What is Roblox and why won't my kids stop talking about it?

[ Reading time : 5 minutes | Date : 21, February 2023 | Author : Teresa Brown]

There is one thing that most parents of children who play Roblox have in common: We don't know exactly what our kids are doing on the online gaming platform, regardless of whether they are pleading with you to check out their avatar's newest wardrobe or asking you to "purchase more Robux."

We do, however, know that Roblox is becoming more and more well-liked. An analysis of 2021 data reveals that Roblox's online community increased to 50 million users last year from over 30 million per day across 180 countries. The majority of everyday users of the RobloxPlayer.exe are children and teenagers because somewhat more than half of the Roblox community are 13 years of age or older.

What are my kids doing on Roblox?

According to the 2021 Roblox data report, there are 10 highly-visited games within the platform that, chances are, are where your kid is hanging out online. Games within Roblox range from role-playing games, where players take on an action or role, to tycoon games, where players complete simulated real-world activities to earn money within the game.

There are action games, which focus on fighting and survival, games that simulate obstacle courses (called "obbys") and simulator games, which involve collecting certain items or clicking objects within the game repeatedly. And, the games are most often played together in virtual groups.

Can my kids talk to other people in Roblox?

Curious if your kid is making online friends in the game? The short answer is yes, they are. Letter explains that in each game, players can chat with one another, provided a parent has enabled those settings, even connecting with friends and relatives from the real world in-game. She also adds that for the most part, Roblox is about being friendly and coming together as a community to enjoy an experience. "

What I like about Roblox is they have two types of profiles: They have above 13 and under 13," Letter says. "With [under 13 profiles] you can turn on parental controls, turn off entire chats, make it where nobody can talk to your child or whatever you're comfortable with." Laura Higgins, Roblox's director of community safety and civility, says Roblox works to filter inappropriate chat content like discriminatory speech, bullying, extremism, violence and sexual content, as well as the exchange of personal information or invitations to move communication off of the Roblox platform.

"We update our filters continuously, multiple times a day," says Higgins. "For users under 13, our filters are even stricter and include any potentially identifiable personal information, slang and more. In order for us to maintain a safe platform and prevent inappropriate content in violation of our policies, users are also not able to exchange images or videos via chat or one-to-one user interactions on Roblox."

"With our parental controls and features such as 'Account Restrictions,' parents and caregivers have the option to limit chat to a curated list of contacts for their kids' accounts, or turn it off altogether," she adds. When it comes to chatting, "people are really nice and helpful in these games," Letter says of the Roblox community. And she's not wrong.

On an hour-long tour through Roblox with Letter, I only saw positive interactions: Other avatars inviting her to play with them or offering to teach her how to do things in games where she was a novice.

How many children play it?

Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls. In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights.

Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%). The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like CBBC (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%).

Why is Roblox popular?

“We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.” He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were.

“When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball. But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says. “Most of the experiences on our platform aren’t just about the object to win. It’s an experience you have with other people: a shared experience.”

How do people make games for it?

Anyone can make a game (or “experience” – they can simply be virtual spaces) for Roblox by downloading its separate Roblox Studio software. The company says that it has more than 2 million “creators” – so around 2% of its players – with the most popular games being played by up to 100,000 people simultaneously. For many children, creating a simple game or virtual room where they can hang out with friends is the limit of their ambitions, but others build bigger, more complex games, and even start to make money through taking a cut of in-game purchases using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux.

The company expects to pay out more than $100m in 2019 alone to them. “We have these teams forming businesses, and making millions of dollars a year,” says Donato. Roblox is keen to foster this community: in 2018 it launched its own curriculum, available under a Creative Commons licence, for educators to use. Donato says it reached more than 500,000 children in its first year.

Are people really making businesses out of this?

There is Josh Wood is one of the British Roblox game-makers. He’s 18 now, but discovered Roblox in 2013, and started to make his own games for it a year later. “From there I continued to learn and collaborate with other people on projects until I released my most successful game to date, Game Dev Life, which has so far had over a million play sessions,” he says. Wood has now set up his own company to make games for Roblox, hiring other developers, artists and testers, and even launching a line of toys based on Game Dev Life, in partnership with Roblox.

“With the money from my games I have been able to pay for my university education, and continue to reinvest in my business,” he says. Another young British developer working on Roblox games is Abbie Leigh. Now aged 19, she started playing Roblox in 2011, but took the leap into development in 2017, initially creating assets for other people’s games.

She’s currently working on three games, including her own sports-themed title, and hopes to make a full-time career out of freelance development. “It never feels like a job, which of course is the best part. I enjoy building and do so in my free time, and I’m simply rewarded when it comes to doing what I love.”

Game Dev Life by DoubleJGames.Players must try to build a successful game.

Is Roblox safe for children?

When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery. The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”.

The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform. “We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players.

“We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says. “It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are. We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.”

How can parents keep informed about it?

Another measure taken by Roblox is to launch a section of its website called For Parents, which explains its safety tools – from algorithms blocking swearwords and names and addresses in text chats, to its reporting system for inappropriate chat or content. There’s even an algorithm detecting whether players’ avatars are wearing “appropriate attire”.

Higgins admits that parents can get “very frustrated” when there’s a horror story around safety on a children’s platform like Roblox: “You think, how hard can it be? [to stop these things happening],” she says. “And it’s very hard, is the answer. When things go wrong, it’s because somebody is trying very hard to break your systems.”

She’s keen to make sure that parents also see the positive side of the games that children are creating on Roblox, citing the example of a game made by a teenager whose father had recently died. “He developed a game around managing mental wellbeing, mental health, as a journey for other young people experiencing those kinds of issues,” she says.

“It was an amazing outlet for him, but it also helped many young people who played it, and were able to explore their emotions.” That’s an aspect also highlighted by developer Abbie Leigh. “I absolutely love the developer community as a whole. We all stick together, support each other’s creations and help each other when we need it the most,” she says. “From feedback on games, to personal issues.”