December 11, 2025
Somewhere between leftover pie, end-of-year billing panic, and the quiet dread of January calendars, the legal industry received an unexpected holiday gift this season. It did not come wrapped. It came docketed. And its name is MDL 3166, In re: Roblox Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation.
Once marketed as digital Lego, Roblox Corporation now finds itself staring into one of the most emotionally dangerous categories of civil litigation a company can face. As of late 2025, dozens of families across the country have sued the platform, alleging that predators used Roblox’s in-game chat and social features to groom children, migrate conversations to off-platform apps, and in some cases arrange real-world sexual abuse. What parents once saw as a creative sandbox is now being described in pleadings as a digital hunting ground.
On September 18, 2025, plaintiffs asked the JPML to consolidate the federal cases into a single MDL. The Panel heard arguments last week, and based on historical JPML timing, a written order is expected imminently. In other words, the ornament is already hanging. We just do not yet know which way it will fall.
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The factual spine of the litigation is unsettlingly consistent. In April 2025, a Galveston County mother sued after her daughter allegedly met a predator through Roblox, was moved to Discord, and then assaulted offline. In July 2025, two California teens filed separate lawsuits after allegedly being targeted through Roblox and attacked in person. In October 2025, a New Jersey father sued Roblox and Discord after his son was extorted with Robux (Roblox virtual currency) gift cards in exchange for explicit images.
Then the attorneys general arrived. In November 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Roblox, accusing the company of operating as a “digital playground for predators” and misleading parents about safety. Louisiana filed next. Kentucky followed. Florida opened investigations. When multiple state AGs begin moving in formation, it is usually a sign that civil exposure has crossed into regulatory risk.
At the same time, Roblox is fighting a second, financially dangerous line of litigation that runs parallel to the exploitation claims: Robux gambling. In Colvin v. Roblox Corp. in the Northern District of California, parents allege that Roblox knowingly allowed minors to convert in-game currency into gambling credits on third-party casino-style sites while collecting transactional fees along the way. In October 2025, Judge Vince Chhabria let the core negligence and unfair-competition theories survive dismissal. Discovery is ongoing. The implication is simple and unnerving: Roblox may be fighting not one fire, but two—and they are feeding off the same design choices.
And that brings us to the legal ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. For decades, Section 230 has operated as the internet’s diplomatic immunity. Platforms are not treated as publishers of third-party content. If someone commits harm using your site, that harm is usually not your legal problem. Roblox’s position follows that blame the criminals.
Plaintiffs are offering a different story. They are not suing because Roblox failed to delete one bad message fast enough. They are suing over the architecture itself. Age-verification systems that can be bypassed by changing a birthday. Chat tools that pair adult strangers with minors. Private messaging defaults. Monetization systems that reward engagement without regard to who is engaging with whom. Gambling mechanics built on a currency children can accumulate and convert. The argument is simple but potentially precedent-setting: this is not about hosting speech, it is about engineering risk into the product.
As of now, Section 230 remains very much alive—but no longer untouchable. SCOTUS declined to rewrite the statute in Gonzalez v. Google, choosing instead to sidestep the issue and leave the core immunity intact. At the same time, lower courts across the country have begun carving out a critical distinction between claims based on third-party content, which are still largely barred by Section 230, and claims based on platform design, monetization systems, age-verification failures, and safety architecture, which some courts are now allowing to proceed. The result is a legal fault line rather than a clear rule: platforms still enjoy powerful protection for speech they host, but when plaintiffs frame harm as the foreseeable result of how a platform is built and monetized—especially where children are involved—Section 230 is no longer the guaranteed eject button it once was. If courts accept that distinction, Section 230 becomes a cracked shield instead of a force field. If courts reject it, much of the federal litigation could stall before discovery even begins.
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All of that brings us back to the JPML hearing—and what comes next. Here is the clean forecast. There are three futures. Roblox is probably headed into at least one of them.
In the first, and most likely, the MDL is granted. Given the number of federal cases already filed, the tight factual overlap across complaints, and the steady drumbeat of new filings, consolidation fits squarely within traditional JPML criteria. If the Panel grants MDL status, discovery opens (likely in Northern California) sometime in early 2026. Internal moderation policies, incident-report metrics, age-verification testing, safety audits, and engagement-monetization design documents all become fair game. The exploitation cases and the gambling cases start feeding a single it allegedly built systems that made harmful behavior foreseeable and profitable. Bellwethers follow. By late 2026 or early 2027, serious mediation begins. Individual exploitation cases with strong grooming and psychological-injury facts press into the high-six to low-seven-figure range. Aggregate exposure, including state AG resolutions and injunctive relief, drifts toward nine figures. This is the future the plaintiffs’ bar is quietly betting on. The odds of this outcome are better than even.
In the second future, the JPML denies consolidation. The cases fragment across California, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Some judges lean into duty and design. Others lean hard into Section 230 and arbitration. Roblox selectively settles where risk is highest and litigates aggressively where doctrine favors it. Payouts happen, but they are jurisdiction-specific and inconsistent. There is no single global number, no clean inventory exit. This is slower, messier, and far more expensive for everyone involved. Defense teams tolerate it. Plaintiffs still work it. But the scale never fully materializes.
In the third future, Section 230 reasserts dominance. One or two early federal rulings take a broad immunity view and begin dismissing exploitation claims on content-publisher grounds. Arbitration rulings begin to stack. The exploitation inventory weakens. The pressure on Roblox shifts almost entirely to regulators. Texas and Louisiana negotiate injunctive relief. Kentucky pushes civil penalties. California tightens platform-safety requirements legislatively. The gambling cases continue because they look more like classic consumer fraud. The child-exploitation MDL never coheres. This is the winter Roblox’s defense team is dreaming of—but it is not the most likely one.
What makes Roblox different from prior social-media mass torts is not just the severity of the allegations. It is the setting. Roblox does not live in adults’ feeds. It lives in children’s bedrooms. Jurors do not need tutorials to understand the emotional breach. Parents trusted the platform. Children trusted the avatars. The platform sold safety as a feature, not a disclaimer. That story plays with or without experts.
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The numbers behind the Roblox litigation are what quietly keep defense lawyers up at night, even when the headlines focus on the horror stories. Roblox now reports 70-80 million daily active users worldwide, with over 40% under the age of sixteen. Based on current filing velocity and how quickly similar youth-harm dockets have scaled, a mature Roblox MDL would likely settle into the 2,500-10,000 of active plaintiffs, with an outer-bound scenario pushing well beyond that if the gambling claims and exploitation claims ultimately merge. This is not Camp Lejeune volume. But it is far larger and far more dangerous than the social-media addiction dockets that struggled to generate jury traction.
Even more, Roblox is not a thinly capitalized defendant. Depending on market swings, the company’s valuation sits roughly in the $25 to $40 billion range, with annual revenue approaching $4 billion. More important than market cap is liquidity, and here Roblox is well insulated: over $3 billion in cash and short-term investments, with manageable long-term debt. That means Roblox has the financial muscle to absorb a nine-figure global settlement without existential consequence.
That is where the litigation leverage truly lives. If the MDL is granted and the plaintiffs crack the design-versus-content distinction under Section 230, the most serious exploitation cases—those involving documented grooming, threats, coercion, and real-world assault—carry settlement values that can reach into seven figures individually. When those numbers propagate across even a modest inventory of core bellwether cases, the global exposure accelerates fast. The gambling cases, by contrast, generate much lower per-plaintiff numbers—but they scale easily. And scale is what creates settlement inevitability.
For law firms, Roblox is attractive because it checks nearly every modern intake box at once. Household brand. National footprint. Minors. Sex crimes. Gambling. State AGs. Platform design. And now, possibly, an MDL. There are not many dockets that offer that mix at the front end.
For the broader tech industry, Roblox may quietly become the case that tests how far Section 230 can stretch in a world where platforms no longer just host speech—they shape behavior. If Roblox survives with immunity intact, 230 survives another generation. If it doesn’t, this case will be cited in complaints against every youth-facing platform that monetizes engagement while disclaiming responsibility.
So yes, think of this as a holiday gift. Not the kind that sparkles. The kind that changes what the room feels like once it’s been opened.
Craig H. Alinder, Vice President
Office: 802-664-4201 | Email: craig@legalcalls.com
Legal Calls, 2108 N Street, Suite 4809, Sacramento, CA 95816, (877) 853-5801
