Roblox to introduce new kid accounts in its quest to appear less of a child safety nightmare
Roblox's efforts to scrub clean its really-quite-awful reputation for child safety continued yesterday, with an announcement that, come June, it will be introducing new age-based account categories for kids.
The two new account types are Roblox Kids (for five to eight year olds) and Roblox Select (for nine to 15 year olds), and Roblox Corp says the goal for them is to "more closely align content access, communication settings, and parental controls with a user’s age."
Kids will be assigned to their respective categories—or at least, that is the hope—either by Roblox's facial age estimation check or a verified parent. Once there, they'll find themselves limited. The youngest children, in the Roblox Kids category, will only be able to play games with a "a Minimal or Mild content maturity label," and "all communication [will be] disabled by default," though chat can be reenabled via a linked parent account.
Nine to 15 year olds will be able to access content with a Moderate content maturity label, and their default communications setting will be unchanged. Once kids in Roblox Select hit 13, mind you, Roblox's "full suite of parental controls" gets a little less full, though the company promises that "Certain controls and visibility into kids' accounts" will be available until they age out of Roblox Select entirely.
Roblox Corp says it's also using additional evaluation criteria (like developer verification and "real-time evaluation," which sounds like it means checking out user reports to see if games are suitable for kids), to assess games before making them automatically available to kids accounts. Parental controls are also getting beefed up and more granular.
The corporation says its big dream is "to become the world’s healthiest platform for users of all ages," which is going to be quite the schlep from where it is now. We've had numerous stories of child safety failures and controversies at Roblox on our pages, and one particularly memorable instance of its CEO describing its predator problem as "an opportunity". If it wants to clean its image, well, it's got a long row to hoe.