Nov 18
Jay Peters
Roblox will restrict kids under 13 from chatting outside of games
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is starting to roll out some recently-announced child safety features, and the updates include some new limitations for how users under 13 can communicate on the platform. Beginning Monday, users younger than 13 won’t be able to DM players outside of games or experiences on Roblox. And they’ll need parental permission to be able to send in-game DMs — though this change won’t be fully implemented across the platform until the first quarter of 2025.
The changes follow recent reports highlighting instances of Roblox failing to protect children. A big article from Bloomberg described how predators on the platform use chat to communicate with kids. And a report from Hindenburg Research described Roblox as “an X-rated pedophile hellscape.” These new restrictions on chat will build on Roblox’s automatic chat filters intended to block users from sharing personal information.
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Nov 6
Jay Peters
Roblox is banning kids from ‘social hangout’ spaces
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is going to block kids from accessing certain types of experiences following reports alleging that the platform has enabled child abuse.
One new measure will stop kids under 13 from accessing experiences with “certain types of interactive features,” Roblox says in a post on its developer forum. Those include “social hangouts,” where the primary purpose is to communicate with others over text or voice chat, and “free-form 2D user creation” experiences, where players can do things like draw on a chalkboard or whiteboard. This change goes into effect beginning November 18th.
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Oct 23
Jay Peters
Roblox is making changes for pre-teen users after reports that it failed to protect children
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is making some potentially major changes that will limit what pre-teens can access and give parents more control over what their kids do on the platform, according to an email sent by the company and shared with The Verge. The changes follow recent reports highlighting how Roblox has failed to protect children.
In July, for example, Bloomberg published a big report about predators on the platform. Turkey blocked access to Roblox in August, saying it was a necessary measure to protect its children. (Roblox said this week that it would open an office in the country if access was restored.) Earlier this month, a popular financial newsletter accused Roblox of enabling child abuse and the investment firm Hindenburg Research alleged that its “in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape.”
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Oct 8
Emma Roth
Roblox accused of lying to investors about user numbers by Hindenburg Research
Image: Roblox
Roblox is facing accusations that it lied to investors about the number of people who use the platform. In a report published on Tuesday, the investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is “consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more.”
Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox “intentionally conflates” actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company’s disclosure says daily active users “are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox.”
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Sep 6
Alex Heath
Roblox’s CEO on getting to 1 billion users
Getty Images / The Verge
Roblox CEO David Baszucki has a goal that even he admits is “a little audacious”: to grow the company’s share of the global gaming market’s revenue to 10 percent in the coming few years.
For comparison, the company’s investor guidance of $4.2 billion in bookings this year is about 2 percent of the global gaming market, which Roblox estimates to currently be between $160 billion and $180 billion. Baszucki shared this goal, which ladders up to his ultimate mission of reaching 1 billion users, during the company’s annual developer conference on Friday.
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Sep 6
Alex Heath
Roblox will start sharing more revenue with creators
Illustration: The Verge
As Roblox marches toward its ultimate goal of 1 billion users, the company is finding new ways to share revenue with the developers who have made millions of games on the platform.
During the company’s annual developers conference in San Francisco on Friday, CEO David Baszucki announced that creators of these games, which Roblox calls experiences, will be able to keep between 50 and 70 percent of revenue from their paid titles when they’re purchased in real currency on desktop computers. That’s significantly more than the roughly 30 percent revenue split Roblox gives developers for purchases made with its native Robux currency inside freemium experiences.
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Jun 9
Wes Davis
Ikea will pay 10 Roblox players to roleplay as employees in its virtual store
Image: Ikea
Corporate publicity stunts involving virtual reality are almost always bad, but Ikea’s new Roblox store feels especially silly. The company announced last week that it plans to pay 10 people £13.15 or €14.80 per hour to work in The Co-Worker Game, a virtual Ikea store in Roblox. The company is taking applications until June 16th, only from candidates in the UK or Ireland who are 18 or older.
Being paid to be an NPC. What a world. The virtual employees will carry out tasks like serving meatballs or helping people find fake furniture or other Ikea items. They can also “get promoted to move departments, just like in the real world.”
See Also2021 Year in Review — A Letter from Our CEORDC 2023: Where Roblox is going nextRoblox Developer's Conference 2024: Everything Announced - IGNRDC 2022: Our Vision for the Future of RobloxRead Article >
Apr 4
Gaby Del Valle
Roblox executive says children making money on the platform is ‘a gift’
Image: Roblox
Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, has taken a lot of heat from critics who accuse it of exploiting its users, the vast majority of whom are children and teenagers. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, however, Roblox’s studio head, Stefano Corazza, said the platform has actually been a gift to the young developers who make money by creating games on the platform.
“You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. “So I can be like, 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money, and then sustain my life.” (An unidentified Roblox PR person present during the interview told Eurogamer that most of the developers earning money on Roblox are 18 or older.)
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Apr 4
Alex Heath
Roblox heads to Washington
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge, Photo by Jerod Harris / Getty Images
In late January, a handful of social media CEOs were hauled before Congress to testify about what they were and weren’t doing to project kids on their services. Noticeably absent from the group was Roblox, the gaming-meets-hangout platform that is, to put it mildly, quite popular among young people.
“I watched that, and I had so many thoughts and so many feelings because we’ve been building safety for going on 20 years,” Roblox CEO and co-founder David Baszucki tells me. “And so after I saw that, independent of the Senate hearing, I thought, ‘I have to get out there and start talking to these people.’”
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Feb 5
Emilia David
Roblox releases real-time AI chat translator
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox built an AI model that it says translates text chats so quickly users may not even notice it’s translating the messages of other players at first. It works with 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese.
Dan Sturman, Roblox CTO, said in an interview with The Verge that the goal is to make Roblox users feel more comfortable engaging with each other by letting them understand what they are saying. The translator automatically translates chats, but users can click an icon to see the original message.
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Dec 14, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox has a new music-themed metaverse experience, too.
The experience, called Beat Galaxy, was made in part by Universal Music Group (UMG), and features a runner / music game you can play with music from UMG artists. It’s not nearly as polished as Epic’s newly-launched Fortnite Festival, but if you’ve been looking for something like that in Roblox, Beat Galaxy is in the ballpark.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Dec 1, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox’s chatbot assistant for developers is available now in beta.
The Assistant, which Roblox recently showed off at its 2023 Roblox Developers Conference, can answer questions, insert scripts, explain code, and generate materials for in-game assets, according to a post on Roblox’s developer forums.
Many game studios are experimenting with AI tools for making games, but some developers worry about how the tools could affect their jobs. Roblox seems very invested in AI; CEO David Baszuckihas said the company is aiming for Westworld-like ease of design with its generative AI tools.
Image: Roblox
Nov 15, 2023
Jay Peters
You can now buy subscriptions in Roblox experiences that offer them.
The company rolled out the ability for developers to make them in September, and now, if you want, users can actually start paying for them. I’m curious to see if or how this might change the way Roblox developers build businesses around their experiences — subscriptions in the App Store ended up being a huge deal, after all.
Subscriptions within experiences: Now available for users to purchase
[https://devforum.roblox.com/]
Nov 14, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is launching its take on video calls.
You can read more about the launch of Roblox Connect on the company’s developer forum. Roblox is also introducing APIs so that developers can build Roblox Connect into their experiences.
Roblox is putting its own spin on video chat
Jay Peters
Nov 8, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is still popular — and still growing.
Here’s just a few stats from its Q3 2023 earnings:
📈 Average daily active users hit “a new milestone” of 70.2 million, up 20 percent from the same quarter last year
📈 Daily active users grew across “all age groups”
📈 Average monthly unique players (MUP) hit 14.7 million, while the average bookings per MUP was $19.02
Basically, more and more people are playing Roblox, and many of them are spending money, too. I have to imagine the expansions to PlayStation and Meta Quest have helped.
Oct 20, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is taking less money from subscriptions, but for a limited time.
If a developer introduces subscriptions before December 15th, Roblox says it will only take a 15 percent cut of those subscriptions instead of 30 percent, according to a post on its developer forum. However, that reduced rate will only be in place through March 15th, 2024. And, importantly, the “fee savings” from the reduced rate will be paid in a lump sum in April, Roblox says.
You can read more about Roblox’s subscription plans in my post from September.
Roblox is rolling out in-experience subscriptions, but you can’t buy them yet
Jay Peters
Oct 19, 2023
Jay Peters
Here’s your TL;DR on some Roblox news tidbits.
In this blog post about how the platform connects people, Roblox said that:
😀 You’ll be able to customize the names you see for your Roblox friends “in the next month.”
📱The company will make it easier to share in-Roblox captures, using a GIF to show what that might look like.
📞 “Eventually,” you’ll be able to use Roblox’s new Roblox Connect video call feature to call people from within a Roblox experience.
Oct 17, 2023
Jay Peters
Here’s a few more things I wanted to share about Roblox.
In addition to Tuesday’s news that Roblox is asking employees to return to its offices, I have a few other Roblox tidbits you might be interested in.
🎮 Roblox launched on PlayStation last week, and it already has more than 10 million downloads, spokesperson Samantha Spielman tells The Verge.
😀 The company published a long blog post on Tuesday about how it’s “evolving” its avatar technology to make it more modern. It’s an interesting read, though there’s no news.
📺 Earlier this month, the company added the ability for developers to include short videos into their experiences. I worry this feature could be used for bad, but the company says videos must adhere to its community standards.
Roblox says employees must return to office because the metaverse still isn’t good enough
Jay Peters
Oct 17, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox says employees must return to office because the metaverse still isn’t good enough
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning away” from remote work and will be asking “a number of our remote employees to begin working from our headquarters in San Mateo by next summer,” CEO David Baszucki wrote in an email to staff shared publicly on Tuesday.
Like many other companies, Roblox will be shifting to a model where employees are expected to work three days in the office (Tuesday through Thursday). Staffers will have until January 16th, 2024, to decide if they want to stay on at the company under the new rules. If an employee chooses to stay at Roblox and relocate, the company will help with relocation costs and expects them to report into the company’s San Mateo, California, offices by July 15th, 2024.
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Oct 10, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is now available on PlayStation.
After an announcement last month, Roblox has officially been released for PS4 and PS5. Roblox is already available on a bunch of other platforms, including PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, and even Meta’s Quest VR headsets.
Sep 27, 2023
Jay Peters
The CEO of Bumble says that the metaverse is “kind of contrary to everything I believe in in terms of getting humans to look each other in the eye.”
Roblox CEO David Baszucki thinks people will be dating in Roblox, but at Code 2023, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd doesn’t sound like a fan of that idea. “Maybe that is how people will originally connect,” she said, but noted that “I will be much more sad for humanity than myself if people just stop really meeting in real life.”
Sep 27, 2023
Jay Peters
I asked David Baszucki about the potential of interoperability between different virtual worlds platforms.
The short answer seems to be no. But in his response, he talked a lot about file formats and how they might differ for things like a pair of virtual shoes and wheels that fall off a virtual car. That might make any interchangeability would be a tricky problem to solve; companies like Roblox, Meta, and Epic Games would have to agree on file formats that could sync across systems. My sense is they might be reticent to do that right now.
Sep 27, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox hasn’t given up on China.
The company shut down the Chinese version of its app that was operated by Tencent in early 2022, but Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki says that the company is still working on something for the Chinese market.
The idea would be that Roblox can “literally print a copy of Roblox in China and bring it to market there” and that Roblox would have less and less data going back and forth between the US and China.
Sep 19, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is rolling out in-experience subscriptions, but you can’t buy them yet
Image: Roblox
Roblox is now rolling out the ability for developers to create subscriptions that they can sell in their experiences, according to a forum post. The company announced in July that it was working on these tools, saying that they could help developers “establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earning,” and now developers can actually start to plan out their offerings.
Roblox users won’t be able to buy subscriptions just yet, however; that won’t be possible until sometime in November, according to the post. When they can, users will pay for subscriptions in their local currency, but the money will make its way to developers as Robux, Roblox’s on-platform currency.
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Sep 14, 2023
Jay Peters
Roblox is finally coming to PlayStation
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Roblox will finally be available on PlayStation soon. At its 2023 Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) on Friday, Roblox announced that its popular social and gaming app is coming to PS4 and PS5 in October. And during Sony’s September 14th State of Play, the company announced that the game would be released on October 10th.
Roblox, which is free to download, is already out on a bunch of platforms, including PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Xbox, but the lack of support for Sony’s consoles has felt like a notable hole in Roblox’s lineup. There have been some clues that a PlayStation version has been in the works, though: a 2022 job listing indicated that Roblox was hiring for a PlayStation engineer, and CEO David Baszucki hinted on an August earnings call that the company has been looking at bringing the app to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
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