People who don’t do an age check can only access family-friendly games.
People who don’t do an age check can only access family-friendly games.
Roblox is about to make a big change to how you can access games on its platform: If you want to play any game that’s intended for users nine or older, you will have to complete an age verification process. The shift is happening as part of a rollout of new Roblox Kids and Roblox Select accounts, which have different levels of protections for kids of different age groups.
Roblox has come under intense scrutiny over alleged child safety issues on the platform, and the company is the subject of multiple state lawsuits. The platform has introduced many features to attempt to make the platform a safer place for kids, including locking down sexual content, improving parental controls, and requiring age checks to access chat. More than 50 percent of the platform’s 144 million global daily active users have completed an age check, according to Roblox.
When the new accounts roll out, if Roblox’s age verification determines you are between five and eight — or, if you choose not to go through the age verification process at all — you will be assigned to a Roblox Kids account. Roblox Kids accounts will be restricted to accessing games with “Minimal” or “Mild” content maturity labels, and chat will be off by default, though a parent can approve individuals their kid can chat with. Roblox Select accounts, on the other hand, will be assigned to users between the ages of nine and 15 and allow access to games with “Moderate” labels. Chat is also “gradually turned on within Roblox Select accounts based on a user’s age,” Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman says in a briefing with reporters.
Parents who have linked their account with their child’s can also set their child’s age. As a child gets older, they will automatically transition from Kids to Select and then from Select to a standard account.
Users of both of the new types of accounts will only be able to play games that pass a three-step review process. The developer has to be verified with a government-issued ID or linked to a parent’s account, have two-factor authentication turned on, and have a Roblox Plus subscription. The game has to pass Roblox’s “real-time multimodal moderation system,” and Roblox will also monitor user reports from those older players to determine if a game is safe for younger players. And the game has to have a content maturity label, though those labels will be replaced by International Age Rating Coalition-aligned standards like ESRB later this year.
Roblox doesn’t have specific timing to share for how long the review process might take. “We want to be sure that we have enough information about each game from our real-time evaluation before it’s shown to Select and Kids accounts based on the content maturity of the game,” spokesperson Juliet Chaitin-Lefcourt tells The Verge.
Chaitin-Lefcourt couldn’t share which games might be available to Kids and Select accounts given that “the games have not gone through the three-step review process” yet. But Roblox believes that the “majority” of users’ favorite games that go through the review process will be “ready and waiting” for players to jump back in, she says.
The company is also introducing some new parental controls, including parents’ ability to block individual games for their child until that child is 16. Roblox plans make all of the updates announced Monday fully available around the world by the beginning of June.
