The Roblox Developers Conference is currently ongoing with CEO and founder David Baszucki taking the stage. He has revealed that over half of Roblox's user base is 13 or older, contrasting the notion that Roblox is a platform primarily dominated by children.
As such, Roblox is planning to introduce "Experience Guidelines which offer age recommendations [that] are meant to help users and their parents continue to make informed decisions about the content they interact with on the platform."
Roblox also revealed that there are over 58.5 million daily users from over 180 countries – that's a massive increase over the past four years. Only as recently as 2018, that number was at 10 million, so it's seen a growth of nearly 40 million users daily.
With such a large platform and such a massive user base, half of the players being under 13 is still a significant amount, which is particularly concerning given previous allegations and reports of child abuse. Last year, YouTuber People Make Games released a video accusing Roblox of exploiting young game developers.
For context, Roblox doesn't police its developers, whether they're teams or individuals, despite building its platform on the idea of bringing children into game development. As such, the question of whether child labour laws are being broken has been raised. There are also alleged inadequate anti-cheat and moderation tools with users reportedly skirting bans to continue predatory behaviour against young players and developers.
With Roblox being so big, there are whole development studios cropping up dedicated to making games within Roblox itself, and some hire children to work for them given the lack of policing and moderation. These are completely unregulated because they tend to happen outside of Roblox.com.
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