You may recall a recent news piece regarding a hacker obtaining confidential information from Roblox internal documents. While our concerns rested on contact details at that time, some new details have come to light. Apparently, the company had planned for Tencent to not only hack the gaming platform, but also for the possibility of cloning and bending to the Chinese Censorship put in place.
The Roblox Chinese Internal Presentation, as it’s called, is dated August 2017. It showcases details to employees about the planned Chinese version of the game, LuoBuLeSi, that would be managed with partner Tencent. In essence, it presents information on what the company should expect in terms of risks and opportunities.
While that’s all good and well, it also mentions how the Roblox company expected Tencent to eventually hack the servers and use the information to create a clone game. While LuoBuLeSi was released in China in 2021, it was taken down by Roblox a few months later.
The notes also show how far Roblox was willing to go to enter the Chinese market. They had to follow the rules of Chinese censorship, which means no mention of the country’s leaders, paying attention to avoid disagreements with Taiwan, and not painting a bad history of China. While this isn’t astounding news, it does shed some light on what western companies need to do if they want to enter the eastern market.
The report was shared by Vice, but since it clearly says not to distribute the presentation, we won’t share it here. The presentation is ancient history now, but it’s interesting to see the lengths Roblox were willing to go to, knowing they will be hacked and the game may be cloned.
Don’t forget to read what else was discovered in internal documents a hacker leaked for Roblox.
