Congress opens a child-safety investigation into Roblox, the platform its own players build

The letter

On August 12 a US Senate Judiciary subcommittee wrote to Roblox founder and chief executive David Baszucki [1]. The subcommittee, which covers crime and counterterrorism, has opened an investigation into child safety on the platform [1]. Its chairman, Josh Hawley, wrote that police have arrested numerous people over the past decade for grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping and murder of children they met through Roblox [1].

The letter cites one number above the rest. In 2025 Roblox reported 65,381 instances of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [1]. That is more than double what it reported in 2024 [1]. The company is accused of putting revenue and engagement ahead of the safety of young children [1]. It has been directed to preserve every record relevant to how it has handled abuse [1]. “Let us be clear: children on your platform are hurting,” the letter ends [1].

Roblox has added safety measures in recent months, including age-based accounts for children and teenagers [1]. Its chief safety officer responded on the company’s behalf [1]. We could not read a full statement from Roblox in the reporting available to us.

The thing to hold onto is what Roblox is. It does not make the games on Roblox. Its users do, in the millions, inside a toolset and a rule set the company wrote. Bain and Company published its annual gaming report this week, from a survey of more than 5,300 players [2]. The report calls Roblox “the centre of gravity for the entire gaming ecosystem over the past five years” [2]. That is the thing under investigation: a space, not a game.

The week players kept building

Bethesda spent the week apologising in advance to its own audience. It warned Fallout 4 players to log in and save their mod load order before an August 18 patch, because patches break mods [3]. Mods here means Creations, the player-made add-ons that rebuild an eleven-year-old game. A mod is written against one version of the game, and a new version number alone can break it [3]. Heavily modded setups stack mods that depend on each other, so one break cascades [3].

The patch itself is mostly housekeeping for other people’s work. It raised the archive limit from 256 files to 1,024, “to better accommodate larger collections of mods” [4]. It also allowed Creations up to 2GB on Xbox and fixed a Steam Deck crash [4]. Bethesda says a Skyrim update is coming too [4]. PC Gamer noted the studio’s record here: a 2024 “next gen” update broke so much that the community’s best answer was a tool to roll it back [5].

Four days earlier, a modder called Josef Rudberg posted footage of snow in Skyrim holding a footprint [6]. Snow that deforms has been missing since 2011, and modders had largely written it off [6]. The geometry in Skyrim is nearly all static, and interactive snow needs a physics system the engine does not have [6]. One modder said in 2023 that it would likely crash the game, and that he was unsure it was even technically possible [6]. Rudberg’s version builds 3D layers on the snow, refills tracks as the weather continues, and runs on lower-spec machines [6]. It is not finished and cannot be downloaded yet [6]. Polygon ran a fan’s line as its subheading: “At this rate, The Elder Scrolls 6 will be less technically advanced than Skyrim by the time it comes out” [6].

Blizzard, meanwhile, has quietly changed jobs. Principal artist Jay Huang used to make the props in World of Warcraft’s rooms [7]. He now designs the systems that let players make them [7]. Patch 12.1 added blueprints, so a novice can copy a player designer’s saved room outright [7]. Huang describes an internal channel where the team passes around player builds all day, including tutorials they cannot read because they are in other languages [7].

A nonprofit put into Madden what EA left out. The NFL series models dislocated shoulders, broken ribs and ankle sprains, but not concussions [8]. A free mod gives players blurred vision, light sensitivity, nausea, tinnitus and a shaking screen after a hit [8]. Its reach is small. EA Sports declined to comment [8]. Its old tagline was “if it’s in the game, it’s in the game” [8].

The money is following. Mattel, the owner of Barbie and Hot Wheels, launched Mattel Game Studios this week [9]. It unites almost 300 games staff across Los Angeles and Hangzhou [9]. One of its stated jobs is producing original experiences on user-made platforms including Roblox and Fortnite [9].

The authored side had a harder week

Warren Spector announced his retirement after 44 years, 17 full games and nine add-on packs [10][11]. The credits run from Ultima and Thief through Deus Ex to Epic Mickey [10]. His own summary of the work is the line worth keeping. Most of his games sat “in a genre that has had influence beyond what I or anyone else expected” [10]. He told younger developers that games are “not a solved problem yet” [10].

The genre he means is the immersive sim, and it got a new studio the next day. Harvey Smith worked with Spector on Deus Ex and later directed Dishonored 2 [12]. He has announced Black Pony Immersive with former Arkane colleague Ben Horne [12][13]. Microsoft’s closure of Arkane Austin in May 2024 put 96 developers out of work, Smith among them [12]. “Ben and I chose the worst time in history” to start a studio, he said [12]. The pair turned down funding that came with an NFT attached [12].

Small studios keep finding the unplanned bits anyway. Wolf Haus Games is building the open-world cult simulator Join Us with twelve people and no generative AI [14]. A team member’s son asked whether there could be a snake gun [14]. The team already had a tool that scales guns quickly, so it took about half an hour [14]. It is still in the game [14].

Elsewhere the big authored bets kept shrinking. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that Guerrilla Games is stripping the live-service parts out of Horizon Hunters Gathering [15]. Playtest feedback was poor, and it is being rebuilt as a smaller traditional multiplayer game with a story mode [15]. Staff have until December to show executives a milestone [16]. Many will be reassigned to another project that also gets judged at year end [16]. Sony declined to comment [15]. Live service means a game that keeps selling to the same players for years, rather than once. Sony told investors in 2022 it wanted ten such games by 2026, and has since cancelled or closed most of them [15].

Xbox developers rallied in nine cities across the US and Canada on August 18 over the pace of cuts [17]. Organisers put the count at 1,600 jobs already gone, with about as many again planned before the middle of next year [17]. A Bethesda lead character artist said layoffs were rare before Microsoft’s ownership: “all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs” [17].

At EA, workers described a “state of cynicism” after the completed $55bn take-private [18]. The buyers were Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners [18]. One Guardian columnist, who has played The Sims for 25 years, wrote this week that she has stopped [19]. Sony still has no date for the PlayStation 6 [20]. Chief executive Hiroki Totoki blames the memory shortage driven by AI data-centre buying [20].

Alibaba is selling its games unit Lingxi to the private equity firm Trustar Capital [21]. Reuters puts the sale at more than $2bn, citing a person familiar with it and an internal memo [21]. Bloomberg first reported the memo and put the figure at at least $1.5bn [21]. Konami will take Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls off Apple Arcade on August 20 [22]. It switches off entirely on September 3 [22].

Two brighter lines. 2K opened Small Axe Studios in Vancouver, led by an eighteen-year EA veteran, to build a new sports franchise [23]. And the Mesoamerican fantasy game Arco passed 100,000 sales and broke even, two years after launch [24].

The under-covered thread: who is authoring anything now

Bain found that only one in five players actively seek out new titles, and two thirds prefer familiar games and sequels [2]. Asked to choose between story-driven games, open sandbox and user-made content, and multiplayer, no single preference cleared 26% [2]. Focused games aimed at a specific audience succeeded commercially 83% of the time in Bain’s sample of 100 titles since 2023 [2]. Unfocused ones managed 50% [2].

Into that, more authors keep arriving. Former PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida said AI tools are “allowing almost anybody to become a game developer” [25]. He also thinks that means a genuinely tough future for anyone hoping to make money from one [25]. Three Epic veterans announced Immens, a new engine aimed at small teams [26]. Unity and Unreal were used for roughly 70% of Steam’s 2025 releases [26]. Take-Two’s former head of applied AI, now laid off, told The Side Quest he has become a skeptic [27]. “If any of this actually did what people are billing it as, they would not be talking about it,” he said [27]. And the commerce firm Xsolla shipped tools letting studios run their own community hubs, with player-made content and quests, outside Steam and the Epic store [28].

What we still do not know: how Roblox will answer the subcommittee, and whether Guerrilla’s December milestone saves Hunters Gathering. On the Alibaba deal, the memo carried neither the value nor the closing date [21].