Washington, DC – July 10, 2024 – Cooley successfully defeated a class action filed by a group of parents who spent money on the Roblox platform and alleged Roblox Corporation, a video game developer, misrepresentation the platform’s safety and family friendly nature.
Litigation partners Tiana Demas and Kyle Wong, special counsel Laura Elliott, senior associate Robby Saldaña and associate Ariana Bustos led the Cooley team representing Roblox.
On October 2, 2023, the plaintiffs filed a first amended class action complaint in the Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego against Roblox. The complaint included claims for intentional misrepresentation, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law, False Advertising Law, Consumer Legal Remedies Act and various state consumer protection laws. On October 20, 2023, Roblox removed the action to the US District Court for the Southern District of California.
On November 21, 2023, the plaintiffs filed a motion to remand the case back to the Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego. Roblox filed a joint motion to stay briefing on Roblox’s motion to dismiss the second amended complaint until decision on the plaintiffs’ motion to remand in response. The court granted the order to stay briefing, and on February 8, 2023, held a hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion to remand. The same day, the court issued an order denying the plaintiffs’ motion to remand, lifting the stay on the briefing, and setting a briefing schedule for the motion to dismiss.
On March 11, 2024, Roblox moved to dismiss all of the plaintiffs’ claims. Roblox advanced multiple arguments in favor of dismissal – including that the claims did not comply with Rule 9(b), the claims failed to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6), and the claims were barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment. As for Rule 9(b), Roblox argued that the alleged misrepresentations all sounded in fraud and did not meet the rule’s heightened pleading standard, as the plaintiffs did not identify what statements they saw, what the statements said or when they saw them. The court agreed with this reasoning and dismissed the entire complaint, finding that the plaintiffs “[did] not specify which of the purported misrepresentations they saw. Rather, they vaguely allege they read Roblox’s ‘Community Guidelines’ and unspecified ‘advertisements’ [and] do not allege where they saw two of the purported misrepresentations.”
Moreover, the court determined that the plaintiffs “likewise [did] not specify when they saw any of the alleged misrepresentations, and they inexplicably claim[ed] to have relied on some statements that had not yet been published when [the plaintiffs] allegedly saw them […] These pleading deficiencies require dismissal under Rule 9(b).”
The decision provides an approach for online gaming platforms facing similar challenges, and it may influence decisions in lawsuits against gaming platforms or other large social media companies for alleged misrepresentations. The court’s holding reiterated the importance of the Rule 9(b) pleading standard in misrepresentation cases and its heightened requirements. The court grounded the Rule 9(b) analysis in identifying the actual statement at issue, where those statements were seen and when – and asserted that a generalized claim of alleged misrepresentations without specific identification is not enough to overcome the Rule 9(b) standard, even for a popular online platform.
The case is Murphy et al. v. Roblox Corporation (3:23-cv-01940).
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