Understanding parental controls and risk on Roblox

Roblox is a kid-oriented gaming ecosystem with millions of players. Here’s what you need to know about its parental controls, account types and microtransactions.

The main dangers

Roblox has a reputation for being kid-friendly, and it largely is, at least compared to the wider internet. Its “experiences” (the official term for the millions of games created by its community) and users are are subject to community standards that forbid any kind of gore, hate speech, harassment, sexual or romantic content, profanity, and many kinds of violence, although you’ll still find bloodless cartoon battles with swords, guns and tanks if you don’t apply any age or content restrictions to an account.

On the downside, it’s rife with ethically dubious microtransactions, the profit sharing model for young developers is exploitative, unsafe content can still slip through, and your average adult’s idea of acceptable content can be very different from those of Roblox’s young users. There’s plenty of fat-shaming, toilet humour, and disconcerting creepypasta (online folk horror), for example.

How you can stop them seeing inappropriate content

If you’ve created a Roblox account for a child, it’s very possible that you’ve set it up without enabling the content management and parental controls, especially if you set it up by entering your own name and date of birth, rather than those of your child.

If you plan on changing an existing account to accurately represent your child’s age, there are some important points to be aware of, particularly if your under-13 is using Roblox to make games, as well as play them.

A user’s age not only affects which experiences they’ll have access to, but also chat, private server access, information sharing, and some development features.

Roblox Studio users who are under the age of 13 do not have access to a number of features, most notably:

• The ability to use 3D object meshes when making games in Roblox Studio (including those they’ve created themselves)
• The ability to exchange Roblox earned from their games for real-world money via DevEx

If your child is a keen developer, this is a good time to discuss having separate accounts for publishing and playing games, which is industry best practice, as well as making parental content filtering easier.

Extra safety and security features are always enabled for under-13s, including:

• Maximum chat content filtering always enabled
• No social media accounts can be added to their profile
• No phone number can be added to their profile
• They cannot change their listed account age

Content filters and other restrictions can also be enabled for accounts owned by an adult, and can be locked behind a PIN so they can’t be changed without your approval, so whatever your and your household Roblox fan need, there’s a configuration setting that’ll help. Parents can also set a spending limit for under-13s.

Frustratingly, for accounts belonging to children over the age of 13, it’s not currently possible to block or require adult authorisation for purchases on Roblox, which is annoying and potentially expensive in a microtransaction-heavy environment with purchases costing upwards of 555,000 (£1,480) of the in-game Robux currency alongside those costing just a pound or two. Your best option here is to ensure that, if you wish to give your child in-game spending money, you only buy Robux directly and never save a card on any system that your child using to play the game.

To help you navigate privacy, security, safety and content filtering on Roblox, I’ve written a pair of guides: how to enable parental controls on Roblox 13+ accounts and How to create and manage an under-13 Roblox account for a child.

The company has indicated that it may add additional age tiers, such as 17+ categories for older gamers seeking mature content, but has yet to do so.