Jim Ryan has revealed that Sony is now interested in bringing Roblox to PlayStation.
As reported by Stephen Totilo for Axios, Jim revealed this in a video deposition submitted to the FTC federal trial on the Microsoft Activision deal. Jim said this:
“Historically, because of the large number of children that play on the PlayStation, we have been very careful with regards to opening them up to anything that could potentially exploit them.
Over the last couple of years, however, we have reviewed those policies and relaxed a little on this. We have been conservative for too long, and now we are currently engaging with people at Roblox. We hope that the situation will change.”
Roblox is a free-to-play game platform and creation engine that’s emerged as the top rival to Minecraft. Its user created levels and minigames also rival Minecraft in user created content, competing for both creators as well as players.
However, Roblox has also been controversial, thanks to many accusations of labor exploitation and other unethical practices.
These issues all boil down to the choices Roblox Games made in how their systems work. As explained in this Screenrant article, they can be boiled down to three issues:
- Roblox pays creators incredibly low rates to creators, and limits payment to in-game currency.
- Roblox’s avatar system is a gambling platform.
- Roblox has no system in place for content moderation, exposing players to inappropriate material for children.
Roblox currently exists on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and the Xbox One, which also allows people to play Roblox on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Note that Nintendo and Steam joins Sony in not having Roblox on their platforms.
Nintendo, Sony, Valve, Microsoft, and others do have parent and privacy features that in theory, should protect younger gamers from being exposed to games meant for adults. In fact, Nintendo has made such features on the Nintendo Switch robust to the degree that they are confident in having adult games published on their platform. This goes beyond ports of popular older AAAs for older gamers, like Doom Eternal, and even includes the likes of Gal*Gun and Dead or Alive Extreme.
So it should be clear that keeping Roblox out of gaming platforms is a reasonable position to take. This is not about censorship or even marketing to certain audiences.
Roblox Games have not really addressed these issues with their platform since they were brought up, and seem to have no interest in making changes to make them more enticing to Nintendo or Valve.
So Sony’s change in position is somewhat questionable. It is true that most PlayStation owners are older, as based on market research, but that doesn’t mean we can dismiss that children also play games on them.
At least for now we know that there is an interest, not necessarily an intention to follow through on it. Sony may find that their own fans will object to this if it goes through. It will be interesting to see if anything does come out of this at all.
