Roblox Can’t Seem To Keep Anyone Happy Right Now

Roblox has a tricky tightrope to walk between making its online sandbox safe and keeping it fun. On one side, players rail against changes locking off social settings and requiring privacy-threatening age checks, and on the other side Roblox is beset by lawmakers claiming the platform isn’t doing enough. It’s a balancing act, but at the moment Roblox doesn’t seem to be pleasing anyone.

Roblox has long faced controversy fuelled by its young-skewing player base, from accusations of child labor exploitation to a bombshell Bloomberg report that alleged Roblox had become a hotbed for child predators. The company has faced legal action from many states across the US and internationally, including from LA, Australia, Texas, Louisiana, California, and more.

The company’s responses to such accusations haven’t always made for great PR, from CEO David Baszucki’s notoriously poor handling of a New York Times interview to studio head Stefano Corazza saying Roblox was doing a good thing by allowing 15-year-olds to work. While defensiveness has often been the company’s go-to response to accusations around safety, the mounting pressure has now seen Roblox pull the trigger on a number of sweeping platform changes.

Roblox added age verification in January, but the AI-powered age check has proven heavily unpopular with users–with a myriad of concerns raised ranging from privacy and data collection to inaccuracies and flaws in the AI’s age estimates. As of mid-April, only around half of Roblox’s global active users have completed the check, leaving half of its player-base locked out of chat features. Those who have verified aren’t necessarily having a better experience, with social posts showing a mess of censored messages when playing games with different age groups.

Despite its impact on the player experience, the initial age-verification system still didn’t seem to be enough to satisfy regulators–the company recently got a stern talking-to by the communications minister of Australia, where age checks have been in place since December. Now, Roblox is getting three new account types to further separate young players from older users–though the system will still rely on the same AI-based checks.

Developers who publish games on the platform will now have to meet some new standards if they want to publish for players under 16–one of which is holding an active subscription to Roblox Plus, a new $5 per month service. The new pay-to-publish model has upset developers who publish on Roblox, with some claiming that the change is designed for revenue-raising under the guise of safety.

“Requiring a recurring Plus or Premium subscription indicates that you’re an active part of the Roblox community and is a significant financial cost for bad actors,” Roblox defended the decision in a recent AMA on the topic. “99% of creators who have games that will be available to Roblox Select and Kids accounts earn more than the Plus subscription cost, and many creators earn significantly more.”

It’s also unclear what the change will mean for legacy games that have been abandoned by their creators–which make up an important part of Roblox’s 20-year history. While Roblox says that abandoned games can complete the evaluation process to be made available to younger users, it says creators will still need to meet the requirements to publish to all ages–which includes an active Plus subscription.

While most of Roblox’s biggest changes have been made in the name of safety, the most unpopular recent change was purely cosmetic yet still highly controversial. Last month, Roblox officially sunset Classic Faces in favor of Dynamic Heads. While the two options have coexisted for some time, Roblox disabled the option to select Classic Faces at the end of March, much to the displeasure of players who preferred their static, 2D faces.

While it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, many face cosmetics simply look worse on Dynamic Heads, ruining curated aesthetics that players may have spent significant amounts of Robux on. One user on the Roblox dev forum even charted the in-game economic impact of the change, estimating that the faces market has lost around 7 billion Robux in value–equivalent to roughly $26 million USD–with some individual items losing as much as 40-50% of their value in two months.

Despite massive backlash from players, Roblox doesn’t seem inclined to add Classic Faces back to the game, saying the change is necessary to “overcome the complexity of the growing Roblox avatar ecosystem” and that it “makes all heads and bodies compatible and allows for new features.” One such new feature was recently to be a new Makeup category of cosmetics, an addition that many players immediately hated.

In one small gesture of goodwill, Roblox has walked back one minor yet unpopular change when it recently revealed that Connections will be renamed back to Friends. While players celebrated the return of Friends, with many finding the alternative too cold or corporate, it’s just a drop in the ocean in the wake of other unpopular changes.

Roblox fans’ frustrations are clear to see online, with the same negative sentiments echoed across social platforms, app store reviews, and threads in the official dev forums. Many complain that the dev team seem unwilling to take on feedback, with official communications cluttered with insincere corporate jargon. Some are concerned that Roblox is more interested in keeping investors happy instead of looking after players, pointing to the company’s flagging share price.

In a recent AMA on Roblox’s dev forums, a user questioned whether Roblox was concerned about the increase in negative feedback from players and developers. They received a response from chief safety officer Matt Kaufman, who highlighted the balancing act Roblox is currently navigating.

“On age checks specifically: we understand it’s unpopular. But the honest reality is that the cost of not acting is greater than the friction of acting,” Kaufman said. “Without these requirements, Roblox risks losing access in entire regions; which means fewer players, smaller audiences, and less opportunity for every creator and influencer building on this platform. Some Roblox everywhere is better than full Roblox nowhere.”

With all these changes to be implemented over the next year, it’s clear that Roblox and its community are in for a bumpy ride. It’s yet to be seen whether its players will be willing to weather that storm in the hopes that Roblox will be able to find its balance at the end of it.