CASE STUDY

Arkose Labs Helps Roblox Protect Meaningful Game Engagement

Summary

Customer

Business Problem

  • Proliferation in automated, fake, user account creation
  • Double-digit reduction in account creation conversion rates
  • Bot-generated games adversely affected rankings of legitimate user-created games
  • Redirection of genuine traffic to other websites/platforms
  • Dilution of community engagement experience

Solution

Arkose Labs protects Roblox's online gaming platform through custom Arkose MatchKey challenges that filter out bots and bad actors, while ensuring high engagement rates for genuine users

Results

  • Significant reduction in platform abuse from automated bots
  • No reduction in account creation conversion rates
  • Genuine user-created games ranked as per authentic engagement rates
  • Protection against traffic redirection
  • Meaningful interactions and seamless user engagement experience

Overview

Roblox is one of the most popular user-generated online gaming platforms that attracts users from around the globe. It offers a custom game creation platform where users can create their own games and play from numerous games created by other users. It is popular with kids and teens, clocking over 50 million hours of engagement every month.

The Business Problem

The growing popularity of the Roblox gaming platform began attracting fraudsters who executed automatic scripts to create new accounts and monetize the games’ virtual currency. Fraudsters used bots to create numerous poorly crafted games that would get ranked ahead of the superior user-created games. This adversely affected the game ranking data, disrupted user experience, and diluted player engagement.

Upon close inspection, Roblox noticed a sudden increase in the number of fake, bot-generated user accounts. Apart from disrupting gaming experience, bots redirected genuine traffic from Roblox platform elsewhere. Given the scale of its global operations, redirecting even a small percentage of genuine users, meant a substantial loss for Roblox.

The difference between our past solution and Arkose Labs is night and day for us. Previous solutions created a bad user experience, while Arkose solves our problem with no added friction, and makes it fun for our users.”

The Arkose Labs Solution

Roblox deployed a bot-mitigation solution to protect the platform from bot abuse and monitor account creation conversion rates. However, the solution made user verification challenging, which resulted in double digit reduction in account creation conversion rates. On the other hand, within two weeks of deploying Arkose Labs' bespoke solution, Roblox successfully stopped automated abuse of the platform with no reduction in account creation conversion rates or disruption to user experience.

The key features of the Arkose Labs solution that helped Roblox protect meaningful game engagement include

Arkose MatchKey Challenges

Arkose MatchKey Challenges

The Arkose Labs solution presents Arkose MatchKey challenges to accurately distinguish between a genuine user and a malicious human/bot. This protects the platform from online abuse.

Bespoke, Brand-integrated

Bespoke, Brand-integrated

Instead of using easily available stock pictures for user authentication, Arkose Labs uses Roblox's unique collection of art assets. The unique 3D model approach helps incorporate branded elements from Roblox design collection into creating on-brand Arkose MatchKey challenges. These challenges blend with the platform's design, which help deliver a seamless user experience.

Self-optimized, Step-up

Self-optimized, Step-up

Leveraging real-time insights from the Arkose Detect data and depending on the risk assessment of a user, the Arkose MatchKey challenges automatically step-up. This incrementally wastes time and resources of the attackers and renders their efforts useless.

Breaking the Economics of Attacks

Breaking the Economics of Attacks

To bypass the adaptive stepped-up Arkose MatchKey challenges at scale, attackers must invest in additional resources and spend more time. This breaks the economics of the attacks, making them financially non-viable.

Adaptability

Adaptability

The data from user sessions is fed back into the Arkose Detect, which improves future predictions and helps analysts proactively prevent abuse by adapting to the evolving attack types.

It makes us feel good that we are providing a streamlined experience that works well with our target audience.

Victor Reynolds,

Software Engineer,

Roblox
Roblox logo

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