Roblox seems to have finally been prodded to action, as the company has revealed a new set of safety features.
As reported by The Verge, Roblox sent out a new email to users that outlined these features. We’ll run them down for you below.
For starters, they are making changes to content settings to better guide users. Experience Guidelines will be renamed in Content Labels. Subsequently, Content Labels won’t provide an age rating, but instead mark content based on their experiences.
Players 13 years old and below will need parental permission to access some chat features. Subsequently, players 9 years old and below will need parental permission to access content labeled Moderate. These contents may have crude humor, or a lower rated degree of violent content.
The game will be designed in such a way that as players get older, the child settings will be automatically adjusted for them.
Finally, Roblox is introducing accounts with parent privileges. The current system is tied to parent’s email accounts and allow them to set a PIN and get notifications.
Moving forward, the new parent Roblox accounts will also allow them to view and update controls from any device of their choosing. It will also give them access to metrics and information on their children’s activity in the platform.
These are all clearly long required changes for Roblox, but we won’t praise them for making them. After we reported on Hindenburg Research’s whistleblower report on Roblox misrepresenting their financials, on top of failing to make their platform safe for children, Roblox accused them of making a misleading report against them in turn.
But if you remember how Hindenburg Research claimed they had worked with law enforcement in prior occasions, they may have prompted Roblox to go forward with these changes. That report definitely sounded like a prelude to upcoming legal or criminal case action that could have targeted Roblox themselves.
Alternately, Roblox may not have been acting under any such threats. Instead, they may have felt the public pressure to make even more changes to their systems. Whether it was their users, parents of those users, investors, or other potential stakeholders, they likely couldn’t have survived even more enduring controversy.
Perhaps it was Sony and Microsoft who put Roblox under pressure. The game was famously ushered into Xbox and PlayStation platforms, while Nintendo and Valve have yet to allow them into theirs. Maybe Sony and Microsoft themselves were spooked by the prospect of being dragged into potential legal action from Roblox users, and they were in the position to force Roblox to act where their players and their parents were not.
In any case, we don’t know if all of these will be enough to work either. We’re hopeful for the best, but we’ll see what future assessments and investigations will find out.
