Roblox creators use a lot of tools to get players to revisit their games, but one tactic is now getting games yanked from the platform. Games have been getting more advanced in how they keep players engaged. From daily check-in rewards making sure players stop by for a few minutes a day to battle passes that drive return visits for weeks, experiences can often offer valid enticements for players to keep coming back. As Roblox has evolved, so have creator tactics for pumping up their engagement stats. Time in-game is a metric that many use to prove their quality, and Roblox is catching wise to some less-than-reputable ways creators are driving that engagement. Some have turned to video streaming and social media tactics by rewarding behavior that professionals and parents say is unhealthy and addictive. Now, the platform is taking action and removing offending games.
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Roblox recently revealed that, “effective immediately,” it would be excluding games from Kids and Select that featured what they call “reward-driven media feeds.” Essentially, games that had play mechanics that rewarded players for watching endless streams of short form video. Roblox laid out the three things it’s reviewing for the new rule. If the game displays a media feed to the player, whether it’s short-form videos, image feeds, or social media-style stories. If it features or mimics autoplay, a continuous replay loop, infinite scrolling, or autoscroll. The game includes reward mechanics that require viewing of that content. When a game ticks all three boxes, it gets flagged and removed. If the game corrects the behavior and takes out the offending mechanic, it can be restored. In other words, if a game is designed to keep kids glued to a social media feed, Roblox is coming for it.
Roblox Is Cracking Down on In-Game Doomscrolling
Recently, the pet-collecting sim Steal An Egg was taken offline for its mechanic of having players run on a virtual treadmill while effectively “doomscrolling.” The game is back up and available, but without the Black Mirror-style treadmills. The mechanic has come into sharper focus as Meta faces major legal consequences over the addictive nature of its feeds and the harm they do to younger users. Social media is now getting much more regulation for underage users across the globe. The game platform also ran afoul of Australia’s child safety regulator when it failed to keep children’s profiles safe from contact with adults. All of this comes at a time when US senators are beginning to look into whether or not Roblox puts profits over child safety. Rewarding kids for doing the exact thing regulators are working to prevent does seem like a quick way to get a senator to increase their scrutiny of your platform.
While Roblox isn’t a traditional social media platform, regulators in Europe and Australia are on record as having seen a lot of crossover. Some have even left open the possibility of declaring the gaming platform a social media site and having all the associated regulations apply to Roblox as well. As courts are finding tech giants liable for their addictive algorithms, it would seem Roblox is trying to clean up its act before someone else does it for them. As Roblox continues to fight against its reputation for being lax when it comes to kid safety, they’ve released their own safety tools as open-source kits to the public. The company has also been getting aggressive with reminding creators the standards they expect for content they feature and even purging bots. For its part, it still appears as though Roblox is playing whack-a-mole with the issues inherent to a creator-driven system.
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Courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
