this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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Roblox is possibly the most popular gaming platform on the planet—far more popular than you might think. Grow a Garden, a game built within the app, recently had 21.9 million concurrent players, dwarfing the likes of Fortnite and Counter-Strike 2 by multiple times. And that’s despite being an application recently described as “a pedophile hellscape for kids.” Well, it can now add another similar accolade to its collection, as the entire state of Louisiana has announced it’s suing Roblox, calling it “a breeding ground for sex predators.”

Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill announced the action via X, explaining that she’s coming after the gaming platform due to its “lack of safety protocols,” and the claim that this results in danger for children. Which, in most circumstances, might come across as all-too-familiar hyperbole from a member of government looking for a moral panic to latch onto. It’s just, in the case of Roblox, it’s something that’s been demonstrated to be true over and over again. But no matter the accuracy, the question remains: What is the actual, practical purpose of this suit?

“Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators,” says Murrill, “because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety. Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger poised to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”

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[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 9 months ago

Besides how Roblox now a den of pedophiles now, that I think is more an effect than a cause, it does strike me as a game that would have, ideally, have a high-ass age rating due to

  1. Being online-only, with random visitors and chatting capabilities, no anonymous presence allowed
  2. Having a free-form gameplay where creators can make entire games in it
  3. Thriving on mxts, having robux incencetives for creators

A good game for teens, from the parents' standpoint, is where they have a predictable experience with as less addiction-inducing mechanics as possible.

GTA: SA, the controversy queen at the time, was more safe for children because even with it's sandbox gameplay, you couldn't encounter or do anything more than cartoonish violence or, like, boring sex minigame in Hot Coffee. Most games are like this or even more sterile, with all toys screwed down to the floor, where player can not deviate from a range of experiences baked into it. CoD, of all games, presented a space where the chat was the worst offender as it was put in stone in our massmedia, but other than that you just shoot people and watch propaganda, that's what you can tell by it's cover.

There we see not a built-and-released game where we can estimate anything, but a platform that hosts an uncontrollable space of minigames, a risk factor 1, where you encounter random individuals, rf2, and that encourages you to spend money, rf3.

If we are to take age ratings seriously, these three should put Roblox deep into M territory.

I remember some games started with the disclaimer 'ESRB doesn't rate your online communication experience', and oh, well, it fucking should start doing that. If you don't limit your chat capabilities to the likes of point-and-call wheel seen in Valve games, you get a more mature rating. Not to say that community-created minigames themselves could be even worse offenders, like, someone can create a challenge to draw a palestinian flag! Where's the admin?!

And fucking mtxs, man, why the fuck we still not considering them a red flag and a reason to ban the fucking thing? Roblox, Fortnite, gachas and others got billions on that, they grew because of that, and game developers/publishers started to pursue that model because no one cared about it. All while having just a cosmetics shop should've led them well into adult market where all their lucrative technics couldn't work as well as with children.

Even without all the pedos on said platform, it's still not a game for children.