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Audit Me!
What a wonderful time of year.
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Roblox, Discord, OpenAI, and Google found new child safety group
Google, OpenAI, Roblox, and Discord have formed a new non-profit organization to help improve child safety online. The Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative aims to make core safety technologies more accessible for companies and provide free, open-source AI tools for identifying, reviewing, and reporting child sexual abuse material.
The initiative was partially motivated by changes that generative AI advancements have made to online environments and aims to address “a critical need to accelerate innovation in online child safety,” according to founding ROOST partner and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Details about the CSAM detection tools are slim beyond that they will utilize large language AI models and “unify” existing options for dealing with the content.
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Some Robux casinos have shut down.
The unlicensed casinos, which were investigated by Sky News, let people gamble Robux, Roblox’s virtual currency, though they weren’t actually on Roblox.
Following Sky News’ initial report, two of the casinos “permanently ceased operations” and a third said it would be shutting down, according to a followup report.
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Find your next favorite song… on Roblox?
Roblox now has a Top 100 music chart that highlights “this week’s most popular music on Roblox based on listens and experience adoptions.”
Don’t sleep on “Jazz Medieval” (#54).
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Roblox tries to skirt app store fees by making Robux worth more on other platforms
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is now incentivizing users to buy its in-game currency, Robux, on platforms that won’t take app store fees. You can now get up to 25 percent more Robux if you purchase the currency through gift cards, on your computer, or on the web, according to a developer forum post from last week.
As for how that might look in practice, here’s some examples from the post:
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Roblox will restrict kids under 13 from chatting outside of games
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is starting to roll out some recently-announced child safety features, and the updates include some new limitations for how users under 13 can communicate on the platform. Beginning Monday, users younger than 13 won’t be able to DM players outside of games or experiences on Roblox. And they’ll need parental permission to be able to send in-game DMs — though this change won’t be fully implemented across the platform until the first quarter of 2025.
The changes follow recent reports highlighting instances of Roblox failing to protect children. A big article from Bloomberg described how predators on the platform use chat to communicate with kids. And a report from Hindenburg Research described Roblox as “an X-rated pedophile hellscape.” These new restrictions on chat will build on Roblox’s automatic chat filters intended to block users from sharing personal information.
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Roblox is banning kids from ‘social hangout’ spaces
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is going to block kids from accessing certain types of experiences following reports alleging that the platform has enabled child abuse.
One new measure will stop kids under 13 from accessing experiences with “certain types of interactive features,” Roblox says in a post on its developer forum. Those include “social hangouts,” where the primary purpose is to communicate with others over text or voice chat, and “free-form 2D user creation” experiences, where players can do things like draw on a chalkboard or whiteboard. This change goes into effect beginning November 18th.
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Roblox is making changes for pre-teen users after reports that it failed to protect children
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox is making some potentially major changes that will limit what pre-teens can access and give parents more control over what their kids do on the platform, according to an email sent by the company and shared with The Verge. The changes follow recent reports highlighting how Roblox has failed to protect children.
In July, for example, Bloomberg published a big report about predators on the platform. Turkey blocked access to Roblox in August, saying it was a necessary measure to protect its children. (Roblox said this week that it would open an office in the country if access was restored.) Earlier this month, a popular financial newsletter accused Roblox of enabling child abuse and the investment firm Hindenburg Research alleged that its “in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape.”
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Roblox accused of lying to investors about user numbers by Hindenburg Research
Image: Roblox
Roblox is facing accusations that it lied to investors about the number of people who use the platform. In a report published on Tuesday, the investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is “consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more.”
Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox “intentionally conflates” actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company’s disclosure says daily active users “are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox.”
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Roblox’s CEO on getting to 1 billion users
Roblox CEO David Baszucki has a goal that even he admits is “a little audacious”: to grow the company’s share of the global gaming market’s revenue to 10 percent in the coming few years.
For comparison, the company’s investor guidance of $4.2 billion in bookings this year is about 2 percent of the global gaming market, which Roblox estimates to currently be between $160 billion and $180 billion. Baszucki shared this goal, which ladders up to his ultimate mission of reaching 1 billion users, during the company’s annual developer conference on Friday.
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Roblox will start sharing more revenue with creators
Illustration: The Verge
As Roblox marches toward its ultimate goal of 1 billion users, the company is finding new ways to share revenue with the developers who have made millions of games on the platform.
During the company’s annual developers conference in San Francisco on Friday, CEO David Baszucki announced that creators of these games, which Roblox calls experiences, will be able to keep between 50 and 70 percent of revenue from their paid titles when they’re purchased in real currency on desktop computers. That’s significantly more than the roughly 30 percent revenue split Roblox gives developers for purchases made with its native Robux currency inside freemium experiences.
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Ikea will pay 10 Roblox players to roleplay as employees in its virtual store
Corporate publicity stunts involving virtual reality are almost always bad, but Ikea’s new Roblox store feels especially silly. The company announced last week that it plans to pay 10 people £13.15 or €14.80 per hour to work in The Co-Worker Game, a virtual Ikea store in Roblox. The company is taking applications until June 16th, only from candidates in the UK or Ireland who are 18 or older.
Being paid to be an NPC. What a world. The virtual employees will carry out tasks like serving meatballs or helping people find fake furniture or other Ikea items. They can also “get promoted to move departments, just like in the real world.”
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Roblox executive says children making money on the platform is ‘a gift’
Image: Roblox
Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, has taken a lot of heat from critics who accuse it of exploiting its users, the vast majority of whom are children and teenagers. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, however, Roblox’s studio head, Stefano Corazza, said the platform has actually been a gift to the young developers who make money by creating games on the platform.
“You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. “So I can be like, 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money, and then sustain my life.” (An unidentified Roblox PR person present during the interview told Eurogamer that most of the developers earning money on Roblox are 18 or older.)
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Roblox heads to Washington
In late January, a handful of social media CEOs were hauled before Congress to testify about what they were and weren’t doing to project kids on their services. Noticeably absent from the group was Roblox, the gaming-meets-hangout platform that is, to put it mildly, quite popular among young people.
“I watched that, and I had so many thoughts and so many feelings because we’ve been building safety for going on 20 years,” Roblox CEO and co-founder David Baszucki tells me. “And so after I saw that, independent of the Senate hearing, I thought, ‘I have to get out there and start talking to these people.’”
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Roblox releases real-time AI chat translator
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox built an AI model that it says translates text chats so quickly users may not even notice it’s translating the messages of other players at first. It works with 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese.
Dan Sturman, Roblox CTO, said in an interview with The Verge that the goal is to make Roblox users feel more comfortable engaging with each other by letting them understand what they are saying. The translator automatically translates chats, but users can click an icon to see the original message.
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Roblox has a new music-themed metaverse experience, too.
The experience, called Beat Galaxy, was made in part by Universal Music Group (UMG), and features a runner / music game you can play with music from UMG artists. It’s not nearly as polished as Epic’s newly-launched Fortnite Festival, but if you’ve been looking for something like that in Roblox, Beat Galaxy is in the ballpark.
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Roblox’s chatbot assistant for developers is available now in beta.
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You can now buy subscriptions in Roblox experiences that offer them.
The company rolled out the ability for developers to make them in September, and now, if you want, users can actually start paying for them. I’m curious to see if or how this might change the way Roblox developers build businesses around their experiences — subscriptions in the App Store ended up being a huge deal, after all.
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Roblox is launching its take on video calls.
You can read more about the launch of Roblox Connect on the company’s developer forum. Roblox is also introducing APIs so that developers can build Roblox Connect into their experiences.
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Roblox is still popular — and still growing.
📈 Average daily active users hit “a new milestone” of 70.2 million, up 20 percent from the same quarter last year
📈 Daily active users grew across “all age groups”
📈 Average monthly unique players (MUP) hit 14.7 million, while the average bookings per MUP was $19.02
Basically, more and more people are playing Roblox, and many of them are spending money, too. I have to imagine the expansions to PlayStation and Meta Quest have helped.
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Roblox is taking less money from subscriptions, but for a limited time.
If a developer introduces subscriptions before December 15th, Roblox says it will only take a 15 percent cut of those subscriptions instead of 30 percent, according to a post on its developer forum. However, that reduced rate will only be in place through March 15th, 2024. And, importantly, the “fee savings” from the reduced rate will be paid in a lump sum in April, Roblox says.
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Here’s your TL;DR on some Roblox news tidbits.
😀 You’ll be able to customize the names you see for your Roblox friends “in the next month.”
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Here’s a few more things I wanted to share about Roblox.
🎮 Roblox launched on PlayStation last week, and it already has more than 10 million downloads, spokesperson Samantha Spielman tells The Verge.
😀 The company published a long blog post on Tuesday about how it’s “evolving” its avatar technology to make it more modern. It’s an interesting read, though there’s no news.
📺 Earlier this month, the company added the ability for developers to include short videos into their experiences. I worry this feature could be used for bad, but the company says videos must adhere to its community standards.
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Roblox says employees must return to office because the metaverse still isn’t good enough
Illustration: The Verge
Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning away” from remote work and will be asking “a number of our remote employees to begin working from our headquarters in San Mateo by next summer,” CEO David Baszucki wrote in an email to staff shared publicly on Tuesday.
Like many other companies, Roblox will be shifting to a model where employees are expected to work three days in the office (Tuesday through Thursday). Staffers will have until January 16th, 2024, to decide if they want to stay on at the company under the new rules. If an employee chooses to stay at Roblox and relocate, the company will help with relocation costs and expects them to report into the company’s San Mateo, California, offices by July 15th, 2024.
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Roblox is now available on PlayStation.
Roblox: all the news about the popular social and gaming platform
