Keep kids off Roblox if worried, CEO Dave Baszucki tells parents

The chief executive of a very large gaming platform has said that parents who do not want their children on rubles should not be used to be used.

The site, which is the most popular in the UK in young concerts between the ages of eight to 12, has also been influenced by some children’s claims of explicit or harmful material through its sports, as well as numerous allegations of bullying and grooming.

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

When they were asked what was their message to their parents who did not want their children on the platform, Mr Basseki said: “My first message will be, if you are not comfortable, don’t let your children stay on the rubles.”

“It seems a bit anti -intuitive, but I always trust parents to make their decisions,” he told BBC News.

Roblox based in the United States is one of the largest sports platforms in the world, with more monthly users than the Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation joint. In 2024, its average average of more than 80 million players-about 40 % of them is under 13 years of age. Its wide empire includes 40 million consumer -made sports and experiences.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act, which comes forcibly in April, has strict laws for all tech firms, which aims to protect children from online losses, especially children.

But Mr Bassey says he trusts in Roblox’s safety tools and insists that the firm goes up and beyond to protect its users.

He says, “We adopt the attitude in the company that there is a lot of bad, even a bad event.”

“We look for bullying, we look to be harassed, we filter all these things, and I will say behind the curtains, analysis is going on in every way to reach law enforcement agencies.”

The players who call it “civilization” choose not to disclose it, and Roblox claims to analyze all communications that pass between members on the platform, and for this, using more modern AI systems and other tech-and any flag is sent for further investigation.

In November last year, sending direct messages to the U -13s, and playing in “hangout experiments”, was also banned, which includes chat among players.

However, the BBC managed to create two fake accounts, one age 15 years and one aged 27 years, on the unprecedented devices and exchange messages between the two.

Although the filters attracted our efforts to move the conversation to a different platform, we got easy ways to give us requests to repeat requests to chat and to play more mature games.

When we showed these results to Roblox Boss, he argued that our example highlighted the comparative safety of Roblox: People felt that they would have to take content that could violate the rules of Roblox to other platforms.

Mr Basseky says, “We do not condole with any kind of image sharing on our platform, and you will see us more and more, in my view, where the law is located on such behavior.”

He acknowledged that there is a delicate balance between the encouragement of friendship among the youth, and that they have been harmed to prevent opportunities, but they say they believe that Roblox can manage both.

We also set up some Roblox game title that the BBC has discovered, through this platform recently recommended to an 11 -year -old child, including:

• ‘Late night boys and girls club rp’
• ‘Special Forces Simulator’
• ‘Squad Game’
• “Shoot the planes … why not?”

When we asked if he considered it appropriate, he said he puts his confidence in the platform’s age rating system.

“One thing that is really important for us to work here, is it not just on the title of experience, it is also literally on the contents of the experience,” he says.

He insisted that when Roblox experiences, he goes through tough guidelines and is about the company’s “permanent policy”.

Mr Basky founded the platform with Eric Casil in 2004 and issued it to the public in 2006 – a year before the first Apple iPhone appeared, identifying the start of the smartphone era.

Mr Basky describes his little soul as “less than a game, and more part of the engineer”, and the pair’s first company was an educational software provider called the Knowledge Revolution. But they soon saw that the kids were not using the product just to do their homework.

“They wanted to play the goods. They were making houses or ships or scenes, and they wanted to jump, and all this was the inspiration for Roblox.”

Roblox’s name was a mesh -up of the words “robot” and blocks.

Recalling Mr Baski, Mr Casil saw some players “start working” and did not always behave in a “decent” manner a few months after the beginning.

He says the roots of the “trust and safety system” were very early, very early “and that in those first days, four people were working as a protective moderator.

He added, “The Civilization Foundation started this way.”

But despite attracting a decent number, it was a year later, when the firm launched its digital currency Robox, that he really started making money.

Players buy robots and use it to buy accessories and unlock the material. Content creators now get 70 % of the fees, and the store operates at dynamic prices, which means the cost of popular items is high.

Mr Basseky says that with the introduction of the digital economy, Roblox had some initial resistance to the leadership team about becoming more than a hobby for his players.

Robix has stopped, and now the firm is worth B 41BN ($ 31 billion).

Its shares have fluctuated since it was common in 2021, but the written time, overall shares of Roblox are one -third higher than six months ago. Like many big -tech firms, its price increased during Coid, when lockdown meant that millions of people were indoors.

Mr Basky has compared her experience of building rubles how Walt Disney may have felt about her creations.

He describes his job as “a little like a chance when he was designing the kingdom of magic”, and he focuses on the ongoing evolution of Roblox in a metawar style experience where people advance their daily lives in the virtual world, in the form of incarnation.

He has also been public in his ambitions to attract 10 % of the world’s concerts.

Roblox was asked to explain in three words, he responds: “The future of communication.”

We finish our time by playing a couple of his favorite sports: clothing to survive and impress natural disasters.

We use his account and is permanently recognized by other players – but we still break the pieces through a snowstorm out of natural disasters.

Extra reporting of Amy Seeon