Oh boy, the reason Roblox was this famous was that anyone could share their games publicly and people could play
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.
People here in comments seem to not read past the title that editorized, but in a wrong way.
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.
Hacker News is turning into every other platform over time it seems. More and more folks just see a headline and comment rather than understand that headlines are designed to mislead you for clicks.
These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.
I'm not sure I understand, as every word in the title is true.
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.
My kid is 13 and likes to make silly Roblox games. No way I'm going to let him take a face scan with whatever creepy unaccountable AI data hoarding outfit Roblox decided to team up with, just so share his creations with 6 friends. How is it protecting him that he's not allowed to share creative work with people?
Good thing he was already messing around with Godot as well cause this kills Roblox for him.
The thing that made Roblox actually work for kids wasn't the editor, it was that a kid could send a link and their friend would be playing 10 seconds later. S&box, Hytale, Luanti are all fun but they're all installs, which kills the sharing loop the moment you have one friend on an unsupported platform or a school laptop.
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.
You haven’t had content moderation questions until you’ve looked at games and user generated content.
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.
> 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.*
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] threadHaving 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.
[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...
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.
These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.
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.
Good thing he was already messing around with Godot as well cause this kills Roblox for him.
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.
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.
> 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.*