This policy is great for kids on Roblox! Games will be rated well as they should be, and prevent bad games from being shown to kids! Nice update and change! Roblox is evolving for the better!
There seems to be a lot of confusion around this update. The Roblox-assigned genre and subgenre have nothing to do with determining whether a game is a “social hangout” or not; it’s a new descriptor in the experience guidelines that the developer would have to explicitly set when taking the questionnaire for their experience.
Whether developers will actually rate their experiences honestly or not can’t be guaranteed.
I believe this change was requested by the Turkish government because its a weird timing of choice to publish this now.
However this is unrealistic. The kids will find a way to play it one way or other. Limiting it makes it worse because something restricted makes it more appealing, its the human psychology.
Here is the context behind what warranted these changes.
This was also the reason for the group wall limitations for <13 users.
Not to mention, this hurts actual games more than inappropriate ones. PLS Donate will be restricted to >13 audiences while Meepcity gets to stay all ages, especially with the status update.
Oh wow, well either way this will also favor the authorities of my government because they banned Roblox for failing to categorise games and limit accordingly…
Well, i dont get you. How is meepcity is the main issue when we have a lot to restrict (as discussed everywhere lately in devforum)?
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Hey there, unfortunately there isn’t a pre-existing api for this, but we are definitely exploring whether we can add this to the existing PolicyService API. It’s a nuanced feature, and we have to consider how parents can best understand what this means, as well as how moderation will be able to enforce that the API is used correctly. That means this will take some time to figure out.
If your experience will include any of the new descriptors, we recommend that you disclose this information in the questionnaire, otherwise moderation may remove your experience’s guidelines (which will make your experience unrated).
If your experience has free-form user creation and wants to retain its under-13 playerbase, it’s possible to remove free-form user creation features or to split your experience into a 13+ experience that has free-form user creation and an all ages experience that doesn’t have free-form user creation.
I’m sorry I don’t have better news, but let me know if you need further clarification about the above. Behind the scenes, we are working very hard to see how we can make this experience more frictionless for our creator community, because we know that this is a necessary update with a short timeline and significant impact for some experiences.
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Thank you for this crisp response! This clears up a lot of things!
I have one more quick question though!
My game is a single player 2D physics sandbox game, with per-pixel simulation, meaning you can technically draw in the game if you pause the physics, However, the game is single player.
Is my game able to retain the <13 player base if the game is single player and these creations are never shared outside of the local gameplay? because currently the questionnaire will affect any game with any kind of drawing aspect, regardless of if other people will actually ever see the drawing.
If I submit the questionnaire with it’s current vague requirements, I will lose all <13 players, which makes up more than half of my player base since my game is a single player 2D physics simulation game with aspects of free-form user creation which I am unable to remove.
EDIT:
After reading this, I think my game is safe as long as I dont replicate the drawings to other users.
It’s such a shame we cannot handle <13 users to ensure our game complies with all ages without affecting the entire game.
Thank you for your time anyway! Your responses are very helpful
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This was one of my biggest concerns with the update, and it’s surprising to see how little it’s being discussed here.
I absolutely understand the reasoning behind locking players who are under 13 from seeing and playing unrated games by default, but from what it seems Roblox is saying here, it looks like they can’t even get the option to play unrated games at all.
As I said before, you perfectly expressed my main concern, which I feel should be addressed in some way, or have some type of solution, like a whitelist in parental controls that allows specific games or parental controls giving you the option to enable or disable the block after appropriate warnings.
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no i head xbox one i cold use roblox i chat in adopt me and my own game
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just what everyone expected to happen! how suprising
roblox when they make everything worse for good games and benefit sketchy and inappropriate ones
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spray paint wont be affected because of the vote kick feature right?
Right?
out of every game why would that game get an exception lol
the vote kick feature and mod call
I don’t think it will be good enough. My game has active moderation, but despite this, the descriptors for the questionnaire enforces the game either to be 13+, or the drawings cannot be replicated to other users.
I haven’t read anywhere or had a confirmation from a staff member if it’s possible to get an exception.
@Caelestene could you confirm or further clarify this? Some of us devs would like to know if there are any other possible options we have. Many thanks! 
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at some point in the game it starts to stop replicating to others which may just be a bug
the with this update that it does not fix the problem from it is roots any one change there experience name a genre then there games will be available as normal
Are we allowed to use these followings methods as a safe-guard to prevent <13 users from being able to see or publish free-form 2d creation?
My game is a 2D physics simulation and has a datastore-based gallery where users can publish these 2D creations to it and view them. I could easily use an API or this method to prevent these creations from ever being loaded and viewed from <13 users:
I am currently looking for what options I have as a developer before I go ahead and make a very large change to my game that could heavily impact it’s discoverability, because if I cant use any other method, I will have to create and maintain 2 separate places, which is very much not ideal to us devs.
Would love to hear a response back from a staff member about this. Thank you!
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Hey there, I see where you’re coming from, but as of now, we don’t have any content descriptors for Experience Guidelines that are integrated into the PolicyService API. As a result, I would not recommend relying on the steps you linked in your post. If a moderator reviews your experience and sees free-form user creation in it, I think this would still result in your guidelines being moderated. I’m sorry we don’t have better news for you at this point!
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it would be better if you would only do this to games that met a criteria such as
- the game was made before 2020 and hasnt been updated in at least 1-2 years
otherwise a lot of old games are probably never gonna be discovered again (since the people who did play them when they were out probably forgot about them or roblox)
I’m confused here.
In my School Experience, we have Teachers who input Text to be displayed on Blackboards, which is obviously filtered through Roblox’s own Text Filtering System before being displayed. This is displayed on a Blackboard model in the Workspace to Students, after being filtered. Only very specific users are classed as Teachers in our experience, and only those people are able to use the Blackboards.
Yet, in the same game, we also have announcements, which Teachers also write themselves, and the text is filtered, in the exact same manner to each individual Student before being displayed on an announcement GUI to the player. Roblox recently said that Admin Announcements (pretty much what ours are) were not required to comply with the new Text Chat Service features.
So, writing on a Blackboard is explicitly stated as Free-Form content, and not going to be available to Under 13 users, but our announcements are absolutely fine? These two things are pretty much identical, and both use the exact same Roblox text-filtering system.
Sorry if this seems too confusing, ultimately I just want to know, do both of these things need to be removed? Do any of these things need to be removed?
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