At Roblox, we create an exciting platform to communicate and connect with safety and courtesy by its basis, which simulates the real world. In real life, people visit places designed for all ages, from theme parks to city parks, every day. Older age groups find themselves in environments where some form of age verification is required, from night clubs to some concerts or movies. At Roblox, we want to recreate this dynamic of real life in the virtual space. Just like in real life, the key is to set appropriate expectations for people on Roblox based on different experiences. While we’re used to how it works in the real world, creating these processes digitally requires a whole new level of intent and effort. We are excited to pave the way for this new digital world that is both safe and civil.
Our goal is to be a one-stop platform for finding age-appropriate experiences for every stage of life. This can include experiences you might have seen on Roblox, such as concerts, digital fashion, immersive games, and learning. But in the future, Roblox could include different kinds of experiences like virtual dating, indie movie screenings, and new forms of content like news and hot topics.
The evolution of our community
In the early days of Roblox, Eric Cassel and I spent part of the day in Roblox, not only building and playing, but looking at content and paying attention to how people interacted. It gave us an initial but vivid sense of the power of the platform to connect – and at the same time – demonstrated how important a sense of security is to human communication.
Nineteen years later, our Roblox community continues to grow as the platform expands and our users grow with us. More than 55%¹ of our users are now over 13 and the fastest growing demographic is users aged 17 to 24, with 35%² Year-over-year DAU growth in the first quarter of 2023. Currently 17-24 users are represented 22%³ our community.
As the number of people on our platform grows, our developers want to expand our reach with more types of content that target all parts of our ever-widening community. with Most of our top 1,000 ideas are created by developers aged 17 and up, many aiming to create experiences for an older audience so they can interact exclusively with people their own age. We want to empower our developers to provide the best and safest user experience for every age group.
Experience Guidelines and Age Policy
One of our age-old policies is Experience recommendations. Roblox content currently conforms to several experience guidelines, from all ages to age minimums such as 9+ and 13+. These guidelines help diversify content by giving developers direction and options to create content that is appropriate for specific age groups. As a result, we’re starting to see more features tailored and relevant to specific age groups, e.g Combat warriors for users 13+ or Piggy for 9+ users. Although our range of age offerings is growing, most programs are still ‘All Ages’, keeping our younger audience engaged with educational simulations for all ages, such as Mars missioncreated by the Museum of Science, for such competitive racing games Escape from prison for 9+ users. To create a more engaging and engaging experience for all ages, we have invested in technologies such as high quality graphics and Layered clothing.
Most importantly, experience guidelines help users and parents continue to make informed decisions about the content they interact with on the platform. Parents can use parental controls to limit access to content based on these usage guidelines, allowing them to decide what’s right for their children. As our platform has expanded, our tools and these improvements have now created an even richer, safer, and more engaging user experience for everyone.
Roblox is an engaging place to connect with friends, socialize and connect, and we will continue to develop our platform to stay a safe and respectful environment for everyone. Dynamic and age-based policies are key to ensuring the best experience for everyone on the same platform. In addition to the robust security protocols we already have in place, we’ve implemented a number of new age-specific features that we believe are important to foster an age-differentiated experience. INe implemented an age verification system that can be used for future features such as age-related experiences. For example, users can verify their age with ID and view selfies in real-time for certain features and experiences. In addition, we have communication security features that allow users to mute and block users, secure voice recordings to view violation reports, and community alerts to suspend voice access for those who violate our Community standards. These features allow us to securely enable exciting connectivity better than ever before.
An exciting year ahead
Looking ahead, we are focused on working with our community to bring our vision of Roblox as a platform for all ages to life. We will work to enable older creators to safely post more engaging and age-appropriate content, while remaining committed to providing the best experience in courtesy, content, and communication for everyone on Roblox.
(¹), (²) Figure as of the 1st quarter of 2023
(³) Figure as of the 4th quarter of 2022