Happy Nice Mall

SAN FRANCISCO — Dave Baszucki, CEO of gaming company Roblox, took the stage at a conference hosted by his company on Thursday, reflecting on how much has changed for Roblox since its last in-person event two years ago.

in March, Roblox debuts on Wall Street. As of Friday, it was worth $44 billion and had more than 43 million players using it every day – more than double the number of daily users it had two years ago. One of the most striking differences, though, was the age of the crowd of hundreds of game developers with whom Mr. Baszucki spoke at Fort Mason, a former military base on the San Francisco waterfront.

Not long ago, the crowd consisted mostly of children. By Thursday, most were young adults. And as they grew, Roblox, a colorful, blocky platform that offers millions of online games of all kinds, from exploring tropical islands to feeding digital pets, has sought to grow with them.

Roblox’s effort to keep in touch with an older audience while providing a safe environment for its youngest users offers both a roadmap and a warning note for other internet companies trying the opposite: engaging with a younger audience.

While Roblox is often praised for its efforts, protecting its young users has been an ever-evolving battle. The company reviews game content, offers parental controls, and includes chat filters that block profanity and information that can be used to identify people. Even so, the exposed material slides through the cracks. has been Games that display avatars of users engaging in graphic sexual activity and recreating mass shots.

Like many other internet platforms, moderation is “a really tough issue for Roblox to roll up,” said Jeff Haynes, senior editor of web and video games at Common Sense, a children’s advocacy and media ratings group.

Roblox’s shift towards a mixed-age audience comes with global attention to the privacy and vulnerability of children online. Earlier this month, a Senate subcommittee session spent several hours listening to Instagram detail a whistleblower. harming its young users. The informant, a former employee of Instagram’s owner Facebook, is also expected to testify before government officials in the UK and the European Union in the coming weeks.

Confusing older users with the traditional crowd of Roblox poses other safety risks, such as the possibility of young children being exposed to predators or recruited by others. extreme groups. The company has sought to eradicate such abuses, and Mr. Baszucki said he understands the “difficulty” of integrating various ages into its platform. But he said it was part of his vision to build a safe and open online world. pseudo metaverse, an idea where people can share a huge online universe together.

“We are optimistic that we can build this society that is accessible to people of all ages,” Mr. Baszucki said in an interview after his speech.

Roblox was launched in 2004 under the assumption that most of its users are underage, so it has taken security measures to protect children from online harassment and predators. for a long time wildly popular with kidsespecially those aged 9 to 12.

Mr. Baszucki, who has a background in educational software, envisioned Roblox as a place where children can learn to code, explore virtual worlds, play games and socialize, especially if their real-life school experience is unsatisfactory. (Manuel Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer, recently joined the board of The New York Times Company.)

The company makes money by selling a digital currency called Robux, which is used to purchase in-game items, and shares its profits with the indie developers who create many of the universe’s games. Developers depend on Roblox more than the creators of social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. where teens say they often come across toxic substances.

“We share less of our lives and more say ‘let’s play hide and seek or go to ancient Rome,'” Mr. Baszucki said.

This month, Roblox said that more than half of its first-time users are over the age of 13. It recently announced new tools designed to attract older players to the platform, such as more realistic avatars; the ability for developers to limit some games to players 13 years and older, or possibly 17 years and older; and voice chat is available for those who are at least 13 years old. Users can upload a government-issued ID along with a selfie to verify their age.

Earlier this month, Roblox updated community standards prohibiting depictions of romance or discussions of political parties. It also explicitly banned terrorist or extremist groups from hiring or raising funds on the site – an issue that has plagued social media companies like Twitter for years.

Mr Baszucki said it was a “big responsibility” to integrate older users while maintaining the standards of courtesy and good behavior on which the platform is based. But he was optimistic that the company would succeed because he said Roblox has a history of children behaving better than adults on other social platforms.

Child safety experts said that as other sites try to engage children, Facebook, for example, will create an Instagram product specifically tailored for those 13 and under. before postponing these plans – They can learn important lessons from Roblox.

Titania Jordan, chief parent officer of Bark, a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor children’s devices, said that while bad behavior can sometimes slip through the cracks in Roblox, the company is still “praiseworthy” in its approach to child safety. especially when compared to sites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

One Roblox tool that other companies can implement is the ability to turn on parental controls that kids can’t disable, he said. Ms. Jordan said it would be much better to let her 12-year-old son use Snapchat if, for example, she could enter a pin code at a certain time and lock the app for the rest of the night. He said it’s also comforting to have an age verification system backed by an ID, compared to apps where it’s easy to enter any age and create an account.

Common Sense’s Mr. Haynes said the fact that Roblox dedicates a significant portion of its design to combating abuse and illegal materials, but still faces criticism, could be another lesson for companies like Facebook. He said social platforms, many of which dedicate a significant amount of resources to policing offensive or violent content, could get a younger audience to try even harder before they believe they can deliver something safely.

Roblox’s young developers are also optimistic. After all, they know what’s on the internet outside the confines of Roblox’s digital world.

“You can always find little examples of something that gets overlooked – someone spells a cursed word weirdly, everyone has seen it. But compare that to the open internet,” CJ Oyer, a 23-year-old developer who grew up playing Roblox, said at the company conference.