“The System is Made to Inherently Push Child Gambling in my Opinion”: Child Safety, Monetization, and Moderation on Roblox

User-generated game (UGG) platforms like Roblox are enormously popular among children but are increasingly scrutinized for safety risks, such as gambling-like gameplay features and disturbing game themes such as slavery and Nazi roleplay. Researchers have started to examine harms in UGGs, but little attention has been paid to how game creators themselves consider child safety in their game making practices. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 20 Roblox creators with varied degrees of success. We found that our interviewees observed several types of risks to child players’ safety in their games, such as child-specific deceptive design, gambling-like gameplay, sexual abuse, and scamming. They further reasoned about major causes of these safety risks, such as Roblox's profit-driven monetization model, and leaving the burden of moderation to individual game creators. We discuss implications for platform governance on UGG platforms as well as policymaking.