Roblox, one of the most popular global gaming platforms, adds a polarizing new feature that has fans divided: Voice chat, or more specifically, “safe” voice chat, is on its way to the platform, announced by Roblox Corporation during their annual investors day.
As far as when we can anticipate this massive update rolling out, Roblox Corporation didn’t exactly say. However, a release sometime in 2021 is a fair bet.
The main concern with this sort of update is that Roblox’s primary player demographic is relatively young — with the devs revealing in their February 26, 2021 investors day video that over half of the total users are under the age of 13. On the one hand, communicating with one another in-game is incredibly useful; however, introducing voice chat amongst young players can potentially become very toxic, very fast. There is certainly a high potential of servers becoming unplayable, with users spamming the voice chat with vulgar language if the feature is abused. This alone can turn players completely off from the platform altogether.
Safety and chat moderation has always been a priority for Roblox Corporation, so exactly how they intend to put the “safe” in “safe voice chat” is unclear, but the method in how they do so will certainly be a contributing factor in how Roblox can maintain their priority to the safety of their players.
