upcoming Changes to Experience Guidelines

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Creators,

This fall, we’ll be making changes to our Experience Guidelines naming and default settings. These changes are intended to update how our youngest users access experiences and to provide parents and users more clarity into the types of content available on Roblox.

Experience Guidelines will be renamed Content Labels and we will no longer label experiences by age. Instead, we’ll label experiences based on the type of content users can expect in an experience.

Why the change?

This change was prompted by user feedback and the recognition that all children develop on different timelines, so labeling experiences based on age does not meet every family’s needs. Knowing that parents also differ when it comes to the type of content they are comfortable with their child engaging with, we hope that this update will give parents more insight into the type of content to expect in an experience so they can make more informed decisions on what is uniquely appropriate for their child.

Current Naming Future Naming Content Description
All Ages Minimal May contain occasional mild violence and/or light unrealistic blood.
9+ Mild May contain repeated mild violence, heavy unrealistic blood, mild crude humor, and/or mild fear.
13+ Moderate May contain moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, unplayable gambling content, and/or moderate fear.
17+ Restricted May contain strong violence, heavy realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content, the presence of alcohol, strong language, and/or moderate fear.

  • Default content settings for users under the age of 9: By default, users under the age of 9 will only be able to access experiences with a content label of “Minimal” or “Mild.” Parents will be able to use parental controls to let their children access more mature content.

  • Descriptors and Questionnaire: We’re updating the terms we use to describe experience labels.

    • “Experience Guidelines” will become “Content Labels” – which you will see reflected in the questionnaire you fill out for your experience.

    • “Age Guidelines” will now be called “Content Maturity”, and users will continue to be able to customize their access to experiences based on their Content Maturity (renamed from Allowed Experiences) setting under Parental Controls.

    We will also add questions to the questionnaire about scary elements that may trigger fear. For more context on descriptors, see here.

  • Audience Insights: We’ve added the ability to see what percent of your audience is under 9 years old, to help you better understand the impact these changes will have on your experience(s). You can access this new functionality in Creator Hub under Analytics.

Next Steps

As we know these updates are significant and may affect many creators, we’re sharing this news early to provide visibility into the changes that will be most important for you. It is important to us to provide our community with advance notice, so these changes will not take effect for at least three months from now.

Closer to launch, we will share more specifics on exactly when this change will take effect. When that announcement happens, we will encourage you to take two actions:

  1. Retake the updated questionnaire with the new questions before the defaults are updated.

  2. Notify your users of these changes, and let them know that users under 9 will need parental consent to access your experience.

After a certain period of time, if you do not retake the updated questionnaire, your experience will be treated as an experience without a content maturity label and will be unplayable to users under the age of 9 by default. We will share exact timing at a later date, with at least thirty days advance notice.

We hope that these updates will help make Roblox more useful for parents and families, and we are excited to share more information over the coming months.

Thank you.

FAQs

Can I appeal the content maturity label for my experience?

  • Your content label and descriptors should accurately represent your experience. To update the content maturity label on your experience, you will need to resubmit the questionnaire to generate a new label. If the content label of your experience is moderated due to being inaccurate, the label will be removed, and you will need to resubmit the questionnaire again.

    Experiences with a 17+/Restricted label will retain their existing label to ensure they are accessible only to verified 17+ users.

Will scary avatars be allowed in experiences?

  • Scary avatars will continue to be allowed in experiences. Experiences that include scary elements will require a Fear descriptor and will have a content maturity label of either “Mild” or “Moderate.”

Can users who entered an incorrect age at signup correct their age?

  • Soon, all users who entered an incorrect age at signup will be allowed to correct their birthdate to change their age. Depending on the age they previously entered, they may need parental consent or ID verification in order to correct their birthdate.

Are creators required to fill out the questionnaire with the new questions related to fear?

  • After a certain period of time, if you do not retake the updated questionnaire, your experience will be treated as an experience without a content maturity label, and will be unplayable to users under the age of 9 by default. We will also provide more information closer to that date, and will provide at least thirty days advance notice.
120 Likes
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#4

Thank you for keeping us updated on these changes! :+1: Clarity is always important especially if it’s done in advance for stuff like this.

In the future, can we expect to possibly see algorithmic changes to reflect a user’s preferences? e.g. if a game has “violence” and a user is into games with similar metrics such as shooters, then the questionnaire would be used to recommend games with “similar” questionnaires? I am aware the algorithm already does this with genres in general, but do/will questionnaires play a part?

23 Likes
#5

This is an interesting update!

I like this. I 100% understand how families can differ in allowed content DRASTICALLY.

A possible suggestion for a feature to include with this is allowing parents to enable/disable specific descriptors. So a parent could block extremely violent games or games with moderate blood. :+1:

32 Likes
#6

Well, I think after this update parents won’t worry about their children. They have to choose right age/content for their children.

17 Likes
#7

I am incredibly glad to see this being acknowledged. This seems like an overall good change; I’m looking forward to it!

15 Likes
#8

Good change! Different families view content differently, nice to see you guys catering toward these differences.

12 Likes
#9

Can we please clarify what “unplayable gambling content” actually means?

When we look at something like the Roblox Community Standards under the Illegal and Regulated Goods Activities Section it refers to playable versions of gambling being allowed so long as real money, Robux, or in-experience items of value are not exchanged in connection to any gambling activities.

This leads to my primary question: is playable gambling allowed so long as it’s not pay-to-play, and does that cause some exemption to the Experience Guidelines and move it out of the gambling category or would this still be considered unplayable gambling?

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11 Likes
#10

What happens to the existing <9 audience if the Content Rating changes to 9+ (Mild)? Do they get locked out of the game losing all of their progression?

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#11

Just retook the questionnaire, and realized I may have just lost over 45% of my playerbase…

9 Likes
#12

They’re giving you advanced notice, so you should have enough time to make changes so younger players can still play, if that’s feasible for your game.

9 Likes
#13

More parental control is nice, but these naming conventions aren’t the best. I’d assume most games on the platform are going to be ‘All Ages’, but now that is going to be named Minimal. I guess I need to wait and see what the UI looks like for this though.

On a larger note, Roblox, if you even see this, y’all need to make a comprehensive guide to all parental controls and what they do. Including the ones for under 13 users who have parental emails connected. And on that side of things, you need to make those Under 13 Parental Controls for All Ages.

9 Likes
#14

By having the possibility of seeing the percentage of the audience to better understand the impact that these changes will have on the experiences, the age percentage will be according to the date of birth assigned to the player or we will only be able to know the age of the users who have the verified age to have an approximation?

With romantic themes they refer to what was announced in the RDC 2023 live that verified users +17 will be able to date on Roblox and form a relationship in real life?

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#15

“Minimal” is weird terminology I feel like?

And these are all very subjective. Moderate to someone can mean something entirely different to someone else, isn’t that why the current age rating naming is pretty universal across all platforms?

13 Likes
#16

As someone else mentioned, this description contradicts the community standards which do allow playable gambling content. Hopefully this is just an error and not an intentional inconsistency in policymaking

8 Likes
#17

what dose spawning a bone fall under in experience guidelines (for undertale like games)

6 Likes
#18

Would something like classic brickbattle games where characters just fall apart when killed (same as the default resetting mechanics) count as “repeated mild violence”? I think “heavy unrealistic blood” flowing and exploding everywhere is much worse than silly falling apart, however I have seen combat games with only silly falling apart death tagged as having repeated mild violence, so just asking.

7 Likes
#19

Finally! After 7 years I’ll be free from all restrictions based on incorrect account age!

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#20

Can we get some clarification on what exactly mild/moderate fear constitutes as? This is a very important change for those of us who are developing horror experiences & we’d like to know ahead of time incase there’s anything we need to change.

8 Likes
#21

I feel as if this needs to be a feature that immediately pops up for all newly made accounts to make sure there’s no confusion, however in terms of what its meant to achieve its pretty good!

7 Likes