Oh boy, the reason Roblox was this famous was that anyone could share their games publicly and people could play

Having a subscription kills Roblox and its ecosystem.

For context, Roblox has 170 million peak concurrent players, All of Steam had 85 (I got this data from someone at hackernews's comment)

This might be the end of Roblox. I hope more roblox's alternative spring up preferably open-source. There is luanti which is a minecraft alternative but I suppose a lot of games can have overlap to luanti and it runs on lua too.

will need*

Wow they reached Stage 3 of enshittification[1] real quick. Now the slow and painful death begins.

[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...

Capitalism: there is always one more shareholder to satisfy

People here in comments seem to not read past the title that editorized, but in a wrong way.

This is basically only requirement to make games available for players under 16 so its certnly done under regulatory pressure because no way on earth they can moderate every game from unpaid users.

To publish to the main 16+ pool I need to do "an age check"? But it seemingly doesn't matter what the result of that check is? I'm confused.

Hacker News is turning into every other platform over time it seems. More and more folks just see a headline and comment rather than understand that headlines are designed to mislead you for clicks.

These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.