We’re excited to introduce two powerful (and frequently requested!) new features, uniquely designed to enable parents to tailor their children’s online experiences with greater precision: Parental Preferences. Whether you’re operationalising regulatory compliance or unlocking deeper customisation for families, Parental Preferences allow you to craft the experiences you envision — with straightforward implementation and, critically, no custom code required.

Parental settings have traditionally been implemented in k-ID using simple toggles — enabled or disabled, on or off, allowed or blocked. But parenting (and compliance) often demands more nuanced options, and many companies have begun to roll out additional parental controls in response to parent demand. Parental Preferences solves this problem by allowing you to create custom preferences with set values instead of just toggles, which can be set by the parent. Here are just a few things you can potentially leverage with Parental Preferences:

• ⏱️ Time Management: Set limits on daily or weekly playtime to promote balanced screen time.

• 💰 Spend Allowances: Manage in-game spending with flexible daily, weekly or monthly budgets.

• 🎯 Mission Limits: Define how many “missions” a player can undertake per day to manage the pace of engagement.

• 👥 Social Limits: Limit the number of new friends/contacts a player can add, or the maximum daily time allowed for social features e.g., chat, to foster healthier social interactions, and even control which categories of users a child can interact with.

Getting started is easy. You can configure Parental Permissions directly in the Developer Portal, setting default values and minimum and maximum bounds to prevent unintended extremes. Implementation is straightforward — and not static. You can quickly update your desired configurations to align with new regulations or evolving family needs anytime, all in just a few clicks.

In addition to numerical preferences, the “Selection” option also lets you present multiple predefined options for parents to choose from. Take content ratings, for example: parents may want to specify the highest rating their child can access from a range of categories such as General Audience (G), Parental Guidance (PG), PG-13, Restricted (R), or Adults Only (NC-17). Using the “Selection” option allows you to define customisable dropdown menus with these options.

What makes this particularly powerful is its configurability: you have complete control over the list of options, and have the ability to localise display names that adapt to the family’s language and region. Imagine a parent in Japan seeing “全年齢対象”, while a parent in South Korea sees “일반 청중(G)”, and a parent in Spain sees “Público general (G)” — providing confidence and clarity for families around the world.

Family Portal Experience

Parents interact with these Parental Preferences through the Family Portal — a user-friendly interface featuring sliders, dropdown menus and editable options. Additionally, parents can review and adjust settings at anytime (relying on you to ensure that these limits are enforced on your end). This helps parents guide their children’s online experiences without friction — and without leaning on support teams to make changes.

This brings a new level of granularity to family settings, empowering parents to balance safety and flexibility in ways that suit their unique circumstances. Such a measured approach is a significant upgrade over the “all or nothing” approach — for example, allowing for nuanced spending controls rather than bluntly blocking all transactions.

Unlock Smarter, Safer & More Compliant Experiences

By moving beyond rigid, binary parental settings, you can deliver more personalised, flexible and more globally compliant experiences that resonate with families worldwide — all without adding engineering complexity.

To begin leveraging Parental Preferences, visit the Developer Portal to configure your options and defaults.