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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Easy way to know if Roblox is safe for children is to ask the following question: Is Roblox available on Nintendo?

Nintendo would never turn away money, unless they feel it would damage their reputation as a company you can trust your children with.

If they had believed Roblox was safe, they would have 100% taken that money.

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Interesting thought experiment - making a Nintendo approved version would put the finger on exactly all problems of "real" Roblox. (But strictly speaking, the logic only works in one direction "If Nintendo, then Safe". But "if not on Nintendo, then unsafe" is not strictly true but maybe good shorthand.)

The interview makes me think of Dupont and Tǝflon. "You are giving thousands of people cancer in your community."

"That's alright, think of the millions who love our products."

"Carry on, sir."

They kinda tried with game builder garage a few years back, It keeps the whole game making and sharing aspect while limiting the damage user generated content can do such as limiting custom assets and needing to get the games number to download it to your system

It may be a good enough simple test, especially for huge titles like Roblox, but I’ve worked with game developers whose titles would have been allowed by Nintendo but who decided it wasn’t worth the investment to create a port to publish for Nintendo devices - lots of games don’t release on all possible platforms for business reasons.

Yeah, it's obviously just a crude razor. What I meant is that if it's not on Nintendo, it's a sign you should be more diligent as a parent. Obviously you should always monitor and ideally play the games your kids play yourself, but I can imagine not all parents do that. The Nintendo test is a reasonable alternative, my mom did it in the 90s and I had enough fun games even if I missed out on a bunch of cool PC and Sony titles.

Agreed, just thought worth pointing out to anyone reading your comment that a game not being on Nintendo doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not child-friendly (lots of people don’t realise that making a game work on different platforms involves actual dev work rather than just an equivalent of “file -> save as -> choose platform”)

> Nintendo would never turn away money, unless they feel it would damage their reputation as a company you can trust your children with.

There's Doom 3 on the Nintendo Switch... so the lines are a bit blurry.

Perhaps, maybe I'm a bad parent but I don't see anything particularly dangerous in Doom 3. It's PEGI 18, but probably fine for teenagers.

Fortnite says hello!

(But yes I generally agree with your point.)

Most games out there are both simultaneously a) safe for kids and b) not available on Nintendo products.

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