Alabama and West Virginia became the latest states Tuesday to announce a settlement with Roblox over child safety protections on the gaming platform.
The company will pay Alabama $12.2 million, state Attorney General Steve Marshall said, calling the settlement a victory for children and their parents.
"Platforms that host child consumers must do their part to give parents a fighting chance to shield their children from harm," he said in a statement. "While parents will always play the primary role in protecting their children online, we are raising the bar on what we expect from gaming platforms—parents need a partner, not a black box."
The settlement funds will be used to finance school resource officers across the state.
The news comes as Roblox, a social gaming platform with more than 151 million users, finds itself embroiled in legal hot water over alleged child safety issues in its user-made games, including sexual predators who prey on children, and sexually explicit or violent content.
Matt Kaufman, Roblox's chief safety officer, wrote in an email statement that the settlement "reflects a shared commitment to the safety and well-being of Alabama students."
"This resolution supports Alabama’s Safe School Initiative and the vital role of school resource officers, and reinforces our work to set the gold standard for digital safety," Kaufman wrote. "We value this collaboration with the State of Alabama and remain dedicated to our shared goal of helping protect young people online."
West Virginia also announced its own $11 million settlement with Roblox, to be paid out over several years. The funds will be allocated toward safety and education workshops for parents and children in the state, a three-year public safety campaign and a West Virginia-based internet safety specialist who would conduct trainings and coordinate directly with state law enforcement.
“I have two young daughters who love Roblox, so I know how popular it is, but our investigation found serious failures that left children exposed to real danger," West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey said in a statement. "This settlement changes that."
McCuskey told NBC News that Roblox was a cooperative negotiation partner, and that the company acknowledged the validity of the state’s concerns. He noted that throughout the eight month-long investigation, he noticed through his daughters’ play experiences that Roblox was adding safety features even before they were mandated.
“That really showed me that they doing this on their own, which was meaningful to me,” he said in an interview. He added that he believes the safety standard Roblox is creating “can be really a model for other online gaming platforms where kids are.”
“They go [to Roblox] to express their creativity, right? And we don’t want to thwart that, and we don’t want kids to run around the whole world being scared and thinking that everything is dangerous,” McCuskey said. “There needs to be places where they can go and be kids. And Roblox is, quite frankly, in the digital age, one of those places.”
Last week, Nevada became the first state to reach a deal with Roblox with a $12 million settlement.
All of the settlements were negotiated in lieu of official lawsuits from the states.
Under the terms of the recent state settlements, the company pledged to enforce stricter safeguards, including by requiring age verification for all users. It will also expand parental controls, end all encryption on chats for minors, and restrict chats between users over and under age 16 unless they are verified as a "trusted friend."
Users between 13 and 15 years old can add these "trusted friends" via a phone contact importer or a QR code, while users under 13 require parental consent to do so.
Roblox has rolled out a slew of safety protocols in recent months and years, including a suite of parental controls, increasingly strict age verification policies and wholly separate age-based accounts for minors to launch in June.
But the platform has continued to face backlash from parents and officials.
More than 100 families have also sued the company over its alleged failure to prevent children from being groomed or assaulted by predators on Roblox. Their individual lawsuits are now consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
At least seven states also have pending litigation against Roblox.
With the Nevada settlement, Roblox agreed to pay $12.5 million, with the majority to be funneled into children’s programs in the state over the next three years, and the rest to fund a Nevada-based company law enforcement liaison and a two-year online safety awareness campaign.
During a press conference Tuesday, Marshall said some of the changes announced in the Alabama settlement have already been implemented, while others will take place between May 1 and Sept. 1.
He also told NBC News in an interview that the settlement sets a framework for structural changes that he believes will "satisfy significant concerns of attorneys general across the country."
"And so our hope in resolving this quickly was not only protect Alabama kids, but also to be able to be an impetus for other states to obtain similar injunctive relief so that their children likewise can take advantage of these similar safety protections," Marshall said.
A spokesperson for Roblox also told NBC News that the company views its first settlement with Nevada as a "blueprint" for how industry leaders and regulators can work together.
