Australian gamers who want use Roblox’s in-game chat service will have to submit to a facial age verification check from next month.
The system is available to Australian Roblox users on a voluntary basis from tonight, but it will become mandatory from the first week of December when the federal government’s social media age ban kicks in.
Roblox said it will start deploying the system across Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands in December, ahead of a wider international rollout starting from January next year.
From the first week of December, Australian Roblox users will be required to use the platform’s mobile app to complete the age verification process if they want to continue using its chat feature.
Roblox’s age verification system will rely on facial biometric data to make an estimate of the player’s age. The estimate will then determine which other players they can chat with based on age tiers.
Roblox vice president of product Rajiv Bhatia said that company had defined six age categories for its chat feature: under-nines, then ages 10-to-12, 13-to-15, 16-to-17, 18-to-20 and over 21s.
“We decided that simply going with age estimation was the path of least friction, and the path that provided the best outcome and that minimised the collection of personal information,” Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman told iTnews.
Kaufman added that players that haven’t subjected themselves to the verification process will still be able to play games on the platform without access to in-game chat.
The game’s face verification process is provided by Persona, the same third-party tool used by Reddit to comply with age restriction rules in the United Kingdom. It records a quick video of the player which is immediately deleted after the process is finished, Kaufman said.
Kaufman said that if Roblox’s face verification process incorrectly determines the player’s age, then the user can correct it with a form of government ID.
“They’ll also be able to do it in the future through verified parental consent where a parent can vouch for somebody who’s a minor or who maybe doesn’t have an ID,” Kaufman said.
The platform provider said it would accept all formal government-issued identification for identity verification, including drivers’ licences, birth certificates and passports.
Roblox said it was confident that Persona’s age verification system won’t determine that a child is older than their true biological age based on mean error rates recorded third-party testing providers in laboratory conditions.
“Persona’s age estimation models achieved an Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.4 years for minors under 18 based on testing by the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) in UK,” a Roblox spokesperson told iTnews.
There is some porousness among the age brackets based on broader definitions of age-appropriate contact.
Bhatia gave the example of a Roblox player estimated to be aged 12. The player would have access to in-game chat with players determined to 15 years old or younger but forbidden to use the platform to speak to players 16 years of age or older.
Bhatia said that, in early 2026, the age verification restrictions will be extended to include collaboration in Roblox Studio – the game’s platform for building worlds and experiences.
The platform provider will also prohibit creators from sharing social media links or using handles that contain them to help stop users being directed to “unsafe interactions”.
Creators will still be able social media links in profiles, experience details pages and communities, but will only be available to users that have been verified as being older than 13 years of age.
Roblox said that would address “nuances” in content age laws across different locales and regions and that it would “address accordingly”.
The changes to Roblox chat system arrive less than a month before laws restricting access to social media age restrictions for under 16 years olds become enforceable, impacting platforms like Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.
Roblox missed out on a total ban under the new laws as, according to the eSafety commission, it fits into the category of a game rather than a social media platform.
“If the online gameplay is the significant or sole purpose, if that were taken away, would the kids still use that messaging functionality to chat? Probably not,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in November.
However, earlier in September, the eSafety commission outlined new safety measures for Roblox to protect children.
Those measures, set to be introduced by the end of this year, include making accounts for 16-year-olds and younger private by default and new parental controls for restricting chat entirely mandatory.