We all know Roblox, made by David Baszucki on September 1, 2006, to create a fun virtual platform where users could build and play their own games. It’s an extremely popular video game known for its virtual worlds and its diverse players with a total net worth of $56.82 billion dollars as of today, and with around 380 million monthly active users. But soon, his company may be losing all of its profit. Keep reading to find out why.
Recently, Roblox has been facing loads of backlash– from quality of games to safety. In response, the Roblox team implemented one of the worst updates ever: the chat update. In an attempt to keep the game safe and more playable, they ruined their game. Now, nobody can see each other’s chats, except those in the same age groups. The newly added chatting age groups are 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20 and 21+. Certain age groups can only chat with certain age groups. Before you say, “this seems like an okay update,” Roblox is supposed to be a globally social game. How can people be social? What about roleplay based games? Team based games? Roblox didn’t take that into consideration.
Roblox added this update because, as stated before, it will keep the game safe, specifically from predators. In disguise, it seems like they genuinely care about their players and their safety. But in reality, they only added this because Roblox moderators don’t want to do their job– they don’t want to actually ban predators. They’re lazy. In fact, this update makes it more suitable for predators. They can quite literally make different accounts, use fake faces for the verification, and choose which age group they’d like to be in. Once they’d chat, nobody else would see it, except those in the specific age group they want.
For starters, to chat, you must do an AI run face verification. It works by turning your head slowly left and right, and the program scans your face and estimates your age. You might be thinking, “what’s so bad about that?” Well, sharing your facial information to an app using AI puts it at risk to frauds and deepfakes. Deepfakes and frauds are artificial images or videos made using someone else’s face.
“The recent chat update has made Roblox worse. Restricting chat to only people the same age stops players from talking to their real friends. On top of that, the age verification system doesn’t work properly. It incorrectly identified my age and caused unnecessary chat restrictions. This update feels rushed and poorly implemented. Please fix the verification system or reconsider these chat limits,” Pam Gazey informs readers, putting this review on the App Store.
Back to the process, after the AI scans your face, it estimates your age, which is terrible, because AI shouldn’t be estimating your age, as it won’t be accurate. Many users have been given an inaccurate age estimation. For example, some users who are over 13 have gotten 9-12. Some users who are over 18 have gotten 13-15 because of their baby face.
Not to mention, if you choose not to show an ID or your face, your chat access just gets completely taken away until you choose to verify. For a game that is known for its fun chatting system, this is just completely wrong. Plus, players are literally getting banned for wearing shirts that say things like “I can’t chat”. Banning people over shirts that aren’t even inappropriate instead of banning predators seems very unprofessional as a multi billion dollar company.
In conclusion, Roblox is completely ruined until they fix this implementation. If they don’t, they’ll lose players, which means they’ll lose money. Which is on them. What do you think about this update? Whether you care or not, it wouldn’t hurt to protest.
