Roblox: all the news about the popular social and gaming platform

Roblox has created a virtual career center inside Roblox where people can learn more about the metaverse platform, prepare for interviews at the company, and attend events hosted by Roblox itself, according to a blog post. In the future, some initial interviews will even happen directly in the experience, Roblox says.

You can get an idea of what it looks like in this video, which I’ve also embedded at the top of the post. “You’ll see what it’s like to work here and how you can join us in shaping the future of human connection and communication,” says a voiceover in the clip. In the experience, you can go to places like a lobby (with plaques featuring the company’s values), a library, an auditorium, a boba cafe, and more.

Sensitive information identifying thousands of Roblox creators has been exposed following a data breach impacting attendees at a conference for Roblox developers, which allegedly remained undisclosed by the company for at least two years. As reported by PC Gamer, the leak contains personal information from people who attended the Roblox Developer Conference between 2017-2020, including names, usernames, date of birth, physical addresses, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and even T-shirt sizes. 

“Roblox is aware of a third-party security issue where there were indications of unauthorized access to limited personal information of a subset of our creator community,” said a Roblox spokesperson to PC Gamer. “We engaged independent experts to support the investigation led by our information security team. Those who are impacted will receive an email communicating the next steps we are taking to support them. We will continue to be vigilant in monitoring and vetting the cyber security posture of Roblox and our third-party vendors.”

Roblox, the virtual world and game platform, has 66 million daily users who spent 14 billion collective hours on it in just Q1 of 2023. If you have kids, you’ve probably heard of Roblox. If you haven’t heard of it, Roblox CEO David Baszucki wants to change that. 

One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17-plus experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences.

Roblox has been signaling that it wants to be more than a gaming platform for kids. Today, the company is making another push in that direction by letting its creators make experiences specifically for people who are 17 and older.

The new age category will allow for more graphic content and adult themes than Roblox has permitted to date, including depictions of heavy bloodshed and alcohol use, chief product officer Manuel Bronstein tells me. To keep underage users from accessing 17 and older experiences, Roblox will require that people scan their driver’s licenses and submit a selfie before they can access the new category.

Roblox (the company) is working on generative AI tools to help developers who build experiences on Roblox more easily create games and assets. The first two tests of the tools will roll out in the coming weeks: a tool to make “generative AI materials from a text prompt” and a tool for generative AI to complete code, according to a blog post from Daniel Sturman, Roblox’s chief technology officer.

You can get an idea of how they’ll work in this short video, which I’ve also embedded at the top of this post. In one example, somebody types in different descriptions of materials for a car, and those patterns are applied right away. In others, you can see how autocompleting code might work for things like turning on the car’s lights and making it rain in the game’s world.

Roblox is officially completing its rollout of the Creator Hub, a new hub that gives developers more tools and centralizes things like documentation and a developer forum into one place. Making the information easier to find seems like it could be quite helpful for developers, and that has an important aftereffect for Roblox, too: Roblox makes its money by taking a cut of what its developers earn, so it’s incentivized to make things better for the creators on its platform.

Creator Hub aggregates five Roblox resources, Nick Tornow, Roblox’s VP of engineering, tells The Verge:

Roblox and Discord are among the platforms sued for allegedly harming children and teens in a new lawsuit. The suit, which also targets Meta’s Facebook platform and Snap’s Snapchat, alleges that the companies’ services “contain unique product features which are intended to and do encourage addiction, and unlawful content and use of said products, to the detriment of their minor users.”

Filed in California state court, the suit is one of many brought against large social media companies. But comparatively few of these have covered Discord and Roblox, both of which are popular with young users. (Over half of US children were on Roblox as of 2020.) It comes shortly after California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring sites to change how they treat users under 18 and follows a UK coroner directly blaming social media for a teenager’s suicide, albeit not in a way that carries clear legal consequences.

Walmart has launched a pair of “immersive experiences” in online gaming platform Roblox. The retailer is presenting the launch as an ambitious move into the metaverse, but the “experiences” — two online worlds dubbed Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play — are really just ways to advertise toys to children. Roblox may seem trivial, but it has more than 50 million daily active users, two-thirds of which are under the age of 16. That means it’s probably Walmart experimenting with virtual worlds to try and hook this market.

Walmart Land and Universe of Play are virtual lobbies. Inside are a variety of minigames and experiences, including a Ferris wheel, “interactive piano walkway,” and DJ booth, most of which serve to funnel players towards certain brands. So, for example, a virtual dressing room lets you spend coins collected in Walmart Land to deck out your avatar with Skullcandy headphones or a Fitbit fitness tracker. In Universe of Play you can race Razor scooters round a track or hang out with PAW Patrol characters. It’s all incredibly basic in terms of graphics and gameplay mechanics, but that’s par for the course for Roblox.