Hope everyone had a great holiday and is refreshed for the new year
While our first recap of 2026 is short and sweet, we have some incredible things in the works for the year ahead.
Remember - we keep information at a high level within these recaps. For more information or to leave feedback, please comment on their official announcements linked below.
We know that changes to foundational systems like chat can be a significant adjustment for social games and communities. We wanted to share more on our upcoming roadmap that your feedback has been instrumental in shaping, and we’ll come back with more details here within the next two weeks.
An age-check requirement is globally in place for users to continue using the chat feature, designed to prevent children under 16 from communicating with adults outside their immediate age group.
The initiation of age checks aims to enhance safety and sustain age-appropriate conversations, with plans to improve experience moderation, support safe communication across different age groups, and assist the identification of chat-eligible users.
The Roblox game client will enforce users’ inventory privacy settings by changing the behavior of PlayerOwnsAsset/PlayerOwnsAssetAsync from January 27th, 2026.
The change applies to assets and all web endpoints, meaning it’s crucial to call PlayerOwnsAssetAsync on the server (not client) to prevent errors due to inventory privacy settings.
Hi everyone! Happy new year! Time for my weekly review! I am so happy to be doing week reviews!
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My rating: 6/30
Utter garbage. Failure of a new year. At least address some issues with the age verification, WHICH YOU HAVE ADDRESSED NONE OF THE HUGE ISSUES. Only three announcements this week and only the PlayerOwnsAssetAsync announcement was good. What on earth are you guys doing? IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE HOUR TO FIND THE “UNLOCK TOPIC” BUTTON FOR THIS RECAP
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One good thing that came out this week was the Require-by-String update.
I believe that Roblox will uphold age estimation despite backlash from the community. In fact, they are still planning to expand it to social media links and Team Create.
I’ll rate this week a 3/10 because of the age check rollout.
Would appreciate if this could be addressed, as it seems like a pretty obvious & dangerous way to bypass the age checks. This now enables bad actors to target a specific age group more easily
I have the intuition that age check is going to be rolled back. We can already see how this is getting backfired in many ways. It’s not just protest and boycott. There’s already problems surging like:
Selling age-verified accounts of any age group (some if not most being total scam)
Letting minors let their guard down thinking they’re safe chatting with anyone when a bad actor with the same age group as them could be talking, especially when a bad actor can either fool the AI face scan or buy an account. This also fools parents into thinking their children are now safe. If you think about it, it would make a lot more parents feel okay with their children talking to strangers as opposed to many of them being cautious before the age check.
Potentially scheduled data leak now that everybody is forced to either do a face scan or verify their ID, putting a hundred thousands in grave danger.
Bypasses with in-game features that are technically not considered chat. I won’t name which.
More people moving off-platform just to chat.
Potentially more lawsuits from parents and legal issues with COPPA in relation to minors, especially under 13, using face scan or scanning their ID without parental permission.
Potential boycott at future RDC.
Roblox staffs who have nothing to do with age verification being harassed, and that could be you whose job is to do weekly recap even if it’s bad. You’re just doing your job.
There’s just too many problems from the age verification alone that wasn’t thought of properly, and maybe you too think the same but can’t express due to a strict NDA. My message is to highlight concurrent and potential problems. It doesn’t really have to be taken into account since I know it’ll be ignored anyway so take it as a heads-up.
My rating: 6/30
