Children’s gaming platform Roblox makes ‘major update’ to parental controls

Roblox, the popular gaming and creation platform for children, is updating its parental controls to enable users to better manage their child’s activity on the app.

In what the company is a calling a “major update” to its parental and safety systems, the platform will also no longer allow those under the age of 13 to directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences.

In addition, those under 13 will only be able to send public broadcast messages within games and experiences, and by default will not be able to directly and privately message others.

As part of the upgrades to its existing parental controls, parents will now be able to monitor their child’s activity remotely using their own linked account, as well as adjust controls and view their child’s screentime for the previous week, set time limits and view friend lists.

Roblox announced it was also simplifying its content description labels to help parents with decision-making on recommended content for their children.

As part of this change, age recommendations for individual games and experiences are being removed and replaced with one of four new content labels which describe the level of mature themes including violence, humour, fear and strong language that appear within an experience.

The four labels are: minimal, mild, moderate and restricted.

Roblox also confirmed that by default it will only allow users under the age of nine to access minimal and mild-rated experiences, and will prevent users under the age of 13 from searching or playing any experience which has not yet been assigned a content label.

It said restricted-level content would also be blocked until a user was at least 17 and had verified their age with Roblox.

“We work closely with kids and parents to understand their knowledge of Roblox’s platform; the information and controls they are looking for; and the concerns they have around safety, engagement, and communication on our platform,” Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer, said.

“Children develop on different timelines, and from both our research and external research, we know that parents have different comfort levels regarding the type of content their child engages with.

“Labelling experiences based purely on age does not take into account the diverse expectations different families have, so today we’re launching simplified descriptions of the types of content available.

“These updates should provide parents greater clarity to make informed decisions about what is appropriate for their child.”