At Roblox, we are building an immersive platform for communication and connection, with safety and civility at its foundation, that simulates the real world. In real life, people visit places designed for all ages every day, from theme parks to city parks. Older age groups enter environments that require some form of age verification, from nightclubs to some concerts or movies. On Roblox, we want to recreate these dynamics of real life in virtual space. Just like in real life, the key is establishing appropriate expectations for people on Roblox based on the different experiences. While we are used to how this happens in the real world, it takes a whole new round of intention and effort to create these processes digitally. We are excited to pave the way for this new digital world that is both safe and civil.
Our goal is one platform, where age-appropriate experiences for every life stage can be found. This could include experiences you may have seen on Roblox like concerts, digital fashion, immersive games, and education. But, in a distant future, Roblox could envision different types of experiences, like virtual dating for older age groups, indie movie screenings and new forms of content such as news and hot topics.
The Evolution of our Community
In Roblox’s early days, Erik Cassel and I spent parts of every day on Roblox not just building and playing, but reviewing content and paying attention to how people interacted. This gave us an initial but revealing sense of the platform’s power for connection – and at the same time – demonstrated how essential a feeling of safety is to human connection.
Nineteen years later, our Roblox community continues to evolve as the platform expands and our users grow up alongside us. More than 55%¹ of our users are now over 13 years old and our fastest-growing demographic segment is 17-24-year-old users, with 35%² DAU YOY growth in Q1 2023. 17-24 users now represent 22%³ of our community.
With the growing diversity of people on our platform, our developers want to expand their reach through more types of content that target all parts of our increasingly broad community. With developers over 17 creating the majority of our top 1000 experiences, many seek to create experiences for older audiences so they can interact exclusively with those their age. We want to empower our developers to deliver the best and safest user experience for every age group.
Experience Guidelines and Age-Specific Policies
One of our age-specific policies is Experience Guidelines. Roblox content currently aligns with multiple Experience Guidelines groups: from All Ages, to age minimums such as 9+ and 13+. These guidelines help drive content diversity by giving developers direction and parameters for creating appropriate content for specific age ranges. As a result, we’re beginning to see more experiences that are customized and relevant for specific age groups like Combat Warriors for 13+ users or Piggy for 9+ users. While our age-specific offerings are growing, most experiences still cater to “All Ages,” ensuring our younger audience remains engaged, from All Ages educational simulations like Mission Mars, created by the Museum of Science, to competitive racing games like Jailbreak for 9+ users. In order to build more immersive and engaging experiences for all ages, we’ve invested in technology such as higher-fidelity 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 restrict content access based on these Experience Guidelines, allowing them to decide what is appropriate for their children. As our platform has scaled, so have our tools and these advancements now enable an even richer, safer, and more engaging user experience for everyone.
Roblox is an engaging place for people to hang out with friends, socialize, and connect, and we will continue to design our platform to remain a safe and respectful environment for everyone. Dynamic and age-differentiated policies are the key to delivering the best experience for everyone on a single platform. In addition to the robust safety protocols we already have in place, we’ve implemented a variety of new age-specific features, which we believe are essential to fostering age-differentiated experiences. We implemented an age-verification system that can be employed for future features like age-specific experiences. For example, users can verify their age using ID and a live-selfie view for particular features and experiences. Additionally, we have communication safety features that allow users to mute and block users, privacy-safe voice recordings to review abuse reports and community signals to suspend voice access to those who violate our Community Standards. These features allow us to safely enable immersive connection better than ever before.
An Exciting Year Ahead
As we look to the future, we’re focused on working with our community to bring our vision of Roblox as a platform for all ages to life. We’ll be working to allow older age-verified creators safely publish more engaging and age-specific content, while remaining committed to providing the best experience in civility, content, and connection for everyone on Roblox.
[¹],[²] Figure as of Q1 2023
[³] Figure as of Q4 2022