While gamers overwhelmingly want platforms to moderate harmful content, doing it at scale is no small feat. According to a Unity Technologies report, 77% of multiplayer gamers believe that protecting players from abusive behavior should be a priority for game developers. Our survey found that 85.25% of respondents believe gaming platforms should actively moderate offensive content (such as hate symbols, slurs, or sexually explicit mods/skins). No matter how great the gameplay is, if the community is known for harassment, many potential players will simply stay away. That is a huge chunk of the player population deliberately steering clear of specific games because of how players behave in those spaces. These behavioral changes directly impact the social experience and community engagement, two crucial pillars of successful online gaming platforms.

Social

Statements like this are important – they set the tone from the top that toxic behavior is not welcome on major platforms. Leading figures in gaming have started to openly acknowledge this responsibility. Players aren’t asking for censorship, they’re asking for safety. For platform owners, this is yet another signal that cleaning up online spaces isn’t just a moral duty – it’s necessary to secure the trust of families and the market’s longevity. The gaming industry has long focused on cultivating the next generation of fans, but toxicity is blocking the on-ramp. If most adults wouldn’t let their kids into your online ecosystem, you’re seeding a future audience problem.
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Roblox Corporation responded to the lawsuit on August 15, stating that they continuously work “to enhance our moderation approaches to promote a safe and enjoyable environment for all users”. The suit alleged that by actively shutting down independent efforts to expose potential dangers on its platform, Roblox was failing in its duty to protect underage users from harm. On August 14, 2025, Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill filed a child protection lawsuit against Roblox Corporation. The lawsuit alleges that Roblox profited off minors when they bought Robux to participate in third-party gambling rings, violating the RICO act. Following the platform ban in Buenos Aires, the secretaries of public education in the provinces of Córdoba, Mendoza and Misiones issued regional bans on Roblox on all public school devices after multiple reports of grooming and child harassment. The Ministry of Education made this decision after a case of child exploitation in which the platform was being actively used by pedophiles based in the city of Cipolletti, who requested intimate photos of minors in exchange for Robux.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, some Roblox users have become “vigilante gamers” in response to Roblox’s perceived poor moderation and failure to protect children. In a Twitter thread reported on by Polygon, a woman stated that when she was investigating the Roblox games that her five-year-old child was playing, she joined a game named Public Bathroom Simulator. While not explicitly sexual, some games have been reported to feature suggestive environments that facilitate sexual or fetishistic roleplay such as vore or feet fetishes. Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed and managed by Roblox Corporation, built around user-generated content and games, officially referred to as “experiences”.
If the user’s age could not be determined with high confidence after a facial scan, the platform would ask for the ID of the user or their parent. By default, users under 9 were only allowed to access “minimal” and “mild” experiences, whereas “moderate” experiences would require parental consent. They had met on Roblox and had been friends for around six years, communicating through various social media platforms and meeting in person four or five times. The perpetrators in both cases were in close contact with each other and communicated through online communication. Online child exploitation groups which operate on the platform like 764 and CVLT are also known to hold neo-Nazi and other extremist ideologies.

• At what age should I allow my child to play games online?
• On June 25, 2025, Aftermath reported that 6 people had been arrested in the United States in connection to grooming on Roblox since the start of the year.
• Throughout the 2020s, the cyber police divisions of several Mexican states have reported numerous cases of sexual harassment of minors through Roblox, including the federal government of Chihuahua, which from 2021 to 2025 reported an increase in cases of grooming using the platform.
• Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed and managed by Roblox Corporation, built around user-generated content and games, officially referred to as “experiences”.
• On March 4, 2026, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers filed a lawsuit against Roblox, accusing the platform of becoming a “playground” for child predators and misleading parents and guardians about the safety precautions taken on the platform.
• While not explicitly sexual, some games have been reported to feature suggestive environments that facilitate sexual or fetishistic roleplay such as vore or feet fetishes.

From content filters to limiting chat options, parental controls give you more oversight on who your child can communicate with and what they can play. Learn more about our Positive Play Charter and how to report players. FC Playtime was designed to help FC players understand and control how they play. NetSmartz is NCMEC’s online safety education program. But there’s still more to do—join us in protecting children and supporting our mission. On September 15, 2025, Oklahoma attorney general Gentner Drummond announced that he was seeking outside law firms to investigate Roblox over alleged child exploitation and safety failures.

The Story Behind GameSafe

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• One controversial invitee was “TheOfficiaITeddy” who, according to IGN, was involved in making games that “featured romantic, dating, and even sex-themed content” with his most popular game having hundreds of millions of plays.
• Following the platform ban in Buenos Aires, the secretaries of public education in the provinces of Córdoba, Mendoza and Misiones issued regional bans on Roblox on all public school devices after multiple reports of grooming and child harassment.
• In January 2026, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) launched investigations to probe whether the platform was safe in the European Union after multiple reports and lawsuits claiming that the platform was a danger to minors.
• However, these restrictions did not apply to advergames, leading to further criticism by Truth in Advertising and children’s digital rights organization 5Rights.
• In March 2025, Roblox CEO David Baszucki said in response to concerns over child safety, “if you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids be on Roblox”.
• Our survey reveals clear coping mechanisms players adopt.

From February to May 2025, law firm Anapol Weiss filed four different lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children for alleged exploitation by adults. The lawsuit alleges that Roblox connected their daughter with online predators, who sexually exploited her by coercing her to send sexually explicit photos to them on Discord and Snapchat; those corporations were also named in the lawsuit. Other federal governments, such as Coahuila and Nuevo León, sent communications to parents stating that Roblox was being used to extort minors. In December 2025, access to Roblox was blocked in Russia due to it allegedly containing extremist material and “international LGBT propaganda”, with Roskomnadzor saying that the platform was “rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children”. In October 2025, the Attorney General’s Office in Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, launched a series of investigations following several reports from parents whose children had been harassed through Roblox. On February 3, the Egyptian government decided to completely ban the platform following a decision by the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR), which had determined that the platform’s content posed significant risks to minors over “violent content”.
Watching or playing the game together lets you see firsthand if anything feels inappropriate or concerning and opens the door to meaningful discussions about online safety. While video games can be a great source of entertainment, creativity, and even learning, they also come with certain risks that parents should be aware of. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language. The first step in ensuring you, and your family, have a positive and safe experience when playing is understanding the tools available on your game platforms.

Early Childhood

Roblox’s business model has been heavily criticized, with the platform being accused of featuring exploitative practices that target children; Professor Jane Juffer at Cornell University accused Roblox of encouraging consumerism in children. American television journalist Chris Hansen, known for the television show To Catch a Predator, said in August 2025 that he was producing a documentary film about the state of child safety on the Roblox platform, and that he had interviewed law enforcement, abuse victims, and Schlep for the project. Court documents show that the lawsuit was settled after Simon agreed to pay the Roblox Corporation $150,000 and a permanent ban from the game, notably not establishing a legal precedent for IP bans from the platform.
The company’s actions were met with major backlash from many online communities who viewed Schlep’s actions as necessary for community policing. This has also prompted multiple Roblox-affiliated content creators of the Roblox Video Stars Program to leave the platform as protest. Roblox Corporation’s letter stated that the activities of Schlep and other vigilante streamers were a violation of the platform’s terms of service and created an unsafe environment for users. In August 2025, Roblox Corporation issued a cease-and-desist letter to Schlep, a YouTuber prominent for conducting sting operations against alleged online predators via the platform, which has resulted in multiple arrests.

Google Play

At what age should I allow my child to play games online? There are different ways to enhance and manage your and your family’s experience when playing games online. On March 4, 2026, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers filed a lawsuit against Roblox, accusing the platform of becoming a “playground” for child predators and misleading parents and guardians about the safety precautions taken on the platform. In April 2025, Florida attorney general James Uthmeier sent a subpoena to Roblox about uses of the platform by users age 16 and under as well as the platform’s protections for children against “mature content”.

Positive playing experiences and player tools go hand-in-hand.

Following the public backlash, senior Australian government officials called meetings with Roblox, where they indicated that if the company is unable to neutralize cases of child sexual abuse on its platform, it could face fines of A$49.5 million. In September, Roblox announced it will collaborate with International Age Rating Coalition to assign age ratings to individual games, complementing Roblox’s own ratings. Players linked with a trusted connection would have chat filters removed between each other, specifically in hopes that users would be less likely to leave Roblox for platforms they did not moderate, but could only be accessed after using an AI-based age verification system using facial recognition. They also reimplemented “experience guidelines” as “content labels” that parents could use with parental controls settings to regulate the content their child was allowed to see. On November 18, 2024, Roblox announced that they would be implementing new safety features for children under 13 set to take effect in the first quarter of 2025. Developers would also need to designate their games as meant for users under 13, otherwise their games would no longer be accessible to those users.
A common criticism in regard to child safety on Roblox is the proliferation of games that depict sex clubs (usually termed “condo games” or “scented cons”) that facilitate virtual sexual roleplay between users and how easily accessible they are to underage players. In September 2025, Algerian authorities banned the game, citing that the company did not have sufficient tools and capacity to protect children, where the vast majority of Algerian users were under the age of 10 and were being exposed to sexual harassment and inappropriate content on the platform. The ESRB’s primary mission is to help parents make informed decisions about the video games and apps their children play. Video game rating systems are designed to help players and parents make informed decisions about the games they choose for themselves or their children. While some communities place age limits to prevent users from joining, applications obtained by Rolling Stone for players to “work” in adjacent sexual games on the platform showed that the large majority of users in these communities were under 15. The appropriate age for online gaming varies by child and game content, but generally, most experts suggest waiting until around age 7-8 for limited, supervised online play.

PITTSBURGH PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Hindenburg Research cited a similar game, Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe, as one of the reasons Roblox is an “X-rated pedophile hellscape”. He stated in July 2025 that Roblox could serve as cubet an effective online dating platform and that it could help lonely people meet in real life. Roblox has rejected claims made by these organizations, alleging that they were highlighting rare instances and that their promotion only served to further an agenda of causing others to sell stock. The developer would later be sentenced to 15 years in prison for paying an Uber driver to drive a 15-year-old child from Indiana to his home state of New Jersey for sex. Although his account was terminated, he transferred the game to a friend’s account and continued to make money from the game.
The same study also took notice of the genre of “hood games”, in which players roleplay as gangsters in low-class neighborhoods, for promoting prejudice and stereotypes against African Americans and those of lower socioeconomic status. However, these restrictions did not apply to advergames, leading to further criticism by Truth in Advertising and children’s digital rights organization 5Rights. The woman reported that her character slipped on a puddle and was stuck on the ground, at which point several other players roleplayed sexually assaulting her. One controversial invitee was “TheOfficiaITeddy” who, according to IGN, was involved in making games that “featured romantic, dating, and even sex-themed content” with his most popular game having hundreds of millions of plays. Bloomberg Businessweek reported the existence of forums on the dark web sharing tips on how to encourage children to contact predators offsite without detection by chat filters through the use of intentional typos and emojis.
People may act differently IRL than they do online. Avoid sharing personal or private information online, including when creating your EA ID. May contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling and/or infrequent use of strong language. May contain more cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language and/or minimal suggestive themes.