Roblox Will Let Kids as Young as 9 Build Games With AI Prompts, Starting July 28

Roblox announced Thursday a new mobile feature called Build that lets users generate a playable game from a simple text prompt, no coding required.

Type something like "let's make a cozy adventure game set in a dense forest," and Build will spit out a working prototype, according to Roblox's own blog post. Users can then tweak it and share it with friends.

The company says the tool runs on "a broad set of AI models, including both open-source and proprietary Roblox models," handling everything from gameplay mechanics to environment design, characters, visual style, and sound.

Who Can Use It, and When

Build enters public alpha testing on July 28, limited initially to users in New Zealand, according to both TechCrunch and Engadget. Roblox says it plans to expand to more regions in the coming months.

The age floor is 9 years old for using the tools at all, with age verification required. But only users 16 and older can publish their AI-generated creations to a global audience, per Roblox's announcement. There will be a free basic version alongside paid options.

A 9-year-old can build a game with AI. A 16-year-old can put it in front of millions of strangers. Roblox is drawing a real line here, which is more than a lot of tech platforms bother to do for kids' products.

But Engadget flagged something important. Roblox's age verification system "didn't get off to a great start." The company still went ahead and launched restricted account tiers last month regardless. If the verification system meant to enforce that 16-and-up publishing line has already had problems, parents have a legitimate reason to ask how airtight it actually is before letting a kid loose on it.

Beyond the kid-safety angle, there's an industry fight brewing over whether tools like this flood platforms with garbage.

Critics argue that lowering the barrier to game development to "type a sentence" will produce an avalanche of low-effort, repetitive AI-generated games, according to TechCrunch. This year's Game Developers Conference State of the Game Industry survey found 52% of game industry professionals believe generative AI is already having a negative impact on the industry, per TechCrunch's reporting.

That's a fair concern from people whose jobs are on the line, and it deserves to be taken at face value rather than dismissed as reflexive tech skepticism. Human developers who spend months building something now have to compete for attention against AI tools that can produce a game in seconds.

Roblox's answer is that its discovery algorithm will bury anything nobody plays. "Our discovery systems are designed to highlight games with long-term retention, which doesn't include AI slop," the company said in its announcement. "The quality of games on the homepage isn't changing: If no one plays it, no one can find it."

That's a reasonable design principle on paper. Whether it actually works is a different question, and one that won't be answerable until Build is live and creators start flooding the platform with prompts. Roblox is grading its own work here, and the company has an obvious financial incentive to say the system will hold up.

The Bigger AI Push

Build isn't happening in a vacuum. Roblox is also developing AI agents to help creators playtest games and pull analytics, expected to roll out in coming months, according to TechCrunch. The company already has an AI foundation model for generating 3D assets, an AI chatbot to help developers, and is working on a scene-generation model that can build entire editable 3D environments from one prompt.

Google, Microsoft, and Tencent have all built similar AI game-creation tools, per TechCrunch, so Roblox isn't out on a limb here. It's chasing an industry trend, not inventing one.

The announcement also lands just after Roblox disclosed it's shutting down Roblox Connect, the avatar-based video-calling feature it introduced in 2023, TechCrunch reported. No reason for that discontinuation was detailed in Roblox's statements.

The open question now is simple: when Build expands beyond New Zealand and the alpha tag comes off, will Roblox's retention-based ranking system actually keep AI slop off the homepage, or will parents and developers find out the hard way that a text prompt and a company blog post aren't the same thing as a working safeguard.