Disney refuses to be on Roblox because it’s not safe for children says report

Disney has backed out of any deal to bring its properties to Roblox, despite similar deals with Fortnite and OpenAI.

As the biggest video game platform in the world, and one that’s especially popular with children, Roblox’s popularity has naturally invited a lot of scrutiny.

This year, concerns about child safety reached an all-time high, with lawsuits being filed against the Roblox company for allowing inappropriate content to percolate on the platform. It’s also recently been banned in Russia, with other governments starting to take a closer look as well.

Roblox has made efforts to assuage such concerns, having since added new age verification checks to help prevent children from being contacted by adults or being exposed to any child unfriendly content. But the platform is apparently so much of a liability that Disney is purposefully keeping its distance from it.

Disney has run some promotions in Roblox in the past, where players could acquire items themed on certain properties, like Star Wars and Pirates Of The Caribbean, but the last one of those happened in 2018, to tie in with that year’s Ant-Man And The Wasp movie.

That was before Roblox saw a massive boom from the coronavirus pandemic and yet Disney’s not gone near the platform since. Meanwhile, other companies have partnered with Roblox to design entire games based on popular franchises, such as Sonic The Hedgehog and Sesame Street.

Given how many franchises and characters Disney has, you’d think it’d be all over Roblox and yet, according to a new Variety report, the company has its own safety concerns about the platform.

Why Disney won’t appear on Roblox

As a result, Disney has no formal plans to collaborate with Roblox and nor does it have any sort of presence on the platform. So, any Disney themed games or experiences you might find on Roblox are unofficial.

Variety’s sources also make a point to deny that Disney’s trepidation has anything to do with its partnership with Epic Games and Fortnite, itself another massive gaming platform popular with children, that allows for player-made content.

Disney was already comfortable lending characters from Marvel and Star Wars as Fortnite skins, but it also bought a 5% stake in Epic Games in 2023, investing $1.5 billion as part of a plan to create an ‘expansive and open games and entertainment universe connected to Fortnite.’

Said universe is yet to completely come to fruition, but the investment has yielded a Disneyland Resort themed island, complete with its own mini-games and a recent Simpsons collaboration in the main battle royale mode.

If the Epic Games partnership isn’t interfering with any sort of potential Roblox partnership, then that’s a huge loss for the Roblox company. It’s also ironic considering Disney is perfectly happy to throw a billion dollars at OpenAI instead.

Last week, Disney announced it had entered a three year licensing agreement with OpenAI, which will allow its Sora app (no relation to the Kingdom Hearts character) to draw from Disney’s wealth of properties, with which people can create their own AI generated short videos.

Some of these shorts will even be made available on Disney+, but we don’t need to tell you what a phenomenally short-sighted idea that is. Aside from the general negativity towards generative AI (even golden child Larian Studios isn’t safe from fan blowback), there’s real risk of people using it to create incredibly inappropriate content.

And since a lot of Disney’s output is popular with children, there’s every chance a child will be exposed to something unsuitable involving their favourite characters, which in turn would cause parental upset.

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