To not beat around the bush too much, Roblox isn’t the “perfect game” that many within the company would like to tell you. Just recently, we talked about how there is some “strife” between the main development team and the “creators” who make the various worlds within the game for players to enjoy. The friction there is over money and whether the main dev team is doing right by creators by giving them more “opportunities to thrive” as they have in the past. However, if you were to look at things at a more “base level,” you know that the game has had some serious allegations against it due to the “activities” that sometimes happen within the title.
Specifically, Roblox as a whole is incredibly popular with gamers 13 and under, which makes a certain level of sense when you think about it. After all, the visuals are rather basic, the games you can play are perfect for kids of many styles and personalities, and it’s free outside of microtransactions, so it’s the perfect game to “jump in and play.”
However, since people KNOW that a bunch of kids play it, things tend to happen within the game that aren’t cool at all. As such, there have been many accusations and allegations thrown against the game regarding bullying, worlds being intentionally made with explicit content, and even grooming young players. It’s…not great.
Enter CEO Dave Baszucki, who talked with BBC about the state of the game and how parents might be able to protect their kids from this kind of “bad influence.” His response was blunt, to say the least:
“My first message would be, if you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids be on Roblox. That sounds a little counter-intuitive, but I would always trust parents to make their own decisions.”
He went on to note:
“We watch for bullying, we watch for harassment, we filter all of those kinds of things, and I would say behind the scenes, the analysis goes on all the way to, if necessary, reaching out to law enforcement.”
On the surface, that sounds great. However, as both parents and the BBC pointed out, that’s not as reassuring as he would think. First and foremost, the game has tens of millions of players, and the company can’t possibly monitor them all. Second, the BBC actually created fake accounts to show how easy it was to contact minors, and the CEO’s answer wasn’t great.
It’s fine to be confident in one’s team, but when there are a LOT of people out there who will go to great lengths to do certain things? It’s not enough to say “there’s no real risk” because there absolutely is one.
