Confidential Documents Reveal Roblox's China Expansion Plans

Recently leaked internal documents from Roblox have shed light on the company's early strategies to comply with China's censorship regulations and laws. The documents, dated August 2017 and shared by Vice, detail key features necessary for Roblox's launch in the Chinese market, including the separation of its Chinese user base from international players. Roblox also discussed the possibility that its Chinese launch partner, Tencent, might attempt to replicate or hack the game. A presentation slide notes that Tencent appears to have a competing product in development, prompting Roblox to highlight its unique strengths, such as its social network, technical capabilities, and global developer community. To launch in China, Roblox needed to create a subset of its global game and virtual goods catalogue, implement segmented play and user item trading, and adhere to the country's anti-addiction measures. These measures limit the amount of time children can spend playing games, although activities like chatting, watching videos, and editing avatars are exempt. Full translations of iOS, Android, desktop, and user-generated content were required at launch. Setting up local web servers was identified as a significant task, with the requirement that Chinese players can only access Chinese servers to ensure compliance with local laws. Personally identifiable information for Chinese players must also remain within the country. The company noted that the government review process for game launches can take up to eight or nine months, emphasizing the need for thorough preparation. This includes strong content moderation, such as text filtering, image and video moderation, and real-time chat translation. A separate document from November 2018 outlines Tencent's content guidelines, which prohibit horror themes, mistreatment of corpses, revealing imagery, and the promotion of polygamy or one-night stands. Companies are also required to respect historical facts, cultural events, and figures, and must not misrepresent the Chinese territory on in-game maps. Roblox launched the LuoBuLesi app in China in partnership with Tencent last year, but it was removed from local app stores by December. A company spokesperson attributed the removal to 'a number of important transitory actions.'