Roblox devs now need a subscription to share their games freely

Hacker News is turning into every other platform over time it seems. More and more folks just see a headline and comment rather than understand that headlines are designed to mislead you for clicks.

These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.

People here in comments seem to not read past the title that editorized, but in a wrong way.

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.

My 6 year old likes to make basic obstacle course games and I help him with the coding.

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/

My kid is 13 and likes to make silly Roblox games. No way I'm going to let him take a face scan with whatever creepy unaccountable AI data hoarding outfit Roblox decided to team up with, just so share his creations with 6 friends. How is it protecting him that he's not allowed to share creative work with people?

Good thing he was already messing around with Godot as well cause this kills Roblox for him.

To publish to the main 16+ pool I need to do "an age check"? But it seemingly doesn't matter what the result of that check is? I'm confused.

I bet the real reason is to add some friction to reduce the moderation burden generated by AI content creation.

a bit misleading title.

> 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.*

Well, standard drug dealer strategy: hook someone, then milk dry.

will need*

You haven’t had content moderation questions until you’ve looked at games and user generated content.

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.

You might like Luanti. Is not low-poly but I think it has some support with some full games, such as the Moon base survival one.

Oh boy, the reason Roblox was this famous was that anyone could share their games publicly and people could play

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.

[dead]

Capitalism: there is always one more shareholder to satisfy

Wow they reached Stage 3 of enshittification[1] real quick. Now the slow and painful death begins.

[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...