Roblox to get a rating system to make things safer for its many young players
Roblox is a game with a userbase so enormous it's sometimes hard to credit, but its freeform nature and user-created levels make it a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to younger players.
Its huge player-pool is more than half comprised of players under the age of 13, so keeping things PG-rated is an important priority, but that's an aim that becomes difficult to enforce when players can freely chat to each other at all times and make their own worlds up.
Since the game does have older users, and since those older users do in part use Roblox as a platform on which they can chat about adult scenarios and engage in themed roleplay, you'd think there might be protections in place already to gate that sort of content off from younger players.
Well, not so - but according to a new piece from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that Remy Malan, vice president of trust and safety for Roblox has confirmed a ratings system is in the works. This will make content rated according to its age-appropriateness, so that players have information on that before they join a game, and potentially to stop them doing so if their date of birth doesn't match the criteria.
Similarly, the game is also apparently going to make it easier to find and use the parental controls that already exist, which limit players to a curated list of family-friendly games, instead of the endless pool of unapproved creations.
For now, though, concrete details are a little thin on the ground - there isn't a timeline attached to this promise from Roblox, so we don't know how long the measures will take to actually become reality. Still, when they do arrive they'll be a step in the right direction.
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