Roblox: Inside the hugely addictive children's gaming platform facing lawsuits and international bans

While some content is developed by Roblox, a lot of it is user-generated.

According to the company's second-quarter data for 2025, Roblox has 111.8 million daily active users and engagement hours of 27.4 billion.

Inside the immersive game-creation platform, users can both design their own games and explore millions of games crafted by others. With countless user-generated experiences and virtual worlds, the platform spans genres ranging from racing and role-playing to simulations, obstacle courses, and more.

Players can also buy, sell, and create virtual items, adding a creative economy to the experience.

Beyond gaming, Roblox serves as a social hub, offering hangouts and interactive spaces where users can text, voice chat, and collaborate in real time.

For safety, users under 13 are automatically restricted from accessing unrated games or participating in unmoderated social hangouts. Parental controls are also enabled by default for all accounts under 13, ensuring a secure and age-appropriate environment.

As it turns out, despite the fact that 56% of Roblox’s customer base is age 16 or younger and 20% of them are under the age of 9, the company wasn’t even founded with kids in mind.

“When we started Roblox, the vision — the long-term vision — was: to what extent could we simulate 3D reality? It takes incredible technical innovation to get there. It’s very different than downloading a game. It’s very different than streaming video. It’s the fabric of the metaverse,” David Baszucki, Roblox CEO, told Sherwood News.

Roblox shares have risen about 200% in the past year and the company is currently valued at about $80 billion by public investors.

To properly understand Roblox, one needs to envision a frenetic middle school playground where everybody is running around having fun — but put it on the internet, where people often aren’t held accountable for what they say and sometimes aren’t even who they say they are.

And that's where the big problem lies. 

Back in August, rumours started circulating on social media that Roblox would permanently shut down on September 1st, citing safety concerns especially when the gaming platform was increasingly facing legal heat and international bans.

The rumors emerged as lawsuits allege that Roblox is not a safe environment for minors. The platform also addressed current lawsuit against them by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who alleged Roblox has failed to implement effective safety measures to protect child users from adult predators. 

Louisiana alleged the wildly popular site has perpetuated an environment where sexual predators "thrive, unite, hunt and victimize kids.”

“Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana,” Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a news release. “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety."

Already, the child-friendly app has been banned in multiple Middle East countries including Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, Oman and Jordan.

Best known as online gaming software for kids, Roblox is not one game, but rather a social and economic platform that hosts experiences made by independent developers. Last year, 83 million daily average users logged in from computers, consoles, and mobile devices to explore more than 14 million digital games and environments.

Back in March, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Sydney revealed alarming insights into the impact of in-game spending on children who play Roblox, a popular online gaming platform. 

The study found that children struggle with complex and deceptive in-game spending features, often leading to unintentional overspending, highlighting the urgent need for action from policymakers, regulators, and platform developers.

Another disturbing issue with Roblox is contact with strangers and pedophilia - one of the most serious risks is a child's contact with strangers who may try to gain trust, manipulate, and even coerce into violations or inappropriate actions. 

Online child predators sometimes use chats, private messages, or create friendly personas.

In the suit, filed by Attorney General Liz Murrill, Roblox was accused of intentionally or recklessly designing a platform with no age verification process, allowing Roblox's tens of millions of users to easily create accounts with fake birthdays.

The 42-page suit pointed to a raft of sexually explicit “experiences” that had been on the platform, including “Escape to Epstein Island,” “Diddy Party” and “Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe,” and it alleged that a man arrested on suspicion of possessing child sexual abuse material in Louisiana in July was using the platform at the time he was taken into custody.

"Roblox may look like a typical video game at first glance, said Titania Jordan, an executive at content monitoring app Bark and author of “Parental Control.”

“But unlike a single game, Roblox is actually a huge online platform hosting millions of user-created environments where kids can build, explore, and interact live with others,” said Jordan. 

“Its blocky, playful style makes it seem safe and welcoming, but that surface can be misleading when it comes to real safety. Because of its size and the way it encourages chatting and socializing, Roblox can sometimes act like a virtual playground with minimal adult supervision.”

Back in April, an investigation by the digital-behaviour experts Revealing Reality discovered “something deeply disturbing … a troubling disconnect between Roblox’s child-friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform”.

The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification - this was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences.

However, Roblox CEO Baszucki has repeatedly said that he remained confident in Roblox's safety tools and insists the firm goes above and beyond to keep its users safe.

"We do in the company take the attitude that any bad, even one bad incident, is one too many," he said.

"We watch for bullying, we watch for harassment, we filter all of those kinds of things, and I would say behind the scenes, the analysis goes on all the way to, if necessary, reaching out to law enforcement."