Keep children out of Roblox if worried, CEO dave Baszucki tells parents

Parents who do not want their children in Roblox should not allow them to use it, said the chief executive of the giant gaming platform.

The site, which is the most popular in the UK among young players aged eight to 12, has taken care of the claims of some children who are exposed to clear or harmful content through his games, along with numerous accusations reported and grooming.

But its co -founder and CEO Dave Baszucki insisted that the company is vigilant in protecting its users and stressed that “tens of millions” people have “amazing experiences” on the site.

When asked what is his message to parents who do not want their children on the platform, Mr. Baszucki said: “My first message would be, if you are not satisfied, do not allow your children to be in Roblox.”

“It sounds a bit anti-intental, but I would always trust my parents to make their decisions,” he told BBC News in an exclusive interview.

US -based Roblox is one of the world’s largest game platforms, with more monthly users than the Nintendo Switch and Sony Playstation combined. In 2024 it on average more than 80 million players a day-respectively 40% of them under the age of 13. Its broad empire includes about 40 million games and experiences created by users.

In the United Kingdom the Online Security Act, which enters into April, has strict laws for all technology firms aimed at protecting children from damage online.

But Mr. Baszucki says he remains safe in Roblox’s security tools and insists the firm goes up and further to keep its users safe.

“We make in the company take the position that every bad, even a bad incident, is a lot,” he says.

“We observe harassment, we look for harassment, we filter all those types of things, and I would say after the scenes, the analysis continues all the way to it, if necessary, reaching law enforcement.”

Players who choose not to display what he calls “civilization” can face temporary times and longer stops, and Roblox claims to analyze all the communications that go through among members on the platform, using more and more advanced systems of him and the other technology to do this-and everything flaged has been sent for further investigation.

In November last year, under 13, they were banned from sending direct messages, and also playing in “Hanging Experiences”, which contains conversations between players.

However, the BBC was able to create two false accounts, one aged 15 and one aged 27, on unrelated equipment and exchange messages between the two.

As the filters captured our efforts to move the conversation openly on a different platform, we found simple ways to re-word requirements to chat elsewhere and make suggestions to play more adult games.

When we told the chief of Roblox these findings, he argued that our example highlighted the comparative security of Roblox: that people thought they had to receive content that could violate Roblox rules on other platforms.

“We do not condemn any kind of image division on our platform, and you will see us becoming more and more, I think, beyond the law on this kind of behavior,” says Mr. Baszucki.

He admits that there is a delicate balance between encouraging friendships among young people and blocking opportunities for them, but says he is convinced that Roblox can manage both.

We also placed him some roblox game titles that the BBC has discovered were recommended by the platform for an 11-year-old recently, including:

• ‘Boys and Late Girls Late RP’
• ‘Simulator of Special Forces”
• ‘Daugy game’
• ‘Hit the planes … because why not?’

When asked if he thought they were appropriate, he said he gives his confidence in the platform age assessment systems.

“One thing that is really important about the way we do things here, isn’t it just in the title of experience, it’s literally even in the content of experience,” he says.

He insists that when Roblox values ​​experience, they go through rigorous guidance and that the company has a “sustainable policy” for this.

Mr. Baszucki founded the platform with Eric Cassel in 2004 and released it to the public in 2006 – a year before Apple’s first iPhone appearing, heard the beginning of the smartphone era.

Mr. Baszucki describes his newest himself as “less a gamer, and more an engineer”, and the couple’s first company was an educational software provider called Knowledge Revolution. But they soon noticed that children were not just using the product to do homework.

“They wanted to play and build stuff. They were making houses or boats or landscapes, and they wanted to jump inside, and all this lesson was Roblox’s germination,” he says.

The name Roblox was a mixture of the words “robot” and blocks “-and it stuck. The platform rose quickly in popularity-and there were even early warning signs for its future issues.

Mr. Cassel noticed some players “starting to act” and not always behaving in a “civilized” way a few months after it began, recalls Mr. Baszucki.

He says the roots of building a “faith system and security” therefore began “very, very early” and that in those days there were four people acting as security moderators.

“It is a kind of kind that launched this security civilization foundation,” he adds.

But despite attracting good numbers, it was a year later, when the firm launched its digital coin Robux, that it really started earning money.

Players buy robux and use it to buy accessories and unlock the contents. Content creators now get 70% of the fee, and the store operates at dynamic prices, which means that popular articles cost more.

Mr. Baszucki says there has been an initial resistance between the leadership team about Roblox becoming more than a hobby for its players, with the introduction of a digital economy.

Robux stayed, and the firm is now worth $ 41 billion (31 billion £).

The priest of its action has fluctuated since it was made public in 2021, but Roblox’s general shares are worth about one -third more than were six months ago at the time of writing. Like many large technology firms, its value peaked during Covid, when blockages meant that millions were inside.

Mr. Baszucki compares his experience of building Roblox to the way Walt Disney may have felt for his creations.

He describes his work as “little as if he had the opportunity he had long ago when he was designing the Magic Kingdom”, and has focused on the constant evolution of Roblox in a meta -style experience, where people go for their daily lives in a virtual world, in avatar.

They have also been public in their ambitions to eventually attract 10% of the world players.

Asked to describe Roblox in three words, he replies: “The future of communication”.

We finish our time together by playing a couple of his favorite games: natural survival from disaster and clothing to impress.

We use his account and he is constantly recognized by other players – but we are still destroyed in pieces by a stroke outside the natural residence of disaster.

Additional reporting by Ammie Sechon