According to a recent Roblox Corporation patent filing, Roblox may start curating age-appropriate content through automated recommendations in the future. While it has blown up in popularity across multiple age groups since Roblox went public last year, the game maintains a sizable underaged audience, and this patent may be an effort to ensure that those players are offered relevant content.
The latest Roblox Corporation patent intends to use new systems and existing computing capabilities in order to present Roblox players with "suitable" age-appropriate content like recommending child-friendly game modes to kids below a certain age. Because there are so many Roblox creators similar to games like Minecraft, there is a wide array of game modes for players to explore ranging from platforming or speedruns to mini-games and tycoon simulations. Given this large collection of creations to sort through, Roblox Corporation's patent may make exploring the marketplace easier as it may recommend better content for each player.
According to the Roblox Corporation patent filing, two similar Roblox players will be recognized by the new systems in order to get content alternatives to recommend or ignore for one player from the other. Before a suggestion is made, values are ascribed to each possible Roblox studio creation in order to automatically recommend the right one for a player through gathering certain data. Roblox Corporation states in the patent that these efforts are being made so that Roblox players in one region of the world will be recommended highly regarded and trusted uploads that may meet regional regulations rather than the current focus on localized content that can be hit-or-miss.
The Roblox Corporation patent filing is like others in suggesting that parameters like age, gender, location, and preferences will all be taken into account from developers and players separately when curating proper content for players specifically. This information may be logged similarly to how it is with YouTube uploads and the age restrictions on the back end correlating with the age a user gives them upon creating an account which helps the Google platform minimize inappropriate videos reaching minors. Although Roblox is looking to make changes to how it presents its content through age-appropriate measures, it's likely that many of the top Roblox creations will continue to be featured given the implementation illustrated in the patent.
Though Roblox Corporation has filed patents for these improvements to the systems on Roblox's back end, it may be some time before the forms are approved, and the developers are able to implement the new curation method. Because a viral video from last year went into detail about why Roblox isn't safe for children, Roblox Corporation may have filed this patent in an effort to make it a safer space for players under eighteen.
Roblox is available now for Mac, Mobile, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.