Roblox rolls out mandatory age-gated accounts worldwide for younger players

This is a real platform-policy change, not just another safety badge. Roblox turned on its mandatory age-based account system worldwide on June 16, automatically sorting players into Roblox Kids, ages 5 to 8, Roblox Select, ages 9 to 15, or standard accounts for everyone else. The rollout follows a limited launch in Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and it lands after Roblox spent months building the age-check system that makes the whole setup possible.

For younger players, the biggest changes are in access and communication. Chat stays off for users younger than 9, age checks are required to chat, and parents can keep adjusting standard chat settings until a child turns 16. Roblox says the Kids catalog is capped at Minimal or Mild content labels, while Select tops out at Moderate. Both catalogs exclude sensitive issues, social hangouts and free-form drawing features by default, which means some experiences that were easy to stumble into before now sit behind a much clearer age gate.

Roblox also said the new framework is meant to preserve the vast majority of favorite games for users under 16 at launch, rather than turning the platform into a stripped-down kids section. Users 16 and older will not see changes to their experience after age-checking, which makes the rollout feel less like a reset for everyone and more like a sharper sorting system for the audience Roblox already has. The company first announced Roblox Kids and Roblox Select on April 13 and tied the system to age checks, content ratings, ongoing moderation and expanded parental controls.

The creator side is where this stops looking cosmetic. Roblox’s creator documentation says games available to users under 16 now require an evaluation process, including a threshold of 500 unique plays from highly engaged players in the last 60 days. That is a new publishing hurdle for developers who want to stay visible to younger users, and it puts more of the moderation burden on Roblox before a game reaches that audience.

Roblox has spent all year moving toward this point. In February, it said 45% of its 144 million daily active users had already completed an age check, and by April it said more than half of global daily actives and 65% of U.S. daily actives had done one. That is the tell here: Roblox is not just adding a label, it is trying to make age the default switch that decides what players can enter, who they can talk to and how much work creators must do to reach them.