Parents who don’t want their children on Roblox should not let them use it, the chief executive of the gigantic gaming platform has said.

The site, which is the most popular in the UK among young gamers aged eight to 12, has been dogged by claims of some children being exposed to explicit or harmful content through its games, alongside multiple reported allegations of bullying and grooming.

But its co-founder and CEO Dave Baszucki insisted that the company is vigilant in protecting its users and pointed out that “tens of millions” of people have “amazing experiences” on the site.

When asked what his message is to parents who don’t want their children on the platform, Mr Baszucki said: “My first message would be, if you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids be on Roblox.”

“That sounds a little counter-intuitive, but I would always trust parents to make their own decisions,” he told BBC News in an exclusive interview.

US-based Roblox is one of the world’s largest games platforms, with more monthly users than Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation combined. In 2024 it averaged more than 80 million players per day – roughly 40% of them below the age of 13. Its vast empire includes some 40 million user-generated games and experiences.

In the UK the Online Safety Act, which comes in to force in April, has strict laws for all tech firms specifically aimed at protecting children from online harms.

But Mr Baszucki says he remains confident in Roblox’s safety tools and insists the firm goes above and beyond to keep its users safe.

“We do in the company take the attitude that any bad, even one bad incident, is one too many,” he says.

“We watch for bullying, we watch for harassment, we filter all of those kinds of things, and I would say behind the scenes, the analysis goes on all the way to, if necessary, reaching out to law enforcement.”

Players who choose not to display what he calls “civility” can face temporary time-outs and longer bans, and Roblox claims to analyse all communications that pass between members on the platform, increasingly using more advanced AI systems and other tech to do so — and anything flagged is sent for further investigation.

In November last year, under 13s were banned from sending direct messages, and also from playing in “hangout experiences” which features chat between players.

However, the BBC was able to create two fake accounts, one aged 15 and one aged 27, on unlinked devices and exchange messages between the two.

While the filters caught our attempts to overtly move the conversation onto a different platform, we found easy ways to re-word requests to chat elsewhere and make suggestions about playing more adult games.

When we showed the Roblox boss these findings, he argued that our example highlighted the comparative safety of Roblox: that people felt they had to take content which might breach Roblox’s rules to other platforms.

“We don’t condone any type of image-sharing on our own platform, and you’ll see us getting more and more, I think, way beyond where the law is on this type of behaviour,” Mr Baszucki says.

He admits there is a delicate balance between encouraging friendships between young people, and blocking opportunities for them come to harm, but says he is confident Roblox can manage both.

We also put to him some Roblox game titles that the BBC has discovered were recommended by the platform to an 11 year-old recently, including:

• ‘Late Night Boys And Girls Club RP’
• ‘Special Forces Simulator”
• ‘Squid Game’
• ‘Shoot down planes…because why not?’

When we asked whether he thought they were appropriate, he said he puts his faith in the platform’s age rating systems.

“One thing that’s really important for the way we do things here, is it’s not just on the title of the experience, it’s literally on the content of the experience as well,” he says.

He insists that when Roblox rates experience, they go through rigorous guidelines and that the company has a “consistent policy” on that.

Mr Baszucki founded the platform with Eric Cassel in 2004 and released it to the public in 2006 – a year before the first Apple iPhone appeared, heralding the start of the smartphone era.

Mr Baszucki describes his younger self as “less of a gamer, and more of an engineer”, and the pair’s first company was an education software provider called Knowledge Revolution. But they soon noticed that kids weren’t only using the product to do their homework.

“They wanted to play and build stuff. They were making houses or ships or scenery, and they wanted to jump in, and all of that learning was the germination of Roblox,” he says.

The name Roblox was a mash-up of the words “robot” and blocks” – and it stuck. The platform grew quickly in popularity – and there were also early warning signs of its future issues.

Mr Cassel noticed some players “starting to act out” and not always behaving in a “civilised” way a couple of months after it launched, recalls Mr Baszucki.

He says the roots of building a “trust and safety system” therefore began “very, very early” and that in those earlier days there were four people acting as safety moderators.

“It kind of is what launched this safety civility foundation,” he adds.

But despite attracting decent numbers, it was a year later, when the firm launched its digital currency Robux, that it really started to make money.

Players buy Robux and use it to purchase accessories and unlock content. Content creators now get 70% of the fee, and the store operates on dynamic pricing, meaning popular items cost more.

Mr Baszucki says there was some initial resistance among the leadership team about Roblox becoming more than a hobby for its players, with the introduction of a digital economy.

Robux stayed, and the firm is now worth $41bn (£31bn).

Its share price has fluctuated since it went public in 2021, but overall Roblox shares are worth about one third more than they were six months ago, at the time of writing. Like many big tech firms its value peaked during Covid, when lockdowns meant millions of people were indoors.

Mr Baszucki compares his experience of building Roblox with how Walt Disney may have felt about his creations.

He describes his job as “a little like having the opportunity he had a long time ago when he was designing the Magic Kingdom”, and is focused on Roblox’s ongoing evolution into a Metaverse-style experience where people go about their daily lives in a virtual world, in avatar form.

They have also been public in their ambitions to eventually attract 10% of the world’s gamers.

Asked to describe Roblox in three words, he replies: “The future of communication.”

We finish our time together playing a couple of his favourite games: Natural Disaster Survival and Dress to Impress.

We use his account and he’s constantly recognised by other players — but we still get smashed to pieces by a blizzard outside the Natural Disasters mansion.

Additional reporting by Ammie Sekhon