Understanding Roblox’s Grooming Problem

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Cecilia reports about video games at Bloomberg and has written many important articles about the business and controversies of one of the biggest games in the world, Roblox. A few weeks ago, we had Patrick Klepek on to discuss Roblox from a parent's perspective, but today we're going to hear about it from the perspective of a great investigative reporter and for my money, the most knowledgeable journalist about Roblox. Cecilia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Wow, such nice words. Thank you. Well earned. So I'm going to start with the same question I gave Patrick because I think unless you are deeply into Roblox, it's very hard to understand what it is. Cecilia, what is Roblox? So Roblox is not a video game. Imagine a mall of video games. And you go to the mall and you can walk into any of these stores and it's a completely different experience. There's B-Swarm simulator. There's a game in which you dress up and try and get the highest score from an audience. There's games about roleplaying living in a city. There are games, you know, the very popular to steal a brain rot, which I won't explain, but you should definitely look up if you have kids because your kid's probably playing it. What Roblox's great innovation is, is that it publishes games that are created by third parties, primarily children. And those games are popular with children. So instead of a 40 or 50 year old in LA trying to guess, you know, what are children excited about? Children know that and are making those games themselves. Is there anything comparable on the market? Like, let's take two other big games, Fortnite and Minecraft. It's like, can you triangulate what Roblox is in comparison to those two things? Or is it like an entirely different category of game in terms of like what kids do in it? I would say it's a different category, but there's a lot in common with Fortnite and Minecraft. In common with Minecraft is this idea that you can build something yourself. So in addition to being a platform or like a mall where you can just play all of these different games, Roblox has something called Roblox Studio where you can make Roblox games yourself. And much like Minecraft, this is something that allows you to manifest, you know, any vision you have, all of your dreams, very like playground-like roleplaying games into reality where it's accessible to millions of people online. The similarity with Fortnite is interesting too, because much like Fortnite, Roblox is very trend-driven. So you see all these news headlines like, Ariana Grande's getting in Fortnite. I was playing Fortnite the other day and I was playing as Jinx from League of Legends, which is another game I love. Roblox creators will make games very quickly riding on trends in pop culture and gameplay mechanics. So it has these things in common. But the reason why I'd say it's different is because Roblox is very social media-like. Roblox is social media for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamer base. You know, you create this avatar and your avatar, which you're wearing on any given day, is not unlike the way people view their Instagram accounts or the way we might have viewed MySpace, you know, a long time ago. You meet friends, you express yourself, you communicate, you have all of these different online experiences together. You're fighting cops in Washington, DC. You're a pirate. You're roleplaying being in like a high school for fairies. And it's definitely going to, I think, trickle down to how social media tries to appeal to younger generations going forward. I was going to ask this later, but since you brought up the fact that you were playing Fortnite, we have played, I think, Warzone together. I know that you're into shooters. I know you really like video games. You play video games. Do you play Roblox? And even if you don't play it, do you get it on a game critic level? Like, do you understand the appeal? Is it fun for you to play? That's a really good question. One thing I will say, an addendum to your, I think, two complementary introduction is that I'm not a great game critic, so just take what I say with a grain of salt. I just play a lot of games and I do play Roblox so I can report on it. The fun of Roblox for people who play it most often, and, you know, it has something like 144 daily active users, is the fact that your community is there. I'm 34. I started fact-checking for you when I was 22 and I was still too old to play Roblox at that time. Although it's been around for decades. My people don't play Roblox. So for me, recreationally, it doesn't have a strong pull. One thing that has been a big frustration for me is that as the AAA games industry is experiencing so many changes, layoffs, studio closures, game cancellations, the majority of growth in the games industry is coming from China and coming from Roblox. And that's not what's frustrating to me. What's frustrating to me is that I really wish people understood how powerful a platform it is and how powerful it is as a culture generator. And just like logged on and gave it a spin. It's fun. Like I've had fun playing Grow a Garden. I've had fun playing Steal a Brain Rot. And I just think that to be a knowledgeable like internet citizen today, you should just check it out. I think that's absolutely correct. And it's why I really wanted to have you on and I really wanted to have Patrick on because he experiences it because his kids are in there. I find it very challenging for two reasons. One is, I think the way that I came up as a reporter on video games is the same way that a lot of people did, which is, it's something that I did as a kid and then I grew up and I was like, can I make money like from playing video games in some fashion? And I did, like reviewing them and then reporting on them. And a lot of the best reporting came naturally from my interest. So it's like, I'm playing World of Warcraft. Something interesting is happening in World of Warcraft. I'm writing a story about it. And I think I get Fortnite. Like I can play Fortnite and understand the appeal. It's not something that I play regularly, but it's very much within the tradition of video games that I understand. And Roblox is really where I am completely boomerified and I don't understand what is happening, which is why I need to like talk to other people. And then the other thing is that when you're reporting on stuff, you get like this feedback from publishing articles. You see what people are interested in. And I found actually, at least back in Vice when we were doing more of this, that the Roblox community is like entirely self-sufficient in terms of getting the news they want about Roblox. Like they get it from Roblox YouTube channels and Roblox influencers. And it's like, they're not coming to like Motherboard at the time for Roblox news. They're going to their own people. So it's like, we were writing it for a different audience that wasn't interested in it. And I don't know, that's just like one reason that I kind of fell off. But it is gigantic. I think you said it's a, what is it? 144 million daily, monthly active users? Not to advertise the Bloomberg Terminal, but I have all of these stats in front of me if you want me to read them out. Oh, please, please. We have 144 million daily active users and each of those on average is spending $15 per quarter. And it's making $1.4 billion. It made $1.4 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. So it is a giant, giant, giant, giant platform. It's a beast. The thing that always rocked my world is something that people love to track and like, I don't know the traditional game press, the enthusiast press, whatever you want to call it, is like Steam charts. Like what is the number one game on Steam? And there's been a couple of times where the most popular game on Roblox, like a Roblox game that some kid made is more popular than any game on Steam. And then you're like, Whoa, what is happening? Like the industry is changing. Yeah, I'm looking at what are the top ones right now. There's this platform called RoMonitor. There's one called Fish It, which is a fishing game. Steal a Brain Rot, Escape Tsunami for Brain Rot, Adopt Me, which is a pet adoption game. That one's a big one. That's like an established one, right? Yeah. Another thing I wanted to ask actually is like, do you think there is like cultural staying power? Like we just went over some numbers, revenue, numbers of users. Obviously, like gamer culture, such as it is, has infiltrated the rest of the culture. Do you think Roblox has that as well? Definitely. I have seen Reddit posts from upset parents be old at this point. It was published in 2024. And a lot has changed since 2024. So although, of course, we stand by our reporting and what people said at the time was their true experience, a lot has changed at Roblox. Like Roblox has done so much. They dozens of updates a year to prevent predators from coming in contact with children. But at the time when we talked to people, what they said was that they had, you know, people had said that they had attempted many times to make moderation more stringent, but they felt that their concerns weren't being listened to by higher-ups at the company. Of course, you know, in these investor calls that we listen to every quarter, moderation always comes up and the chief executive officer and co-founder of the company, Dave Bazooki, always addresses it. So it's definitely top of mind for Roblox. Do you know what that moderation looks like? Yes. Moderating Roblox is very difficult. You're not just moderating every item that is posted onto Roblox's marketplace. You're not just moderating every asset that goes into every game or every avatar body to make sure that none of them have like genitalia or anything inappropriate exposed. But you have, you have to also, in some instances, moderate the way people are engaging with each other. Can you imagine how challenging that is? You know, at the time we were reporting the story, there were very public posts from content creators around Roblox about like bathroom simulator, a very popular game where people would pretend to be in the bathroom and you can imagine children playing this game, lots of inappropriate dynamics emerged. But at the base of that game, it's a bathroom. Everyone goes to the bathroom, right? This is what makes it very challenging to moderate the platform. Recently, Roblox has been saying that they are investing more in AI moderation. I've been very interested in this because I had a story last year interviewing career moderators who are concerned that they are being replaced by AI, which is something that a lot of big tech companies have been doing. And many of them said that AI at that time was not yet equipped to actually ascertain the subtleties of child grooming specifically and some of these other very, very dangerous types of interactions that can occur online. And I don't have anything to say about Roblox's AI moderation specifically. I have not interviewed people about Roblox's AI moderation specifically, but broadly speaking, that's been a trend in the tech industry. And I'm curious to see how how Roblox grapples with that. Yeah, for sure. We're definitely seeing more AI moderation wherever we look. I think Roblox is a very challenging platform to moderate. We cover this thing a lot and usually it's text, images, sound. And here you have like this very rich extra element of like people interacting with each other in a 3D space and be able to make innuendo and double meaning and a nightmare, frankly. Definitely sympathize with the challenge, regardless of how they're handling it at the moment. Something that Patrick has brought up, and I saw in your stories as well, which I'm hoping you can clarify a little bit, there is some controversy about parental controls and what is set by default. Do you know what I'm referring to? I do. Yeah. It's about the sensitive games. So the quote-unquote sensitive games, where sensitive means like issues like marriage equality and pay equity in sports. Right. Yeah. So how does that work? Can you talk about that? Yeah. There was an advocacy group that criticized, there are a couple of advocacy groups that criticized Roblox for identifying certain games as sensitive because they dealt with these issues that the advocacy groups considered were very important to the development of young people's social awareness. I think it's really interesting that that was occurring alongside a lot of fans of the game in the Middle East, where, you know, there are a half dozen countries in the Middle East that have removed access to Roblox. And while many of those countries have specifically said that child safety was a major factor in that decision, there were also expressed concerns around kids having access to LGBTQ content. So I don't have anything concrete sort of linking these things together. 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So a few weeks ago, I wrote a story about this mass shooter in Canada. They had apparently made a mass shooting simulator in a mall of some kind. This is something that appears to happen a lot on Roblox. I want to be clear that it is not a completely new thing. Several mass shooters have made some type of mass shooting simulators in many types of games over the years. I think going as far back as Doom and Columbine, but it is a thing that has happened a few times in Roblox. You wrote a story about a group that does this, I don't want to say professionally, but consistently or like that is their goal. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, loved your story, by the way. Huge fan of your games coverage in general. The story you're referencing that we published on Bloomberg was about this group called ASS, which was Active Shooter Studios. It was a Discord server that had about 800 members where they would discuss games that millionaires who are earning passive income off of something that they made when they were 18 or 19, and will for the foreseeable future. And that's a very rare, that's like a small slice of people who are earning money on the platform, but I would love to know exactly how many people, but I'm sure it's in the dozens from my research. You know, that is the new generation of game makers. These are people who are dominating kids' time playing video games. And at the same time, we are seeing people who have made beautiful, polished shooters, motion capture, you know, 8K compatibility, everything, not really being able to land with the same splash that some Roblox creators have. Why is that? It's because games are about connecting with people, and games are about humanity and about expressing yourself. And the dinky little thingamajigs that people are publishing on Roblox with whatever graphics and like brain rot, like, you know, images, which in some instances are generated by AI, that's a different conversation, are reminding people of just like, okay, this is, this is what gaming is. And I'm not saying that to in any way denigrate the games that I personally play way too much of, but this is what the younger audience is, is looking for right now. And I'm interested in the conversations that more established game developers are having about Roblox and behind closed doors. Two questions about that. One is, I have not seen a serious attempt to come after Roblox in every other business, also in the video game business. Somebody makes a big popular thing. Everybody follows and tries to make their version of it. Like Battle Royale is very big. Everybody makes Battle Royale. Extraction shooters are hitting. People are trying extraction shooters. MOBAs famously in like the 20-teens where everybody was trying to make a MOBA. Have I missed the attempt? Are they so bad that they haven't even popped up on my radar? Like, why is nobody trying their hand at like, let's do Roblox, but better? Well, Epic Games does have Unreal Engine for Fortnite, which is competing with Roblox for user-generated content. The first time I played Steel of Brain Rot actually was on Unreal Engine for, it was like the UFN version of Steel of Brain Rot, and it was really fun. So there's a lot of stuff like that happening there. It's not really poised to compete at the same level of Roblox right now because of the way that avatars work in Fortnite. One of the things that people love about Roblox is the marketplace and the economy and the ability to sell and buy items that are generated by users. So I'm curious about what Epic will do there. But do you remember the metaverse? I mean, very much yes. And I think, obviously, the connection to make there is like everybody was trying to make the metaverse and it already existed in the form of Roblox or Fortnite, but I don't think the people who were talking about the metaverse even really understood what Roblox is and what a hold it has on a generation. I feel like they went right over it. They missed the whole thing. But where are you going with that? Oh, just the same thing you were saying. I think the metaverse frenzy would have looked really different if a lot of people who were kind of leading that charge from boardrooms, like spent some time in Roblox and really thought about what was sticking about it. Because there were attempts to compete with Roblox from a user-generated content standpoint. Like UGC gaming was supposed to be this really huge thing. But a lot of people don't think about is the engineering investment you have to make to let that function. Like Roblox is so impressive in its ability to host a hundred and forty-four million daily active users, millions of concurrent people on a specific game. Like that requires so much forethought and Roblox has existed for decades. So they have a real head up there. That really is, if you were to put a gun to my head, that is like the secret sauce is when I see Roblox and I think other people my age, i.e. old people, when they see Roblox, they just see like the blocky character with the painted on face. And I'm like, this looks ugly. Like this aesthetic is ugly. But it's like, it's the way that it's all hosted and interconnected and the interoperability of everything. It's like, that is like, like you say, it's the engineering feat that I think makes all this possible. And I think as you alluded to, like hard to compete against. Yeah. It's hard to compete against. Also, I mean, and this is the duh thing that I probably should have just said up front, like Roblox is on every platform for free. Duh, duh, duh, duh. Like you can just play it anywhere, anytime for free. Whereas like games cost $70 or $80 now if they're AAA right now. And that's because margins are lower than they've been in a really long time for traditional game makers. I am someone, you know this because we've talked about it at length. I am a PC gamer. Next to me right now is a pink, I'll use the term battle station with like, you know, like rainbow lights and everything in there. And at the same time, as much as I love being a PC gamer and I'm interested in PC gaming hardware, it has become incredibly expensive to keep up with advancements in game graphic technology. Buying a new GPU, maybe you've tried to do this recently. I sure haven't. It's just like cost prohibitive. It's bananas. I'm due for RAM. That's how I'm screwed. I'm very due for RAM. Yeah. Yeah. Like to actually, like making games that are AK compatible is very expensive. Playing them is expensive too. And, you know, the economy, I think you've heard, everyone's heard, not doing so great right now. So yeah, Roblox is, you know, from an accessibility standpoint, definitely going to be something a lot of people will be looking towards going forward in the games industry. So I usually like to end with a lightning round. I'm going to ask you the questions. Feel free to no comment if you're unable to answer. And if you, if you want, we can even just cut this, but my lightning round questions, I think they're all yes or no, but do you think Roblox is around in 10 years? Yes. If you had kids, would you let them play Roblox? Yes. Is Roblox going to be acquired by Microsoft or one of the bigger tech companies? Can you see that happening? It's really hard to picture that. I guess one last thing is, because we've talked about, you've made the point that the hook is really social connection and people having those social connections on Roblox that is, it's giving it lasting power. Do you see what we've come to call the friend swap genre, which are games where it's like, the point of the game is for people usually working together to do something. And like the fidelity of the graphics doesn't matter as much. Like the fine tuning of the mechanics doesn't matter as much. It's more of just like people getting together and doing a thing together. Do you think that is like a, a response to Roblox or like a learning from Roblox? Yeah, that's definitely a learning from Roblox. Like I think friend swap as a genre is in many ways appropriated by what's been working so well with Roblox. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, again, hard for me to connect with, with Roblox, but I guess I am excited to see what happens with this talent once they maybe strike out on their own and like graduate from working on games for Roblox and doing something else. Because it's like, it's a fascinating generation of, of game players and game developers that's like cooking here. So very interested to see where that goes. Yeah. I would be interested in whether they do graduate onto other platforms. Roblox, you know, like I said, the Roblox studio is very singular and so people might just keep developing games on Roblox forever and ever if they've been successful, especially if it goes on to encompass 10% of the global gaming market, which is what the CEO and co-founder is hoping for. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a scary future for me. So I'm hoping it's, it doesn't work out that way, but if not, then I guess I just gotta, I gotta get into Roblox. Yeah. You gotta get into Roblox. Okay, maybe we should, maybe we should, we should log in together and you should, you should show me around. Yeah, I'd have a lot of fun doing that. Okay. All right. Cecilia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I hope to have you on again soon. Please, please come by whenever there's a story you want to talk about or anything like that. Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you for having me. As a reminder, 4Four Media is journalist-founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 4Four Media and directly support our work, please go to 4FourMedia.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to subscribers-only sections where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 4Four Media. We'll see you again next time.