Roblox is drawing a bright line against in-game doomscrolling, rolling out a new rule that bans “reward-driven media feeds” from experiences in its Roblox Kids and Roblox Select tiers, effective immediately. As first reported by ComicBook.com, games that dangle prizes in front of young players for endlessly watching short-form videos or scrolling image feeds are being stripped out of those age-gated sections of the platform unless their creators rework the offending mechanics.
Under the new policy, any game aimed at Kids or Select that combines three ingredients—a media feed (short videos, image streams, or story-style posts), autoplay or infinite scrolling, and a reward or implied reward for continued viewing—will be removed from those catalogs until it is redesigned. Roblox has stressed that traditional opt-in rewarded video ads are not affected, because they must be triggered by the player, are rate-limited, and do not function as endless feeds that exist primarily to inflate watch time. The company also notes that once a developer strips out the problematic feature and passes review, their game returns to Kids or Select without resetting its “Engaged Player” metrics, a clear nod to creators worried about losing progress toward monetization targets.
The crackdown is tightly linked to Roblox’s new age-based account system, which carves its audience into Roblox Kids for players roughly five to eight years old and Roblox Select for those nine to fifteen. These tiers, introduced as part of a broader child-safety push, sit beneath the full Roblox experience, which is reserved for age-verified users sixteen and up. Access to higher-risk features like open chat and 16+ content now depends on age checks that rely on either official ID or a facial-analysis system, with stricter defaults and more granular parental controls for younger cohorts.
The new rule is not theoretical. The pet-collecting sim Steal An Egg became an early flashpoint when players noticed a mechanic that had kids’ avatars sprinting on virtual treadmills while an endless stream of short videos rolled by, with rewards tied to how long they kept watching—effectively gamifying doomscrolling. Community accounts that track Roblox policy changes highlighted Steal An Egg as a test case, noting that the experience was pulled from Kids and Select, then allowed back only after the Black Mirror-style treadmill feed was removed. It’s exactly the kind of engagement hack regulators have been warning about, and the kind Roblox now seems eager to stamp out in its child-focused tiers.
Roblox’s move arrives as governments and watchdogs ramp up scrutiny of how digital platforms capture children’s attention and expose them to harm. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has repeatedly put Roblox on notice over failures to prevent adults from contacting children whose profiles were not properly shielded, and pushed for stronger default privacy settings for minors. In the US, Roblox recently agreed to a $12.2 million settlement in Alabama that includes new tools for parents to monitor chats, connections, time online, spending, and content accessed, as well as limits on personalized ads for users under sixteen. Market and policy analysts have also flagged Roblox’s lobbying for coordinated child-safety standards across platforms, a signal that the company would rather help shape the rules than simply react to them.
At the same time, Roblox has been overhauling its core safety architecture with mandatory global age verification for chat and 18+ experiences, requiring either ID upload or AI-powered facial estimation to slot users into age brackets. For children under nine, in-experience chat is now disabled by default, and broader communication tools are heavily restricted unless a verified parent chooses otherwise. Official guidance to families emphasizes that the full-featured Roblox tier for older teens comes with expanded parental dashboards and settings, while Kids and Select are supposed to function as walled gardens with tighter curation and fewer avenues for unmoderated contact.
For game creators working in the Kids and Select ecosystems, the new ban forces a rethink of engagement design, nudging them away from passive watch-time loops and towards mechanics that reward play, skill, or exploration instead of mere screen-staring. Roblox’s promise not to wipe Engaged Player progress for compliant games softens the blow, but the message is clear: tying loot or progression to endless, autoplay media feeds aimed at children is now off-limits. Regulators have already pointed out how Roblox blurs the line between gaming platform and social network, and the company’s preemptive strike against doomscroll-style reward systems suggests it would rather tighten its own rules than risk being formally branded a social-media service with even heavier regulatory obligations.
