Supporting and Protecting the Roblox Developer and User Community

Time Stamp: February 4, 2022 4:15 PM

At Roblox, our vision is to reimagine how people come together. We have created a place where millions of users, creators, and developers across the globe build and share experiences and form friendships. 

We are committed to ensuring people of all ages have a positive and safe experience, and are free to express themselves within a respectful environment. That’s why safety and civility have been our core values from the very beginning and drive everything we do. 

As our diverse community has grown, so have the  platform functionality and resources we have created to both protect and empower our community. We have built rigorous new systems and improved existing ones. We’ve created a rich suite of free tools for anyone who wants to build on Roblox. And we’ve hired the most talented and well-trained employees across our trust and safety and moderation teams. We’re proud of this foundation.  And our work and focus on safety will always continue, especially as Roblox supports an even wider variety of experiences and our community grows even larger and more diverse.

In this post, we’ll share five important ways we both support and protect our users, creators and developers.  We will provide information about our policies, our differentiated approach to cultivating a safe platform, and some initiatives we are working on. 

#1 – We prioritize safety and civility — it’s the foundation of everything we do

We have had a safety-first culture ever since Roblox first launched in 2006, and always will, which means we will always prioritize actions that protect our users, even when that means superseding other considerations, such as unrestricted speech. For example:

  • Using a combination of human and machine detection, we conduct a safety review of every piece of content that is published on the Roblox platform, including all images, video, and audio files. We do not allow user to user sharing of videos or images.
  • Our chat filters are rigorous and industry-leading, and we continuously update them to block the sharing of inappropriate words, personal information or off-platform links, including to Discord servers and other third-party spaces where we do not have visibility.
  • Our expert team, of thousands of people, is dedicated to monitoring for safety around the world, 24/7.
  • We expect everyone on Roblox to follow our Community Standards, and have Report Abuse tools that anyone can use to report on-platform behavior that falls below these standards. We actively encourage our users to report any rule breakers or bad content. We take abuse reports seriously, and we maintain close and transparent working relationships with law enforcement and global safety partners in every country we operate in.
  • With our zero tolerance for inappropriate content and behavior, we take swift and immediate action to address any content or developer that violates our terms of use, including any attempts to go around our safety policies and protocols. 
  • As with any community, there are a small number of bad actors who may attempt to undermine or skirt the rules, and we continue to evolve our platform and policies to thwart this behavior. 

We also have a robust set of features and initiatives specifically aimed at protecting younger members of the Roblox community:

  • We provide a suite of Parental Control settings that can be used to restrict who children can interact with, what experiences they can access, and how much they can spend. 
  • We ensure certain features, such as spatial voice, are only available to age-verified users.
  • Our chat filters block inappropriate words or phrases, chat behavior that clearly indicates an attempt to bring a player off our platform, social media links and references to third-party chat applications, and questions related to personal information like age, phone number, or address of another user. 
  • We update blocked terms daily and also use automation to flag content for further review by our moderators.
  • We continue to provide actionable resources for parents, caregivers and educators to promote learning about safety and online civility through our Digital Civility Initiative. We partner with more than 20 leading global organizations that focus on child safety, online safety, or both, and belong to a number of industry organizations dedicated to collaborating across platforms to keep users, particularly children, safe. 
  • We promptly report any suspected child exploitation, abuse materials, or online grooming to relevant authorities and organizations such as the National Crime Agency and Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command in the UK, as well as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States.

To learn more about how we protect users of all ages, visit our Safety and Civility pages.

#2 – We provide tools to enable responsible, efficient experience creation

We believe one of the reasons Roblox has proven so popular with first-time developers is that we’ve eliminated the barriers that normally prevent people from getting started in game development. People can start developing on Roblox immediately, for free, with no upfront costs and no coding background required.  

In addition to providing free tools to start creating, we also cover burdensome ongoing expenses and complexities such as hosting, storage, customer support, localization, regulatory compliance costs, payment processing and platform fees. All these might otherwise fall to developers. By incorporating this functionality into our system, Roblox enables developers to focus on creation.

Roblox developers can also modify their experiences and publish across console, desktop, and mobile devices immediately — enabling rapid iteration and testing in real time. And once Roblox developers are ready to show their creations to the world, they have instant access to the nearly 50 million (and growing) daily active Roblox users all over the world.

Because of how easy it is to get started building on Roblox, most developers join the platform as hobbyists, perhaps learning to code for the first time. That describes most of the younger developers we see on Roblox. As developers hone their skills, typically over a period of years, some will choose to transition into part-time or full-time game development as a source of real-world income, or to join development teams and professional game studios building exclusively on Roblox.

We offer a number of resources to support developers making this transition. These include:

For more information on how we help developers build on Roblox, visit Value for Creators and Developers.

#3 – We strive to do everything in our power to maintain an economy that is efficient, supportive, and fair 

We believe in a healthy virtual economy. We are constantly investing in ways to ensure creators can be compensated for their efforts and everyone is treated fairly.

How the Roblox economy works

Roblox is, and will always be, free to play. Users who want to enhance their experience on Roblox can choose to buy items using a virtual currency called Robux. These items might be clothing or accessories for their avatars, or items to assist gameplay in a particular experience. 

When a user purchases something on Roblox, the creator of that item earns a portion of the sale in Robux. If a player buys an item while they are in a particular experience, the developer of that experience also earns a portion of the sale in Robux. 

That means a developer will earn between 30% and 70% of the value of the transaction, depending on whether they are the creator of the item sold, whether the item is sold in an experience they created, or both.

Developers can also earn Robux via Engagement-based Payouts, which reward experiences based on user engagement. These payments happen automatically, and require no direct spending from users. Developers can take advantage of our organic channels, our network effects, and our cost-efficient, on-platform ads to grow the number of users engaging with their experiences.         

On behalf of our developers, we cover app store fees, development software, networking infrastructure, global compliance, customer support, billing and collections, and deliver a growing, global audience of 50 million daily active users.

We paid out more than half a billion dollars to our community in 2021 alone, and that is nearly 5x the amount our community earned just two years ago.

The bottom line is creating an experience on Roblox is significantly less expensive than trying to do so off-platform or in any app stores and the financial rewards are potentially very large.

#4 – We take action to prevent abuse of our economy

We do not tolerate fraud and scams, and have stringent rules and monitoring processes aimed at combating them. 

For example, we don’t allow links to third-party sites that could be used to trick users into handing over cash, items, or Robux. 

Developer earnings resulting from the trading of collectibles are not eligible to be converted into real-world currency in our DevEx program.

For other earnings that are eligible to be converted into real-world currency, our 50,000 Robux withdrawal minimum provides an additional layer of transaction security that reduces the risk of fraud. While we allow the portrayal of gambling in experiences, no real money or Robux may be exchanged in these experiences.

#5 – We are always strengthening our systems to make Roblox even safer

Our safety systems and teams are constantly evolving and innovating to ensure everyone has a positive and healthy experience on Roblox, every day. 

For example, in 2021 we implemented multiple new machine-learning-based systems and significantly increased the number of human moderators reviewing Roblox for bad content. As a result, in 2021 we saw an 84% reduction in the number of users who were exposed to any experiences that violated our policies. This year – and every year – we continue to aggressively improve both our proactive and reactive detection methods.

It’s important that all content adheres to our guidelines, and that all development teams collaborate in ethical and respectful ways. We work to ensure there is no abuse or unfair treatment taking place within development teams. Even though we are limited in our ability to monitor off-platform abuse and mediate disputes or inappropriate behavior that arise off-platform, we’ve created new initiatives to help guide and support our community and prevent behaviors that could cause harm, even off-platform, including:

  • Additions to our Community Standards to further codify the behaviors we expect everyone in the community to adhere to, including those collaborating as part of a team;
  • Additional resources aimed at younger creators, particularly those looking to Roblox as a source of income; and
  • Educational materials to help the parents of younger creators guide their children if they choose to pursue becoming a professional developer.

At Roblox, we’re proud to be one of the most civil places on the internet. As it has been since our earliest days, safety is, and will continue to be, our top priority, and we are committed to continually improving our systems to keep it that way.

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