Documents Show How Roblox Planned To Bend To Chinese Censorship

Last year, Roblox launched a version of its game in China called LuoBuLeSi. Like other Western gaming companies that have entered the lucrative but heavily regulated Chinese market, it had to partner with a Chinese company, Tencent, who would operate the game in the country, and Roblox had to host user data on local servers, as required by law. But newly released internal documents reveal that Roblox assumed and prepared for the possibility that any Chinese partner it worked with could try to hack Roblox. From a report: On top of that, Roblox expected Tencent to copy the game and create its own version of it. "Expect that hacking has already started," one slide in a presentation from 2017, called "China MVP Ideas from Aug Trip; CONFIDENTAL," read. The slide dates from before Roblox ultimately announced a partnership with Tencent. "Expect it to ramp up after a deal is signed, possibly even by partner." The documents also show the steps Roblox had to take in order for its game to comply with Chinese censorship laws: any maps created in the game had to "respect the integrity of the country and not misrepresent the Chinese territory," including by recognizing Beijing's claim of self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, according to a presentation given to Roblox by Tencent. Users and developers also "must not tamper with historical facts' and "must not appear any images or names of national leaders." There is no evidence that Tencent did target Roblox. The documents were originally obtained and then published online this month by a separate, criminal hacker who attempted to extort Roblox. Motherboard is publishing details from the documents despite them being obtained by a criminal hacker because of the overriding public interest in understanding the highly controversial steps major companies might take in order to break into markets in authoritarian countries. Roblox also expected a group of hundreds of people to be working on reverse engineering any code that the company placed on Chinese servers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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