In his opening remarks at a conference held by Roblox on Thursday, Dave Baszucki, the company’s chief executive, remarked on how much had changed for Roblox since the company’s previous in-person event, which took place two years ago.
Roblox made its debut on Wall Street in March of this year. As of Friday, it was valued $44 billion and had more than 43 million daily users, which is more than twice the amount of daily users it had two years before to that. Mr. Baszucki spoke to a gathering of hundreds of game developers at Fort Mason, a former military post on the San Francisco bay, and one of the most noticeable contrasts between the two groups was the age of the people in the audience.
Not so long ago, the majority of the audience may have been made up of children. Many of those there on Thursday were teenagers and young adults. Roblox, a colourful, blocky platform that provides millions of online games of various kinds, from exploring tropical islands to nurturing virtual pets, has tried to grow up with them as they have progressed through life.
For other online businesses trying the reverse of Roblox’s strategy of connecting with a younger audience while keeping a secure environment for its youngest users, Roblox’s approach serves as a road map as well as a warning note, according to the company.
While Roblox has been praised for its efforts on behalf of children, safeguarding its young users has been a never-ending struggle for the company. Content in games is reviewed by the business, which also provides parental controls and chat filters that prevent vulgarity and information that may be used to identify individuals. Despite this, explicit information manages to sneak through the gaps. There have been games in which players’ avatars engage in explicit sexual behaviour, as well as recreations of mass shootings, that have been released.
The moderating of Roblox, like many other online platforms, has proven to be a “very difficult issue for them to get their arms around,” according to Jeff Haynes, senior editor of web and video games at Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy and media ratings organisation.
Roblox’s move to a mixed-age audience comes at a time when concerns about children’s online privacy and security are receiving widespread attention. On the first of this month, a Senate panel spent several hours listening to testimony from a whistle-blower who expressed worries that Instagram is hurting its adolescent users. The whistle-blower, a former employee of Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, is also scheduled to appear before government authorities in the United Kingdom and the European Union in the coming weeks, according to reports.
Aside from the obvious safety concerns, mixing older users with Roblox’s typical user base presents other dangers, such as the potential that young children may be exposed to predators or recruited by extremist organisations. The business has attempted to rein in such behaviour, and Mr. Baszucki acknowledged that integrating people of different ages on his platform was “a problem.” However, he said that part of his goal for the so-called metaverse, which is the notion that individuals may share a vast online universe together, was to create an online environment that was secure and accessible to everyone.
Roblox was founded in 2004 on the assumption that the majority of its users were under the age of majority, and as a result, it included measures to protect minors from online abuse and predators. It has always been a huge hit with kids, especially those between the ages of 9 and 12 years old.
A digital currency called Robux, which can be used to buy in-game goods, is used to generate revenue for the business, which shares its earnings with the independent developers that build the many games that make up the universe. Teens report that they are often faced with harmful material on social media sites such as Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, where developers are more intimately associated with Roblox than content producers on those platforms.
