It continues to both amaze and concern me that a whole other internet ecosystem appears to exist within the realm of Roblox. Recently, a game by the name of Steal an Egg has blown up on the UGC platform, which is more or less what it says on the tin: you need to steal an egg. This is Roblox we’re talking about, however, so Steal an Egg comes with a big ole asterisk that comes in the form of a treadmill you can train on whereby you can doomscroll through TikTok videos.
You can probably see where the cause for concern might come from given that this is a platform for children, and so the game was pulled yesterday. Now, Roblox have put out a statement which explains that they are putting restrictions on “reward-driven media feeds.” For some context, in the case of Steal an Egg, running on the treadmill for lengthy periods of time would increase your speed, letting you outspeed faster and faster creatures so you can nick their eggs.
As Roblox put it, “Effective immediately, games will not be allowed in Roblox Kids and Select if they combine,” the likes of media feeds that feature short-form videos, images, or story-style posts, a “feed that autoplays, loops, or scrolls on its own,” and a “reward, or implied reward, for continued watching.” Explaining the change, they wrote quite simply, “Rewarding users to consume a continuous feed of content without natural stopping points is not appropriate for younger users.”
An FAQ cleared up a few questions folks may have too. For one, you can still put endless scroll stuff in your games as long as there’s no reward component. Roblox also made sure to make you aware that this policy does not apply to rewarded video ads, because of course that’s fine, as the “user must actively initiate the ad, and we apply rate limits to how many a user can watch.” Games with such endless scroll and reward mechanics can be reviewed after removing them so that they’re still playable under Roblox Kids and Select, too.
We live in a nightmare world! Sure would be nice if Roblox wasn’t generally a platform that encouraged kids to be regularly on the platform.
