Roblox, a very popular site for kids to play games, has said that it will soon be available on Sony’s PlayStation consoles.
The company says that more than 60 million people play Roblox every day, but it has been criticized because of worries about how well it moderates its material.
Other news includes a new way to make characters, a conversation tool called Roblox Connect, and the full release of Meta’s VR platform Quest.
It will be out in October 2023 for PlayStation 4 and PS5.
Before, you could only play it on computers, mobile devices, and the Xbox One system from Microsoft.
It is a big step for Roblox, which wants to keep being one of the most popular places to play games online.
It’s not clear how popular it is, but Roblox told Bloomberg in 2020 that two-thirds of US kids between the ages of 9 and 12 play the game.
In the same year, Statista surveyed 400,000 kids in the UK and found that Roblox was much more popular than its closest competitor. 67% of kids said they played Roblox, while only 23% said they played Minecraft, which is the best-selling video game of all time.
It’s popular because it puts a lot of focus on making things. Instead of being a standard game, it lets players make their own games inside it. In fact, Roblox calls the people who use the game “developers.”
These creators, who are often children, can make games and may even be able to make Robux, a type of in-game money, from other players.
It has gotten a lot of praise for letting young people make games and be artistic, but the same freedoms and popularity have also led to questions about it.
In 2022, the BBC heard from the NSPCC and Childline that since the outbreak, five times as many kids had called their helplines to talk about Roblox.
A new beginning with PlayStation
Roblox’s yearly Developers Conference is where the news of the launch was shared.
Roblox also said that Meta Quest’s open beta version, which came out earlier this year, was well accepted.
The beta version, which let people with a Quest 2 or Quest Pro headset play an unfinished version of the game, had more than a million downloads in its first five days, and the company said it would be available on Quest later this month.
But, even though it was often asked for, there was no PlayStation version until now.
Few details were available about the launch, but Roblox said that players on both older and newer PlayStation systems would be able to “access the full catalog of Roblox experiences.”
Roblox also talked about a new feature called “Connect,” which will let people call each other in the game using their real names, body language, and facial expressions.
By pointing a camera at their own face, Roblox users can give their game character the same emotions they have in real life.
This motion-capture technology was made available for the first time in August, but Roblox Connect is the first time the company has tried to combine it with calling friends.
In a blog post about motion-capture technology, Roblox said that players over the age of 13 could use it.
Before Roblox can use a player’s camera, the player will have to give Roblox permission to do so. In a privacy notice, the company said that it does not record or store information from a player’s camera and that “video from your camera never leaves your device.”
It’s not clear which countries Roblox Connect will start in, but the company says more information will be released soon.
