Roblox Launches New Category for Older Teens and Adults with Strict Rules
The announcement comes as the 17-24 age group is the fastest-growing on Roblox, with teens aged 13 and 14 making up 32% of daily active users. The overall Roblox population has now surpassed the population of Canada, turning the platform into a major cultural and economic phenomenon. While these behind-the-scenes stats have sparked focus on Roblox’s younger userbase, the platform has noticed that older teens are increasingly joining in, as well.
As teens grow older and continue to want to play Roblox, then, the platform has designed a new category for them. After starting with ones aimed at younger players, Roblox will now introduce the “Ages 17+” option, which it says will present more mature themes and storylines, though subject to some rules and guidelines.
“The 17+ experience will include playables and places with intense violence, heavy realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content, and/or the presence of alcohol,” Roblox explains.
“To participate in experiences that contain this content, you will be required to provide a selfie and a photo ID that meets the requirements for the platform.”
Roblox will continue to allow the use of strong language and simulations of sexual content, but all nudity, depictions of drugs and tobacco, and – notably – all explicit depictions of alcohol will be prohibited entirely.
While allowing a degree of sexy clothing, the platform suggests that creators who want to indicate a stab wound or some other kind of realistic injury in their game can have avatars carrying realistic weapons and fighting with some vivid animations and audio effects to accompany them.
When it comes to depicting alcohol, creators can use red plastic cups to depict people consuming booze, but the in-game effects will continue to be banned altogether. Roblox also notes that this is an interim solution for the ban on alcohol representations, with “a feature designed to implement a realistic gameplay approach to producing and consuming alcohol” set for development on September 18.
On the matter of “unplayable gambling content,” which chiefly refers to simulated gambling games that players cannot earn or withdraw from, Roblox will start banning these experiences from September 18 onwards. While creators can offer up “paid experience packages,” such as “experiences that have been curated and approved by the community,” such as those available on the Experiences Marketplace, they cannot offer paid random item generators and lootboxes.
You can read more about the new rules here on the Roblox website.
Plenty of people have taken to Twitter to react to these guidelines, and at least one person has also started a Change.org petition to get Roblox to remove rules against “pornography and explicit sexual content.”
