It’s no secret that kids love Roblox, which has led to tons of parental concerns about child safety over the years. Now, the company behind the game is doing something about it.
Bloomberg reported that Roblox is adding enhanced child safety features sometime next month. These include new accounts for parents that allow them to see what their kids are getting up to online, as well as requirements for parental permission to access certain features or modes for players who are 13 or younger.
Google launches new gaming world for kids on Roblox
Put bluntly, these features may feel like too little, too late for some of Roblox’s biggest critics. As a robust platform for game creation, Roblox has an essentially unlimited number of games and modes for players to mess around with, and inevitably, some of those are going to be inappropriate at best and actively exploitative at worst.
In just the latest of Roblox’s many high-profile child safety-related problems, a woman arrested in Florida last week faces a deeply disturbing allegation that she coerced a 10 year-old into doing serious harm to a baby. There is, sadly, a long history of related cases. A 2022 lawsuit accused Roblox of allowing for a young girl to be sexually and financially exploited, for example. Sony, for its part, blocked Roblox from appearing on PlayStation consoles until recently over safety concerns.
But some child safety features are better than none.
