Chat Restrictions Rolled Out to Australia and NZ

Beyond The Blox

10 December 2025

Adam Whitney

Adam and Anthony looking over a Roblox player interaction where one player is unable to respond to another.

This week marks our final episode before the holiday break, and while we are winding down for the year, Roblox engineers have been hard at work. From the rollout of safety-driven chat restrictions to a suite of powerful new APIs and Studio tools, there is plenty of news to unwrap.

Chat Restrictions Go Live 'Down Under'

Following up on our recent deep dive into safety, the new age-based chat restrictions have officially started rolling out. As of last week, users in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands must complete age verification—either via facial estimation or ID—to access text chat. Once verified, they are placed into specific age-gated chat pools, meaning they can only communicate with users in their own age group or adjacent ones.

This rollout has created some immediate friction. Because these restrictions currently only apply to three countries, users in these regions are effectively isolated from the rest of the global player base. Even if they are verified, they cannot chat with unverified users from other parts of the world. This has led to reports of "quiet" servers and left some moderators with little to do, as they can no longer see messages from age groups outside their permission set. It is a significant shift that developers need to monitor, particularly for social or roleplay experiences where communication is the core loop.

Matchmaking Gets Smarter

To help mitigate this fragmentation, Roblox has introduced a new "Text Chat" signal for matchmaking. This signal prioritizes grouping players who can actually talk to each other, factoring in chat enablement, age verification status, and age group compatibility.

We dove into the default weights for these signals, and it is telling that the "Text Chat" weight is set quite high—comparable to latency. Even more interesting is that the "Connections" (friends) signal has been bumped from 10 to 15, making it by far the most influential factor. It seems Roblox is banking on existing friendships to maintain social engagement while these new safety barriers are erected. However, this does raise questions for developers relying on custom matchmaking logic, such as skill-based systems, which may now have to compete with these aggressive social defaults.

Group Management & Revenue Overhaul

For group owners, managing revenue and collaboration is getting a much-needed upgrade. A new CSV upload feature allows for bulk payouts to up to 20 people at once—a massive quality-of-life improvement for studios paying contractors or staff. Coupled with a cleaner payout workflow that highlights recently paid collaborators, this should reduce the risk of accidental transfers to the wrong users.

We also discussed the new "Private Member List" feature, which allows groups to hide their members from non-members. This is ideal for development teams working in stealth on new projects who want to avoid leaks. Additionally, transferring experience ownership between groups is now possible without selling the entire account, streamlining how professional studios manage their portfolios and acquisitions.

Product Intelligence & Analytics

Roblox is giving developers sharper tools to maximize revenue with the new Product Intelligence APIs. RankProductsAsync and RecommendedTopProductsAsync allow you to personalize which items are shown to players based on their purchase history and likely engagement. It is essentially a "For You" algorithm for your in-game shop, aiming to surface the most relevant items to each player.

On the analytics front, a new MessagingService observability dashboard helps developers track data usage across servers—crucial for games relying heavily on cross-server communication. We also have a new performance dashboard that specifically tracks "Out of Memory" exits, giving us clearer insight into crash causes by place version.

Studio Workflow Improvements

Finally, Studio sees some welcome updates. The Reimport Beta now supports rigs, avatars, bones, and cages, making the iteration loop with Blender much smoother for character artists. The Adaptive Animation beta introduces HumanoidRigDescription to map animations across different rig types seamlessly.

We are also excited about the new StudioTestService, which allows plugin developers to automate and customize play-testing flows. For games with long introduction sequences or complex menus, this service will let you inject state to skip straight to the action during debugging, saving countless hours of manual setup.

That is a wrap for 2025! We will be back on January 14th, 2026. Happy holidays!

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