Do you let your children play Roblox?
Many parents do it. The game platform has a huge audience – some 85 million people visit it daily – and around 40% of them are under 13 years old.
But the Roblox juvenile user base is also a question mark for the company. Some people fear that the platform, which houses millions of games generated by users and encourages children to chat with each other, is an attractive target for predators. Others simply fear that there is not enough surveillance in the giant digital playground, which allows children to play everything, from dressing games to those who imitate school shots (Roblox has recently closed one of them).
Meanwhile, Roblox is trying to convince investors – who are currently enjoying the company at $ 40 billion – that its future growth will come from adolescents and older adults.
This is a complicated question for the CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki, who co-founded the company in 2004 and launched it in 2006. On the one hand, Baszuck tries to convince regulators and parents around the world that Roblox is sure because his business spends a lot of time and efforts to practice the platform; On the other hand, Roblox owes its success to the fact that it is a platform – just like YouTube, or Facebook, or Tiktok – whose users decide what they want.
I spoke to Baszuck for my podcast channels, and our conversation ended up approaching a wide range of subjects, including the company’s relationship with Apple and Google, and its approach to intellectual property. This modified extract focuses on Roblox’s double -edged age problem:
Peter Kafka: Roblox has a large and young user base. You get a lot of criticism about it. Sometimes Concerns concern grooming on the platform. Some parents simply think that games are rude or just don’t like the idea that children speak to other children in an unregulated manner. Has your reflection on the question of children on your platform has changed, or has it been consistent since you started?
David Baszuck: I think that retrospectively, when we think of starting the business for all ages, 18 years ago, we are very happy that we did it. It was really difficult to do. It is much easier to build a game platform 13 and high, where many social media applications are today.
And when something is built for 13 and high, it can create a situation where you are not going immediately after the real major challenges. For us, literally during the first months of being alive, we started to build our first security systems and made it an absolute priority. There was a time when we were the founders of Roblox were in the Modera room. Each of us took a day.
This has evolved in the past 16 to 18 years until the development of more than 200 AI systems, automatic filtering of all texts on the platform, automatic filtering with a human supplement of all images on the platform. I would say that over time, we have improved, better, better, better. (But) Any problem for us is too big.
And we deal with any problem like too many, but we are very optimistic that we are going a lot in the right direction and that the value of the adoption prevents what happens when 8, 9 and 10 years are on a platform of 13 and upwards which does not have these same ways to maintain security and civility.
It is therefore a difficult challenge. We kissed him.
Do you have the impression that the perception of the brand has changed over time? I can talk to my colleagues who have young children, and they say, “I don’t want my child to get there. I want them to stay on Minecraft. I’m worried about Roblox. “And they might even not be able to articulate what their concern is, but they just heard that it is bad, or they are worried.
We take this very, very seriously.
What we have seen in the past four to five years-so many parents recognize the advantages and differences between a 3D connection platform compared to a social media platform where you watch videos or share photos of yourself.
And while many, many, many parents around the world said: “Oh my God is a way for my children to stay in touch with their friends” in a way parallel to perhaps when I was younger per day, I used the phone and I would call my friend and that we drag on the phone for half an hour. People are doing this on Roblox right now.
I think there is general recognition in society that the connection is positive. We see it all the time on Roblox. And I think parents become more wise of this type of connection compared to a short video by yourself or by yourself by sharing your image on a social media platform. Again, we take everything very seriously, but the vast majority of the parents we meet are very favorable to our platform.
You recently talked to the BBC And you were quoted by saying, mainly: “If you are not comfortable, do not let your children be on Roblox.”
On the one hand, it makes sense to me. I am a parent, I have the logic. On the other hand, I could imagine that the parents say: “Wait-you put all the responsibility on me and you built this platform. Isn’t that your responsibility to control this thing?”
I would put a support around this declaration. And this support was a dialogue that we had so much that we do so much, because we know that all parents cannot get on the platform with their children and set parental commands. There are many parents who are so busy in their lives – they give their young people an iPad and say: “Go play Roblox”.
We must therefore be ready for the parent who is unable to be involved. And we must be, I would say – even the value of a business and moral responsibility – lead vision on this subject as an ideal place for civility and optimism.
In the midst of everything we do, I would definitely say to parents: “We are doing a lot, as we are going to focus on this, whether you are an involved or not parent. If you are not comfortable with your 12 -year -old child in any situation, whether Roblox, whether the community pool, whether it is the playground, whether it is something.”
There is an in progress debate now – It’s really between Apple and Meta – on whom should be responsible for determining the age of a user. Where do you go down on this? Should this be managed at the device? Should it be the request?
We will love that each device in the world said that the user of this was exactly 11.2 years and that he was validated. The reality is that we cannot wait for this. And the reality is that we don’t know if and when we will have that.
We have taken the idea that we are going to get better, better, better, whatever the situation. And if we get a signal like this, we will welcome it. We look at our age estimate. We look at each other, I think, a really interesting area, which is not only 12 and less, but the 13 -year -old area. And the 13 -year -old area is – independent of the age estimate – very sensitive because it is a very sensitive part of the life of young people.
And in most platforms at the moment, they can discuss that they are not filtered with whom they want. Many things happen in this area.
So I think we are going to a point where, for the elderly we know who they are – you could imagine and I will play poker and we will talk about everything we want. We will not be filtered, perhaps not recorded, as adopted freedom of expression and the laws of the physical world.
But for the 13 years of 13 years, we will be very thoughtful on who they discuss, and if and when they learn to know who is in the real world.
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