A novel report has revealed that child safety concerns are keeping Disney from working with Roblox.
With 151 million daily dynamic users, Roblox is one of the largest games in the world – if not the largest. Increasingly, access to this audience is seen as a lucrative and accessible method of marketing everything from established brands to Hollywood blockbusters.
Still, concerns about Roblox’s safety for its expansive audience of gamers – many of whom are under 18 – continue to haunt Disney, a novel Diversity the report emphasized.
While some suspected that Disney was avoiding Roblox due to its $1.5 billion investment in rival gaming platform Fortnite, sources tell Variety that Disney was instead avoiding Roblox, especially because the company didn’t believe the larger platform was currently sheltered.
Disney content is, of course, deeply embedded in Fortnite, which regularly hosts Star Wars and Marvel crossovers, recently featured a well-received mini-season of The Simpsons, and now features a miniature army of licensed skins for everyone from Maleficent to The Mandalorian. A specific Disney Fortnite mode is also in the works.
At least for now, Roblox fans shouldn’t expect anything like that, the report continues. This is despite Roblox’s much larger audience (Fortnite averages 30 to 40 million daily users) and the platform that hosts other major brands like Sonic the Hedgehog and Squid Game.
After significant, constant criticism of player safety protocols and among many lawsuits, Roblox has added a number of stricter requirements aimed at limiting who adolescent audiences can interact with. Facial age verification was recently added to the platform to restrict messaging features in select countries, with a US rollout coming soon. But this has also been criticized as something of a palliative measure.
“The problem is fundamentally the ability of younger players to cheat these systems – pretend to be older, exploit older siblings, use facial identity to get into these systems,” Ron Kerb, CEO of child safety platform Kidas, told Variety. “And we know it’s happening on TikTok, we know it’s happening on gaming platforms, on Roblox. Platforms are trying to block kids, and kids will find a way to open it.”
In the latest Roblox Security snapshotthe company said it “continues to innovate in security” and revealed that it has made an open-source version of the software available Roblox Personal Data Classifierwhich has “significantly improved” its ability to detect and block attempts to violate its rules on sharing personally identifiable information.
Photo credit: Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s news editor. You can contact Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
