Roblox has rolled out the most important updates to its parental controls in a bid to improve user safety, providing parents with maximum control.
The popular digital gaming platform is widely used by children and tweens, making new features that allow parents to have greater oversight of activities while still implementing necessary measures of safety and addressing growing concerns.
Roblox Gives Parents More Control For Their Young Ones
One of the biggest changes Roblox has implemented within the new security update is locking anyone under the age of 13 out of sending direct messages to other users. According to Roblox's blog post, these kids are now protected from certain online dangers, which may be encountered while playing the games.
Children under 13 are still permitted to send "broadcast-only" messages, but this restricts them from staying within a safe and controlled environment while messaging players.
In addition, the parent will now be able to see the activities of the child without having to access the child's own account or device. This may include in-game time spent on Roblox games, a list of friends of the child, and putting limits on screen time.
The parents will enforce the limit not to spend more than a certain number of screens per day so that children will not go over their devices' amount of time spent.
Setting Age-Appropriate Limits
The other important feature is the new content labels rating how suitable games are for certain age profiles. Roblox now rates the content into four categories: "minimal," "mild," "moderate," and "restricted." The "restricted" category may include content containing strong violence, realistic blood, and crude humor, targeted toward more mature audiences, NBC reports.
For children under age 9, only "minimal" and "mild" content will be available, and any attempt to access "moderate" content will need to have a parent's permission. Moreover, parents will receive an alert when a milestone is approaching that can alter profile-based defaults for that child, so parents are actually in control of what kind of content their children see.
Parental Control Extensions
In response to growing criticism and bad press, the Roblox platform announced additional extensions on parental controls. The service exploded in popularity, raising a new wave of safety concerns when a string of inappropriate content and behavior was reported within the game.
One tragedy told the story of a 2-month-old boy who received injuries from being dropped by a 10-year-old girl who was instructed on Roblox by a 36-year-old woman.
"We are fundamentally a platform for play, which differs from other places on the internet, where the focus is on browsing or consuming content," Roblox's chief safety officer Matt Kaufman wrote in the blog post.
Roblox's Popularity Can't Be Stopped
Roblox has been gaining popularity, with 68.4 million average daily active users, as reported in its 2023 annual report. Of these, 14.5 million made some form of payment, which adds up to the remarkable $2.8 billion revenue obtained last year. The more subscribers the platform gets, the bigger is its responsibility toward keeping it safe and secure for its young users.
Back in April, Roblox faced legal actions over child predation allegations via illegal gambling.
If you happen to have a young Roblox gamer at home, the safe chat feature should always be turned on so he/she can avoid seeing explicit chats. However, in case the user is not a minor anymore, you can disable this feature.
Related Article: Roblox to Launch 17+ Age Category for Mature Content
