Roblox Bans Popular Ukrainian Roblox Game. Community possibly enraged?

Throughout the history of the well renown game Roblox made by Roblox Corporation, the Company has always been infamous for taking away things from the community that should have not been taken away from in the first place, whether that being a simple drawing game, to the entirety of censoring all “profanic” language throughout the platform. Roblox Corporation has always been known to be the community’s number one enemy, and today two games on the platform have been taken down because of this injustice from the company.

On September 30th, 2022 Roblox had taken down a game on the platform revolving around the events of the Ukrainian war. This game was called War on Lakriv. It was released in February of this year and had clocked up to 90,000 players in the first two weeks it was released. While the name is very much fake, and has nothing to do with the Ukrainian War, the game itself was very much realistic to the happenings of the war itself, from the invasion and capturing of Kherson, to the bombing of Maripul, to the most recent events of the retake of Izyum.

The game that was banned, was a first person shooter where you play as a Russian or Ukrainian soldier, once you pick your faction you are then given the option to either be a regular soldier or become a heavy machinery vehicle. Once you choose your allegiance you are then spawned into a randomly allocated map that was allocated from a list of all the cities that took place in the current Ukrainian War. After you are given a map you are then given the option to either one, spawn into a bombing zone or outside of bombing zone. Or two in one of the key zone checkpoints that your faction must take over. Then at this point you are put into a virtual battlefield of pure slaughter, tragedy, and gore that destroy every single one of Roblox’s guidelines.

The reason for Roblox taking down the game according to a BBC news interview with A Roblox spokesman: “We have strict Community Standards which govern the portrayal of real-world events. Both of the experiences in question have been removed for violating our standards following an assessment by our moderation team.”

This approach to the said situation seems completely understandable to the situation at hand with them taking down a game that violates their guidelines because of the game portraying “real-world events,” however, Roblox giving their attention to this over what needs to be addressed and fixed is outrageous! One of the core reasons why the Roblox community despises the company is because of it not fixing the multitude of issues with the game. With reasons Including not getting a graphical update since 2018, Chat Censorship issues, and a Multitude of games that are being endorsed that OBVIOUSLY violate the Roblox TOS with things that include: Murder, Gore, Profanity, Adultery, Racism, Sexism, Genocide, etc. etc.

While Roblox has always been depicted as the enemy to the community, this achievement has been a start to what we hope to see way more of in the future, and while they can’t change their past as a corporation. They can always try for once listen to their community and improve upon their mistakes as a corporation. With this Some may think that the game War on Lakriv was not needed to be taken off the platform completely or it could have at least just been whitelisted to only people of higher age on the platform because this game is one of the most historically accurate game on the platform, they are completely right, this game may have been a violation to Roblox’s TOS but it has been proven time and time again that Roblox Corporation abuses their power, and only enforces when they want to. As IB learners here at City can learn from this that if we plan on pursuing relationships small or large that we are to be Principled, and follow not only others rules but our own, along with being open minded to change what is not right about ourselves or something we are involved in.