Roblox shuts down Connect video calling service, shifts to Party Voice

Roblox shut down the calling APIs behind Roblox Connect on July 15, ending the video chat feature the company launched in 2023 for avatar-to-avatar conversations in a shared virtual space. Creators were told to move to Party Voice, which Roblox said better fit how people actually use the platform today.

Roblox Connect first reached developers on November 14, 2023, after a preview at Roblox’s Developers Conference in September that year. The company pitched it as an immersive way for users to call friends and talk as their avatars while moving around together in the same virtual space, with the technology open-sourced so creators could add synchronous voice and avatar communication to their own experiences. At launch, it worked on mobile and desktop and was limited to users age 13 and older who had voice access through phone verification or ID verification.

The shutdown covered the Connect calling APIs, including SocialService:CanSendCallInviteAsync, PromptPhoneBook, PhoneBookPromptClosed, OnCallInviteInvoked and CallInviteStateChanged. After July 15, CanSendCallInviteAsync was set to always return false, and any calling interface or flow built on top of those APIs was expected to stop working, according to Roblox’s developer guidance. Roblox also said only experiences more than a week old could use the calling APIs.

The feature had a rough start. Roblox temporarily disabled the calling APIs on November 16, 2023, after a bug, then restored them on November 20. That instability now sits beside a broader 2025 and 2026 shift toward age-based communication controls, including new checks for chat and other trust-and-safety tools, as Roblox tightens how young users can talk to each other on the platform.

Reaction in the Roblox Developer Forum was blunt. Some creators said the feature saw little use and treated the shutdown as inevitable. Others mocked the loss in more personal terms, including jokes about no longer being able to call a “Roblox gf.” The response captured the gap Roblox has repeatedly faced: its ambitions for richer, metaverse-style social communication have been more expansive than the habits most young users seem willing to adopt.