What just happened? Roblox, the game creation platform played by more than half of all American children under 16, made an appearance in a recent episode of The Kardashians, but it wasn’t the kind of publicity developer The Roblox Corporation would have appreciated.
Polygon writes that in the premiere of Hulu’s reality television series, which aired on April 14, Kim Kardashian’s son, Saint West, is seen running to his mother while holding his iPad and laughing. It seems he had stumbled across a Roblox ad that featured Kardashian’s crying face. The advertised game claimed to have a ‘new sex tape’ featuring unseen footage from Kim Kardashian’s 2007 sex tape.
We then see Kardashian calling ex-husband Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, to explain what had happened. “Saint was on Roblox yesterday and a f**king thing popped up and he started laughing and was like ‘mommy look,’ and it was a picture of my cry face,” she said. “And it was a game that someone made of Roblox, and it said ‘Kim’s New Sex Tape’ when you clicked on it.”
at first i thought its funny when she cried over a roblox game, then i watched the full clip & i actually feel bad for her 🙁 pic.twitter.com/Zv1gFs12OT
— Aurelia V (@senjatanuklir) April 15, 2022
Since the episode aired, Roblox has said that the video in question never made it into the platform. It has also banned the community developer involved in the incident.
“We have strict moderation and policies to protect our community, including zero tolerance for sexual content of any kind which violates our Community Rules,” Roblox wrote in its statement to Polygon. “The text reference to the tape that got around our filters was quickly taken down and fortunately visible only to an extremely small number of people on the platform. We also swiftly took down the associated experience and banned the community developer involved with the experience.”
Whether that will be enough to satisfy Kardashian remains to be seen. “I have all the time, all the money, and all of the resources to burn them all to the f**king ground,” she said later in the episode.
Roblox became even more popular during the pandemic, adding 35 million monthly active users (MAUs) in just five months. It has an estimated 40 million games and boasted 202 million MAUs as of April 2021.
Earlier this year, Benjamin Simon, better known by his YouTube handle Ruben Sim, was ordered to pay Roblox Corporation $150,000 in damages and banned from playing the game, talking about it in a negative light, and going near the developer’s offices following years of trolling.