Roblox Moves Closer to the EU’s Strictest Platform Rules

Roblox has reported 48 million average monthly users in the European Union, clearing the 45-million threshold that triggers the strictest tier of the bloc’s content-moderation law, the Digital Services Act, and the European Commission says it is now examining those numbers ahead of a possible formal designation.

Thomas Regnier, the Commission spokesperson for tech sovereignty, confirmed the review after Roblox’s disclosure crossed the mark – “definitely possible,” he called a designation, one that “could come sooner or later” – Reuters reported on July 30, 2026. No designation decision has been taken.

The user count comes from Roblox’s own DSA disclosure page, where the company states that its estimated average number of monthly active recipients in the EU for the six months ending February 13, 2026 is 48 million. Roblox publishes the figure twice a year because the DSA requires every online platform to report EU user numbers so the Commission can identify which services qualify as very large online platforms, the category reserved for services with more than 45 million monthly users in the bloc.

What designation would require of Roblox

A designated platform gets four months to comply with the DSA’s full rulebook, and the obligations go well beyond the user-count disclosure Roblox already files. Under the Commission’s published VLOP framework, Roblox would have to identify, analyse and assess the systemic risks linked to its service, spanning illegal content, fundamental rights, public security, gender-based violence, and the protection of minors and their mental and physical wellbeing, then report those risks to the Commission and put mitigation measures in place.

That could mean changing how the service is designed or how its recommender systems work, or adding internal resources to spot systemic risks. Designated platforms must also:

• establish an internal compliance function and face an independent audit at least once a year
• share data with the Commission and national authorities, and give vetted researchers access to platform data
• offer a recommender-system option that is not based on user profiling
• maintain a publicly available repository of advertisements

The DSA’s general obligations – points of contact for authorities and users, transparency around advertising, recommender systems and moderation decisions – apply from the same four-month deadline.

How the Digital Services Act’s threshold works

The DSA designates platforms and search engines based on the user numbers the companies themselves publish, and it updates those designations as the numbers move. The Commission revokes a designation if a service falls below 45 million monthly users for a full year; Roblox’s own disclosure notes that its DSA figure is an estimate produced solely for compliance with the law’s reporting requirement, calculated differently from the daily-active-user metrics it reports to investors, and that its estimates may change as its methodology evolves.

The enforcement stakes are set out in the Commission’s enforcement framework: fines for breaching DSA obligations are capped at 6% of a provider’s global annual turnover, with periodic penalties of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover for each day a company delays complying with remedies. The Commission’s supervision list shows how actively that framework is being used – AliExpress was fined €550 million on July 20, 2026, TikTok received fresh preliminary findings on July 24, 2026, and X accepted a compliance action plan on July 15, 2026.

The fine print in Roblox’s own disclosure

Roblox’s disclosure page is careful about what the 48-million figure is and is not. The company states the metric “do[es] not correspond with” its own methods for calculating daily active users or their geographic breakdown, and that it “does not otherwise publish EU user metrics.” It also cautions that current-period metrics may not be comparable to prior periods as its data sets and platform features change.

That matters for timing as much as for scale: a designation depends on the Commission’s assessment of the published numbers, not on the company’s investor metrics, and the Commission’s list notes that reported figures are taken “without prejudice to the assessment by the Commission of the methodology used.”

What happens next

Regnier said a designation covering both Roblox and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is “definitely possible” and could “come sooner or later,” since both have announced user numbers above the DSA threshold. Once a designation decision is notified, the designated service has four months to comply with the DSA in full. Roblox’s next twice-yearly user-number update, due under the DSA’s six-month reporting cycle, will show whether the 48-million figure holds.

The scrutiny lands as Roblox’s European scale keeps growing – the same week, the Commission cleared the $55 billion Saudi-led take-private of Electronic Arts (EA ), underlining how much of the games business now runs through Brussels’ rulebooks, as Gaming.net reported on July 24, 2026.