Roblox to roll out stricter age verification for all users by year’s end

In future, Roblox will take a closer look at the age of its often very young players and will rely on ID documents and facial recognition. The makers of the gaming platform want to have introduced these measures by the end of the year, as they have now announced. In addition, Roblox intends to work with regional age rating standards such as the German USK or the European PEGI.

This means that there is now a timeframe for some of the things that the operating company, Roblox Corporation, has been talking about publicly for some time. The face scan, which Roblox likes to call a "video selfie", is intended to help confirm a minimum age of 13 in the future. This is required for certain chat functions, such as voice chat with players in the same multiplayer room or switching off parental filters in text chat.

Whether Roblox's "video selfies" can really distinguish a 12-year-old from a 13-year-old remains questionable: users use the front camera of their smartphone to film their own face from several angles. This creates biometric data, which is then evaluated by the external service provider Persona. Alternatively, users can also present an official ID document. This is also the option left for those whose "video selfie" was previously incorrectly classified as under 13.

Only real-life Roblox contacts of legal age

Roblox also wants to restrict communication between minors and adults in the game. Someone over the age of 18 will only be able to communicate with people aged 13 and over in Roblox. And only if they know each other in real life and have certified their age on Roblox. To check who knows each other in real life, Roblox wants to rely on QR codes and the import of phone contacts from smartphones. Users who use the latter and have saved each other as a phone contact will be suggested as contacts in the game and will be able to communicate with each other despite their age difference. No further details on the use of QR codes can be found on a support page, which Roblox has also linked to in a corresponding press release. In the past, legal action was taken against Roblox for failing to protect minors from child molesters.

Another innovation is the local standards for age rating media content, which Roblox intends to use in the future. In Germany, for example, the standard age ratings of the Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body (USK) will replace Roblox's own age ratings, according to Roblox. The platform is now a partner of the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC). The IARC offers game developers worldwide a questionnaire that they fill out to offer their game to an IARC partner – such as Roblox – in future. Based on the information provided, the IARC then takes over the classification within numerous regional systems, such as the USK, the US Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) or the European Pan-European Game Information (PEGI). This should enable game developers to ensure with comparatively little effort that their game can be offered as intended in the respective countries.

Roblox is an online gaming platform on which millions of players have access to millions of games ("Roblox Experiences"), most of which come from external development teams. So far, these games still have Roblox's own age ratings. However, as soon as the IARC system is introduced, the respective regional labels will be used instead. Roblox does not say in its press release when exactly this will be the case and how it will work for the development teams. However, anyone offering their own game on Roblox could then have to fill out a digital questionnaire, which is available to affected developers and serves as a further basis for local age classifications in accordance with IARC practice. This happens automatically. According to IARC, the questionnaire is implemented with algorithms, which then assign the respective age ratings of local authorities. It remains to be seen how well the system is designed for a workload of currently 6.3 million "Roblox Experiences" (as of September 5, 2025). This is likely to be the largest number of games to be provided by an IARC partner to date, followed by the Google Play Store with around 3.5 million apps. However, when Google became an IARC partner in 2015, there were around half as many.

(nen)