Roblox has been forced to react amidst grooming incidents on its platform, tightening regulation, and filed lawsuits.
The company’s response to these challenges has been age verification. It is certainly annoying and causes some potential customers to turn away at the door. However, I would trust in people’s desire for convenience here: as time goes by, the initial frustration and grumbling will be left behind, and more and more people will be ready to authenticate. Facebook is also a good example: people are willing to give their souls to Facebook because all their friends are there. Don’t a large portion of us accept all website terms without a murmur when doing internet searches? So, I believe that in time, people will get used to this kind of identification. And what if Roblox acts as a trendsetter for others here? Or if regulation is tightened by concerned parents and politicians so that authentication becomes the industry norm?
The view that any creative and passionate beginner can publish Roblox content for free and potentially even cash in on it no longer represents the company’s focus. The goal is specifically to attract professionals and experienced game studios as content creators at the expense of amateurs (mandatory identification, increasing creator earnings, more challenging creator tools than before…).
Fundamentally, Roblox is interesting. In its renewed strategy, the company now wants to invest in 18-25-year-olds—after all, the company’s first generation of children has now grown into adulthood. Young adults also have more cash than children living within the frames of a pocket money budget. The long-term plans are considerably more ambitious than just acting as a gaming platform. Additionally, Roblox likely possesses a massive amount of data on its young customer base, which is valuable stuff. A large cash pile, and presumably an almost debt-free company.
However, competition between gaming platforms and games is fierce, which likely explains Roblox’s pivot toward more professional content. It is, however, a great pity that the company is simultaneously turning its back on its own roots and its amateur content creators. As I understand it, creator revenue streams were directed toward a very small group even before the current reforms. The romantic inside me, however, believes that something is being lost here regarding creativity, originality, and youthful passion. We already have enough impersonal, poor top-down produced professional games.
Despite my musings, the company is on my occasional watch list. If successful, Roblox could now be picked up affordably from the dip.
I wondered what on earth… but I had completely the wrong link there. 
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