this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Yeah he's been going on about this for years, they're super determined to make Roblox into an "All Ages" platform with things like public voice chat and 17+ "experiences" but they completely neglect that the vast majority of their user base is barely even old enough to speak.
To make matters worse, as far as I'm aware there's no actual age verification other than just inputting your date of birth so most of those kids barely old enough to speak frequently access features like public voice chat
That’s ridiculous. If you happen to own a platform that’s insanely popular among kids, why not just work to make it the best goddamned platform for kids there is, put in sensible high quality parental and safety controls for them, and keep raking in that money?
That sounds like a far better business plan than trying to turn it into something it’s not, and that nobody actually wants in the first place.
What an idiot.
I mean the whole platform is designed to take advantage of kids by “allowing them” the freedom to do whatever..
I think this is perfectly keeping with their business model of using kids for profit. And I doubt they really care all that much about consequences. Locking down the platform doesn’t net them more money after all; kids are broke.
If I had to guess they want to impress investors by increasing their user count, and since it seems that almost every child with access to Roblox already has an account they might think they can get more users by expanding the target demographic.
Isn't Roblox basically just a roundabout gambling platform that exploits unpaid child labor?
Well you know capitalism seems to ruin everything eventually.
There are definitely some independent developers on there just trying to make games and/or get some dev experience (and from what I've even told Roblox is a great way to get started) but yeah there's no shortage of labor exploitation in the larger development studios (Conveniently a lot of the same ones Roblox Corp likes to partner with for on-site events)
And as for child gambling: yeah
I think a lot of it is that their original userbase is growing up and they want them to keep playing.
I still see roblox as a kids game, but I've met people barely a few years younger then me who play it unironically
I've got a weirdly high saturation of college students in my intro courses who are so addicted to that shit, they play during class.
I played it with my kids. We kinda did a Lan thing, using Discord to communicate. It was fun for that especially when we play a hide and seek game. I also used it to make a game, even paid for premium because was told it's how you can get paid. But I never saw money and I let it go. Now my kids are grown all except my 16 year old and he isn't interested in playing with dad. But he does still play Roblox with his friends.
To be fair, there are some good ~~games~~ experiences to be found there, though by 14 they really should move on to different games. But since Roblox is a "forever game" with a bit of everything, it's easy to see why they don't: they can find different games there and it's much easier to bring your digital friends over
Sounds like a recipe for disaster
Pretty much every significant change they've made in the last five years or so has backfired in a spectacular way