Roblox: The Children’s Game With A Grown-Up Problem

Trigger Warning: This article contains references to content and behavior some readers may find upsetting, including grooming, pornography, and r*pe.

Roblox has been in the news a lot these past few years, in no small part because it’s been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic pushing people indoors. It went public in March of 2021, with a valuation of an incredible $41 billion, and has been in the news cycle ever since. The stories about Roblox range from relatively benign pieces on Roblox’s huge popularity to serious issues like adults uploading sexual content to the game. Still, the majority of articles on Roblox are shallow fluff pieces, and it’s not surprising for a major corporation to have a few minor scandals.

While Roblox added over 50 million users since the start of Covid lockdowns, it was already getting big in the second half of the 2010s – going from just a few million users in 2016 to over 100M by January of 2020. Incredibly, Roblox has been around since 2004, and officially launched way back in 2006. Usually, games are either successful, or DOA; it’s pretty rare for a game to gain traction a decade after release, but Roblox has done just that.   

I first encountered Roblox back in 2020 – not as a gamer or writer, but as an educator during the start of the pandemic. I was trying to find effective ways for my students to interact online, since they were struggling with Google Hangouts and the like. Luckily, one of my students asked if he could share his Roblox name with the class – although he pronounced it “Woah-blox”, since he was 6. I’d never heard of it. After asking the student and a few parents about Roblox, I learned it was an online app that let you play a suite of kids games. 

This was a month or so into the pandemic, and everyone was struggling with how to make at-home learning work. In the hopes of creating more online socialization for my students isolated at home, I created a shared document with the class’s parents so they could add their child’s Roblox account. It quickly filled up with usernames like LoveUnicorns2582s and jasonmrules, and a number of students ended up connecting on the platform. 

I always meant to learn more about Roblox, but had my hands full teaching my fellow educators how Google Classroom worked, and never got around to fully checking it out. So when I was asked to do a piece on Roblox for EIP, I was eager to learn more about one of the most popular games online. If I’d known what I know now back when I was teaching, I wouldn’t have sent the parents a sign-up sheet – I would have sent a warning. 

What is Roblox? 

Roblox grew out of two different projects, Knowledge Revolution and Friendster. Knowledge Revolution was a company that created interactive physics software, including the simulation Interactive Physics. Roblox founder Greg Baszucki learned some valuable lessons watching how students engaged with Interactive Physics: “The fun seemed to be in building your own experiment”¦. When people were playing it and we went into schools and labs, they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” Friendster, on the other hand, was a social media site Baszucki invested in that predated Facebook and Myspace. Though Friendster has long since died, it helped Baszucki conceptualize a game that combined the kid-friendly fun of Interactive Physics with the social connections of Friendster – and Roblox was born. 

Roblox is unique in that it isn’t a game, exactly. Rather, it’s a platform for creating games and playing games others have created. There are currently over 40 million “Experiences” (what Roblox calls games) available to play, ranging in quality from an example level someone has modified slightly to professionally-created Experiences developed by a team of adult programmers. 

Experiences offer an incredible variety of gameplay. In my brief time exploring Roblox Experiences, I encountered high-quality First-Person Shooters and terrifying jump-scare horror games, as well as obvious cash-grab microtransaction “simulators” that are really just simple clicker games with some bells and whistles. There are adventure games, racing games, fighting games, platformers, and tycoon games – as well as mindfulness retreats, recreations of Disney movies, and basically anything else you could think of. 

Despite the large number of adults involved in Roblox, the game itself has a very kid-oriented style: most Experiences feature bright colors, silly themes, and easy-to-understand mechanics. Many Roblox Experiences encourage role-playing or virtual hangouts – a big part of why the game saw such an increase in market share during the pandemic, when many children were stuck at home.

Why are there so many grown-ups in Roblox? 

I was surprised to learn how many Experiences were developed by adults (as well as how many 20-somethings actually played Roblox), but after hopping into the Roblox Studio, I quickly saw why:

Despite being inspired by a kid-friendly physics simulator, the tools for creating Roblox Experiences are not at all kid-friendly. It has a fairly standard modern UI like you’d see in most editors, whether it be for music, video, or game development. What that really means is that you need a manual or tutorial to even begin to figure out what all the buttons do. 

While the complexity of the tool was somewhat surprising, the lack of an easily accessible tutorial was even more so. Without the assistance of an adult (or an excellent YouTube tutorial), I imagine all but the most dedicated of young children would probably get bored of the Roblox Studio after a few minutes. So, this leads to most of the higher-quality Experiences being created by teens and adults (solo or in teams), or by teams led by adults.

Moderation and accountability

These adult-led teams of developers bring us to the darker side of Roblox, but before we dive into them, we need to talk about what happened to the official Roblox forums. Before they went away, they were the primary place to meet other Roblox users, discuss Experiences, and even coordinate work on projects. Unfortunately, the popularity of the Roblox forum made it a target for trolls, and there were frequent “raids”, in which users would coordinate to flood forums with spam or hateful messages. 

Roblox’s solution was to shutter the forums entirely in 2017, soon after a user posted a link to a site that contained images of child sexual abuse. In an official statement, Roblox claimed that “The current structure for our Forums does not allow us to maintain the high standards that we feel are so important for nurturing a constructive and positive environment.” In the same press release, they suggest that players use Roblox’s “Groups” feature as an alternative to the forums, but according to the Roblox Fandom site, “The vast majority [of forum users]… laughed at Roblox for having the gall to suggest Groups as a viable alternative.” I went and checked out the Groups feature for myself, and discovered that the only option for communicating with other users is a single wall, with one long string of messages – not exactly conducive to project management. 

When the official forums shut down, Roblox developers migrated to other communication platforms, and many of them ended up on Discord. But while Roblox may have struggled to moderate the official forums, Discord is a platform with virtually no oversight at all – and naturally, Roblox doesn’t ever take responsibility for anything that happens off of their official platform. Considering the number of adults working with children on Roblox projects, this is obviously an issue, and it didn’t take long for problems to arise from this new arrangement. 

A turn for the worst

Like most video games, many of Roblox’s more popular Experiences are developed by a team. One of these, Sonic Eclipse Online (SEO), included a link to its Discord channel on the game’s Roblox.com page – both fans and potential collaborators used this Discord to interact with SEO’s developers and chat about the experience, as well as other topics. 

On this Discord, the project’s owner did a number of questionable things, like making racist and LGBTQ+-phobic comments; however, all of this pales in comparison to his attempted grooming of a 12-year-old girl on the Discord. Over a period of 2 years, SEO’s owner sent this girl messages like “you’re 12”¦ but soon I’ll corrupt you beyond your wildest dreams”, and in response to “Kill me lmfao”, “Why kill you if I can violate you instead?”. Eventually, he even offered to pick the girl up and take her to a motel

The incriminating information about the SEO project’s owner has been public since 2020, but SEO remained available on Roblox until December of 2021. Throughout 2021, the victim and her friends repeatedly contacted Roblox and asked them to remove the game, but were ignored – at one point, the game’s creator was forced to give up ownership of the game, but it was quickly revealed that he was still involved in the project, and he even tweeted images of a $15,000 payment from Roblox after being exposed as a groomer. Only when SEGA (the owner of the Sonic copyright) filed a DMCA takedown request did Roblox shut down the project for good. 

This is unquestionably a shocking story, but it isn’t a lone cautionary tale, but rather an illustration of a trend. I found numerous other examples of sexually explicit Discord conversations between adults and children, including one instance where a popular adult YouTuber and Experience creator, while Discord chatting with a minor, sent nude pictures of himself and encouraged the underage boy to rape his brother. There’s even RobloxPredators.com (although it’s a work in progress), a website dedicated to documenting and shaming predators on the Roblox platform. There’s no way to know how many instances of grooming and inappropriate behavior are occurring in the Roblox community on Discord and going unreported, but it seems safe to assume that the number is not insignificant – and any amount is too much. 

While it’s true that Roblox doesn’t have a legal obligation to regulate user behavior on other platforms, it seems obvious that a Roblox user behaving badly on other platforms should immediately have their account deleted and their projects removed. The fact that the SEO owner continued to pull a paycheck after evidence surfaced that he was sending sexual chat messages to a minor is absolutely inexcusable. 

“The Best Defense is a Good Offense” – Roblox, 2021

Instead of taking meaningful steps to fix its problem with off-platform abuse. Roblox is suing a YouTuber –  Benjamin Robert Simon, AKA Ruben Sim – who’s used his channel to call Roblox out on its lack of accountability, especially surrounding the SEO scandal. Roblox is accusing Ruben of harassing employees, leading a “cyber-mob” that shut down a developer’s conference. Ruben is denying the allegations, and has recently released one of what is set to be a series of videos defending himself from Roblox’s accusations.  

One of the many things Roblox has accused Ruben of is uploading photoshopped images of one of their community managers, depicting him nude. However, in his video response to the lawsuit, Ruben shows the source of the nude images – a Tumblr post, where the Roblox community manager in question had posted images of himself standing naked in the desert. According to Ruben, this community manager was hired while he was running a pornographic blog with a focus on furry content. A different video from Ruben claims that another community manager followed an NSFW furry art Twitter account on his own Roblox-affiliated Twitter account. In a vacuum, pornography isn’t a bad thing (depending on who you talk to) – but it feels a little strange that so many of Roblox’s social media employees are so openly interested in furry porn.  

It seems likely that Ruben’s exposing of the decidedly kid-unfriendly behavior of Roblox employees is the real reason that Roblox is going after him so aggressively. At this point, it’s a lot of he-said-she-said and it’s pretty tough to figure out who’s telling the truth – but it doesn’t really matter. Even if everything Roblox is accusing Ruben of is true, it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve done little or nothing to deal with their adult users’ harmful behavior towards children.  

While most of the evidence of these unpleasant events has come from individual sources, the most damning aspect of the whole incident is the fact that Roblox has failed to address or deny any of what’s gone on in these Discord servers, or with their community managers. Instead, they’ve gone after Ruben Sims, who – even if he was indeed harassing Roblox employees or encouraging bad behavior from his fans – spent a lot of his time trying to get Roblox to do something about a known pedophile using their game as a way to meet children. 

This lack of accountability is par for the course with Roblox. When People Make Games (PMG) was creating a video piece on how Roblox doesn’t give creators their fair share, Roblox wasn’t interested in giving an interview. Then the video went viral, and PMG tried again to contact Roblox, this time successfully. However, instead of managing to set up an interview, the end result of the conversation was Roblox’s senior PR director linking a rebuttal from another Roblox content creator and asking “Do you plan on editing or removing the video based on some of the things the author raises?” 

The fact that a top PR person at Roblox linked a weak and poorly written rebuttal from a Roblox developer’s blog instead of actually responding to the points raised in the PMG video is astonishingly unprofessional, and demonstrates just how little Roblox cares about being accountable – and they continue to prove this time and time again. In response to recent reports of “sex condos” in Roblox, the company told NBC  “On the rare instances where we find or are pointed to people or content that violate our rules, our moderators swiftly remove it and take other strong actions”¦ ”¦It is misleading to suggest such isolated instances reflect the family-friendly Roblox experience.”  

Given what we now know about Roblox’s laggardly response to what happened on the Sonic Eclipse Online Discord, it seems misleading to suggest that Roblox swiftly takes strong actions to prevent misconduct. They seem more interested in obfuscating the conversation with PR-ready buzzwords to put up a front of caring about their users. As a prime example, take their response to PMG’s thirteen interview questions:

“It is clear to us from the nature of the questions that they are not from a place of objective inquiry and therefore rather than address them individually, which would only half address the important issues at hand, we think it’s important we take a step back and present the fuller picture when it comes to our approach to moderation and the creator community”¦”

They then go on to list a bunch of bullet points with standard platitudes about how they take all rule violations seriously and take immediate action when our TOS is violated, alongside a very long list of things they’re supposedly doing to support developers. (You can check out the full statement in this Gamedeveloper.com article).

If Roblox was truly interested in addressing the important issues at hand, it would have been easy for them to both respond to PMG’s individual questions and then also present the “fuller picture” of their approach to moderation. By intentionally avoiding specific questions about the way they handle their creator community, they’re transparently sidestepping responsibility for the specific situations we covered earlier – and it isn’t hard to imagine why they’d want to do so. While they might have a moral obligation to protect children who find their way onto a Discord server thanks to Roblox, they don’t have a legal obligation, and Roblox is a big corporation that won’t fix a serious issue until it hurts their bottom line. 

The bottom line is the bottom line

Speaking of their bottom line, the topic of the original People Make Games Roblox video wasn’t the disgusting behavior of some creators – that only came up after many users came forward with stories – but rather the way Roblox exploits their developers. The original PMG video does a great job covering this topic, so I’ll just give you the bullet-points: 

• Roblox takes 75.5% of the income Roblox creators generate from experience sales (some Roblox Experiences are pay-to-play). 
• Roblox takes 30% of in-experience microtransactions (you can purchase weapons, outfits, and other in-experience perks with Robux).
• You can’t cash out until you’ve earned 100,000 Robux
• Purchasing 100,000 Robux would cost you $1000 USD, but cashing out 100,000 Robux only nets you $350 USD.
• Roblox lets children participate in what is essentially a stock market, where they can buy and sell items worth a lot of real-world money

PMG’s video pointed out that on the “Create” section of the Roblox website, it said kids can “Make serious cash” designing games – and this didn’t seem to be true for most young developers. Rather than address any of these issues, or release another half-baked statement refuting what the PMG video was suggesting, Roblox simply removed that portion of the Create page. 

Fair pay, fair play

While it’s disappointing that a company worth billions of dollars is nickel-and-diming 12-year olds, it’s not really a surprise. It’s also not nearly as big of a deal as the obvious issues the company has with their users being targeted by predatory adults, and with their apparent inability to keep inappropriate content off of their platform. 

So does this mean you shouldn’t play Roblox, or that you shouldn’t let your child play Roblox? Honestly, I’m not sure. I will say unequivocally that until the company makes some serious changes, you shouldn’t give them any of your money. Realistically though, any online platform designed for kids should be used with supervision and some clearly defined rules. Rather than banning your children from using Roblox, you might be better off teaching them how to stay safe on the internet, and cultivating a relationship in which your children will tell you what’s going on in their online interactions.

It’s a shame that Roblox seems so unwilling to treat its users better, because Roblox has a lot of positive aspects. Opportunities for children to learn how to program or design online experiences become more valuable every day, and I’m sure a large number of Robloxians have nothing but good experiences. But if Roblox wants to continue to be a part of the lives of millions of kids, it needs to do better. It needs to care about more than pleasing the shareholders. It needs to pay developers their fair share. It needs to take more responsibility for what its users are doing both on and off the platform. It needs to do what’s right.