West Virginia has reached one of the first settlements in the country with a popular children’s online gaming platform.
West Virginia will receive more than $11 million from online gaming platform Roblox to address concerns of child endangerment and exploitation on the platform. Nevada and Alabama also recently announced settlements with the company for similar compensation of $12 million each.
West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey said Roblox is not only a place to play online, it can also teach kids how to create and publish their own digital games.
“It’s a place where kids who really have an interest in the creativity of gaming go. It isn’t really a game that has specific objectives, like a sort of traditional Nintendo game. It’s a game that’s full of worlds, and it enables kids to express their creativity with their friends online,” he said. “It is actually another way for children to learn very specific skills as it relates to computer science and coding in a way that they really don’t probably know that that’s what they’re doing, which is kind of the best way for kids to learn.”
But anywhere there’s kids online, there are people trying to harm them. Roblox’s internal metrics indicate that in 2024, close to 40% of their users were aged 13 or under.
“In creating that world, they opened up a platform for people that wanted to harm children to be able to find them,” McCuskey said. “And it was very obviously not their intent to do that, but it did happen. There are well documented cases of kids having been found online by predators in the game, with people who are breaking the law but have very, very nefarious purposes with kids.”
As part of the settlements, Roblox will be implementing age verification for all users before granting chat access. All under-16 and unverified users will be defaulted to a safe content mode that blocks adult-rated material. Those accounts will also be restricted from being contacted by adults except through verified, trusted friends.
“Through our negotiations with them, we were able to really transform the way that their security protocols work and to make sure that every parent can be assured that when their child is online, they’re only speaking to people that are their own actual age,” McCuskey said. “They’re using really sophisticated AI photo technologies to make sure that every person that’s registered is the person that they say they are. They have incorporated massive amounts of monitoring to make sure that the people that are in the game are the people that say they’re in the game.”
The settlement was reached before West Virginia filed a lawsuit thanks to the work of Jace Goins, chief deputy attorney general and Abby Cunningham, assistant attorney general.
“(They) really did fantastic work here,” McCuskey said. “I am blessed to have an unbelievable staff of lawyers that work with me, and the people of West Virginia should be very proud that both of them represent them.”
Unlike the opioid manufacturers and distributors West Virginia often sues, McCuskey said Roblox was willing to collaborate on the issue.
“These guys understood that there was something going wrong and worked with us to not only solve the problem, but to provide us with the resources we need to accomplish the goals that we’ve set forth,” McCuskey said.
McCuskey said the money will be paid out over several years and be used in part to educate children, parents and teachers about online safety.
