These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.
This is basically only requirement to make games available for players under 16 so its certnly done under regulatory pressure because no way on earth they can moderate every game from unpaid users.
There is ZERO chance I’m doing ID verification or paying a subscription. The entire reason we liked this platform was there was barely any friction.
I will be checking out S&box by the creator of Garry’s mod as an alternative: https://sbox.game/
Good thing he was already messing around with Godot as well cause this kills Roblox for him.
It’s such a stupidly thorn intersection of media, user behavior, and tech.
It’s not text, it’s not image, it’s not video - it’s a whole interactive play test.
If your mods don’t walk over the right trigger, they you don’t uncover the “secret” gacha arcade room. Even better - one mod runs the map and finds the room, and sends it for review, but the second mod doesn’t find the same room.
In contrast something like “School shooting simulator” had enough policy training and was obvious enough to be moderated.
People get creative with their tools, I’ve heard of entire copyrighted movies being smuggled into thumbnails.
Bonus points if you realize that this is how good things are for America centric moderation, and how it drops off for other nations and communities.
Having a subscription kills Roblox and its ecosystem.
For context, Roblox has 170 million peak concurrent players, All of Steam had 85 (I got this data from someone at hackernews's comment)
This might be the end of Roblox. I hope more roblox's alternative spring up preferably open-source. There is luanti which is a minecraft alternative but I suppose a lot of games can have overlap to luanti and it runs on lua too.
> Publishing games that are available to players with either Roblox Kids (users under 9) or Roblox Select (users 9 to 15) accounts that we announced in our Newsroom will require additional verification steps than publishing games that are available to users over 16.*
[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...