These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.
They only make sense if you think it's OK for kids to send face scans to scary faceless corporations. And even if you do that, you can't share your game with friends unless they also take a face scan! (cause that's what "Trusted Friend" means - it doesn't mean trusted by you, it means trusted by them)
The step is a significant one, and Roblox has taken one other measure recently, restricting chat a lot for minors (https://x.com/Roblox_RTC/status/2043723470899437623) . I think this is a move to satisfy people concerned with child safety, not a cash grab. I think RB hq probably know they're making tradeoffs of keeping parents happy, while devs will be annoyed/fewer. But everyone can still make games and play them with trusted friends. Likely damages the network effect (Roblox's multiplayer aspect being one of its best parts), but oh well.
I for one will not let my child submit a face scan to Roblox in order to become a 'trusted friend', and so now they wont be able to play the games made by their friends.
age check via face scan or id for both parties is required, along with ~in-person pre-existing connections or parental permission.
I’d be curious if this change came out of their efforts, or whether this is was to deal with compliance issues.
16+ audiences have no requirement.
[1]:https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190869/roblox-games-use...
It is also that your game goes away when you stop paying. Which means, pay forever or you cant show it off anymore.
I think requirement 3 can make sense if we start painting everybody as potential criminal.
but requirement 2 never make sense to me. -- why need age check to publish to adult user?
As a side note, if someone is working on something similar, then now is the time to start talking about it! ;)
I dont know Lua and never touched it, Claude was able to vibe code in pieces a whole 3D Roblox experience, all while I was working in domains I did understand in another terminal window
Taking the Apple approach makes sense as too many ideas guys are flooding the platform with vending machine slop
Vibe coders are far more likely to be willing to pay to submit their games, because just like their $200/mo AI subscription, they see it as a necessary expense on their path to get rich quick. People who just want to make things for fun as a hobby are less likely to pay.
With influencers, the old barrier of entry was getting a good camera and learning about lighting. Now that cameras are essentially shipped with a device everyone has on them at all times anyways, we see how low the low-hanging fruit actually hangs, as evidenced by most instagram reels which are insufferable.
Here's my suggestion for an amendement:
"Roblox devs will need plus membership to publish to young users"
Yes it makes sense when you apply it to adults, but Roblox was made for kids to share and play with other kids. When you look at it from that angle it makes no sense.
My personal policy is I don't click links I consider clickbait. I mean things that are intentionally misleading and vogue. But I sometimes check HN comments - I never comment about the post itself (since I didn't read it), but I sometimes respond to other comments (like I do now).
Your policy will lead to missing articles that you might have found worthwhile someone did a poor job of submitting them.
One of the "requirements" you refer to is possessing an active subscription. The age-cutoff is 16, but Roblox has historically been based around kids making games for other kids, which isn't feasible if a subscription becomes required.
Upvoting gangs upvote the PR comment that downplays the article (the "actually, let me examine is why this is fine in very polished language" type comment)
So it's not like there a total imbalance of purely misleading headlines with no response to them
This is basically only requirement to make games available for players under 16 so its certnly done under regulatory pressure because no way on earth they can moderate every game from unpaid users.
Now they need a paid subscription with an id check to become a 'trusted friend'.
My point is, many people around me or online really really love roblox and they even start to code because of it. I mean it makes sense, Coding something translates to something directly cool. I wanted to make Minecraft plugins too but I always found java to be a bit distressing so I used to search how to make minecraft mods in python or lua when I was 15 or something, I personally never really got into roblox though (I maybe the exception rather than norm) but I suppose lua/luau makes that process a bit easier and so its gonna be a big hurdle to most youngsters who wish to code.
Also I am not fine with Age verification as well but oh well, I could've maybe understood it but what I don't understand is how a billion dollar company needs a few dollars for moderation. I feel like its just a net negative and is gonna create backlash and rightfully so in some sense.
Anecdotally one of my friends back in 10th grade (so 14-15 year olds) actually learnt lua just to make a roblox game or games in general and he was an artist, (one of the most artistic people I know) like firstly his drawings were some of the most amazing in our friend-group and he had made some quite significant amount of money by doing blender for roblox devs and he just said that he likes blender so he gets them to buy blender plugins rather than money itself. He really wanted to get into gamedev.
And I think once again my main point is that, there would be less people interested in game-dev overall. I mean we all start somewhere and I find the idea of taking subscription money a little dis-tasteful for Roblox to do.
To publish globally for <16 users, the id check and subscription requirements then apply.
Publish to 16+ and Trusted Friends - To publish a game that reaches Trusted Friends and users over 16 you must:
a. Complete an age check b. Have an account in good standing c. Have an account on Roblox that’s been on the platform for at least 2 days
There is ZERO chance I’m doing ID verification or paying a subscription. The entire reason we liked this platform was there was barely any friction.
I will be checking out S&box by the creator of Garry’s mod as an alternative: https://sbox.game/
The closest thing to the Roblox distribution model is browser games. I work on browser-based game stuff and the hard part is never authoring, it's the last mile: corporate networks, WebSocket proxies, "my friend has a Chromebook," etc. Godot has a web export now that's genuinely usable for small multiplayer stuff, and it's free. Not as polished as Roblox Studio but the zero-install property is the whole ballgame for kids sharing with friends.
Luanti + Mineclonia is absolutely excellent open source software.
I get a great sense of peace knowing that my incentives are aligned with the people who made it.
> Publish for personal use - Anyone on Roblox can continue to publish games for personal use.
I know it is not great... but .. is that sufficient for your kid?
I don’t let him chat with other players (text OR voice) even though I let him play multiplayer games.
We constantly talk about the dangers of online strangers and he is fully aware of “perverts” on Roblox (though he doesn’t know what tha word really means, he understands it as bad guys that want to hurt kids).
I don’t look kindly on parents that won’t do the bare minimum to protect their kids online but want to use the force of the gun on me.
Good thing he was already messing around with Godot as well cause this kills Roblox for him.
I agree this is dumb but this isn't a Roblox thing so much as "what the fuck are we collectively doing with privacy?" thing.
Accounts without age verification can only play all-ages games, chat is fully disabled, and they cannot publish any content onto the platform.
It’s such a stupidly thorn intersection of media, user behavior, and tech.
It’s not text, it’s not image, it’s not video - it’s a whole interactive play test.
If your mods don’t walk over the right trigger, they you don’t uncover the “secret” gacha arcade room. Even better - one mod runs the map and finds the room, and sends it for review, but the second mod doesn’t find the same room.
In contrast something like “School shooting simulator” had enough policy training and was obvious enough to be moderated.
People get creative with their tools, I’ve heard of entire copyrighted movies being smuggled into thumbnails.
Bonus points if you realize that this is how good things are for America centric moderation, and how it drops off for other nations and communities.
Having a subscription kills Roblox and its ecosystem.
For context, Roblox has 170 million peak concurrent players, All of Steam had 85 (I got this data from someone at hackernews's comment)
This might be the end of Roblox. I hope more roblox's alternative spring up preferably open-source. There is luanti which is a minecraft alternative but I suppose a lot of games can have overlap to luanti and it runs on lua too.
> Publishing games that are available to players with either Roblox Kids (users under 9) or Roblox Select (users 9 to 15) accounts that we announced in our Newsroom will require additional verification steps than publishing games that are available to users over 16.*
This is move to moderated censored platform under regulatory "protect the children" pressurre and hysteria.
This is not affecting publishing games for 16+ audience.
Capitalism: Shareholders need to be satisfied every year.
[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...
