We’re sharing updates you may have missed this week — check it out below! 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.
The Licenses catalog is now live, and you can apply for a license to start working with some of the biggest IPs available today.
We’re launching with four partners: Netflix, Sega, Lionsgate, and Kodansha! Check out the Licenses catalog to see what Intellectual Property (IP) is currently available; we’ll be working with these partners to add more to the catalog over time.
This launch includes the License Manager, which enables verified rights holders to manage their IP and create a Full Experience license, proactively scan experiences across Roblox for IP usage, and offer their licensed IP to creators.
Retention is one of the most important metrics to focus on to grow your experience. We’re excited to launch three updates to give you a clearer picture of how well you’re retaining users:
Track new user retention by daily and weekly cohort
Monitor the same cohort across all your retention charts
We’re excited to announce a wave of improvements to the EditableMesh, EditableImage and related workflows!
These updates are designed to streamline your workflows, and improve performance when working with these APIs. These new improvements can be used in your published experiences today.
Trusted Connections: We’re empowering users 13 and older to connect and chat more freely with people they know and trust, fostering positive interactions. We’re also introducing a new standard for communication between teens and users 18+.
Age Estimation: We’re investing in age estimation technology to help confirm users’ ages. At launch, Age Estimation will unlock Trusted Connections.
Privacy Tools: To help promote their well-being, Roblox users will now have more ways to manage notifications, screen time, and privacy. This functionality will be available to all, but designed with teens in mind.
Insights for Parents of Teens: We’re offering parents of teens new tools for transparency into their teen’s Roblox experience, such as spend notifications, Connections and Trusted Connections insights, and screen time stats. This complements existing parental tools for users under 13.
Thank you for planning on bringing back oof sound. It’s not completely out yet but developers can bring it back if they can do some coding. This will not affect my rating as it is not an announcement on the dev forum but it actually does make me excited.
But now, time to get to the announcements…
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My rating: 45/60
Trusted Connections announcement was by far the worse announcement as many others have expressed. Why rename friend → connections, that seems like an unnecessary change that will only confuse parents. I personally like it if it was renamed to Bonds, as it could be a bond between to friends or two love birds as you guys want dating.
The age estimation can also be a bit tricky. Kids could look young / old based on genetics but in reality can be a different age. Scanning a friends face or a parents face while sleeping could also be easy to gain access to many things they are not supposed to get to.
Oh, this feature in specific I’m a little mixed about, it all depends on what they decide to do with the current video recording system.
The new video captures only last up to 30 seconds, which makes removing the long-form capture system quite concerning for people who actually want to record videos within Roblox. If they remove it or add the same restrictions onto it, it’ll just make people swap to external recorders, which I’d assume Roblox wouldn’t want.
Also, hopefully it fixes all the issues the normal recorder has.
Happy with all of these updates besides the rename of Friends to Connections and certain safety concerns with things like the unfiltered chat.
The IP Partnerships is pretty big! Especially with companies like Netflix and Sega! I hadn’t seen this previously, so wow!
Oh and reading more of the current comments, if the Video Capture is only going to end up being 30 seconds only… That’s not great. Especially if people for some reason are unable to use external recording software (Or just want a way to quickly record something). It would be nice to keep it the same amount of time alongside the 30 second clip option, I think the original length was always fine and shouldn’t be permanently shortened.
Yeah, look at the example scenarios they stated would be the best time to use this feature:
Now, how exactly as a developer (or even a player) are you supposed to expect these player-dependent actions to happen within a 30-second window, record beforehand, and successfully capture the recording?
You:
A. Don’t.
B. Spam recordings every 30 seconds, decreasing player performance while you hope for them to do said action, then cancel the recording if they manage to do said action or continue the endless loop of recording.
I see this only being used to make YouTube shorts videos or staged content. This would be way better as a clipping system where players have a setting that controls whether developers can toggle it for them or not.
that’s how instant replay software works, they record and record until something cool happens. it’d 100% degrade player performance on lower end devices.
I know, but atleast the player would have the choice to disable it without devs forcing them to record. Sure they could add it to 30-second recordings, but clipping would make more sense for cool stuff like what was used as an example.
Am I missing something, because I can’t find any mention of that. From what I can see, users under 13 can still add friends, just like how they always could. They just can’t add Trusted Connections (best friends) which only bars them from using Party VC and using DMs without filters. Nothing has changed for them, they just don’t get new features.
There’s also the worry that comes with teen accounts being able to be controlled by parents now, feels like a huge breach in privacy considering that teens are clearly old enough to no longer warrant extreme monitoring like that. Possibly feeding into abusive parenting styles.
Parents should still have some form of control over what their children do on the internet; especially so people can’t blame the company for something bad happening. (and to keep them safe)
I have a few siblings who are teens, and honestly from what I’ve seen, parental controls at that age won’t stop them from doing what their parents don’t want them to do. They’ll make new accounts, go to their friend’s house to do what they want there, go onto other, more dangerous platforms, literally anything to get around it. I feel at that age, teenagers should be parented not by force using controlled means, but by teaching them how to behave. They’re grown enough to understand consequences!
I really do feel as if this is only to deflect blame away from Roblox themselves and onto parents. Children parental controls are a must of course, but this is harder to justify. Some families may benefit, many others will abuse the feature.
My rating: 45/60
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