PSA: Best Practices for Game Metadata

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#1

Hey developers,

Roblox’s Search and Discovery team would like to bring to your attention a few points to help ensure your games are as visible and easily discovered as they can be.

Please note that this is only a list of best practices and by no means requirements.

Titles

First and foremost, keep the title of your game consistent! It’s hard to grow a brand if players can’t find what they’re looking for - don’t change your game’s name from “Car Racing Champ” to “Racing Tycoon” to “Fast Track Racing”. Maintaining a consistent brand is important for player retention and growth.

Excessively decorative or distracting titles can also be harmful for retention - if players can’t read the title behind all of the emojis, how can they tell they’re looking at the same game they played earlier?

Descriptions

Game descriptions are important for presenting first-time players with preliminary information about your game and give returning players a sense of what’s new. The first sentence is very important as it may be displayed in search to help inform players.

Be sure to use keywords! They’ll make it easier for your game to be discovered in searches. Be careful not to clutter your description with irrelevant words, though, because it could result in the demotion of your game in searches.

Game Icon

The Game Icon is one of the most important factors in getting your game noticed. Don’t use the default icon! Make an icon that’s at least 512x512 pixels and is unique, original, and relevant to your game. Misleading icons are destructive for retention.

Icons should also be square so that the aspect ratio stays consistent across Roblox.

You can read more about Game Metadata Best Practices through this DevHub article: Publishing Experiences and Places | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

Thanks,
The Search & Discovery Team

193 Likes
Robux counterfeiting factory idea - would you play this and is it against the ToS?
#2

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#3

Avoid Spamming

Do not spam the title with keywords; doing so may result in demotion of your game.

Obby Madness OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY

Game descriptions should not contain irrelevant words. Spamming may result in demotion of your game.

Play our fun granny obby game. Obby obby obby obby obby obby obby adopt me bloxburg arsenal ninja legends parkour tycoon battle disaster survival super hero simulator run jump gun rpg game pokemon wild west space alien piggy baldi granny murder mystery prison life jail break mario zelda dungeon quest.

The article mentions that your game may be “demoted” if it contains lots of spammed words. How do you determine if a description’s words are irrelevant?

I know many games that use this method to be placed high in the game search. Will old games which used this practice no longer show up in game searches?

Are you turning this practice on it’s head, by prioritizing game descriptions with few repeated words?

Rather than being a descriptivist, are you instead enforcing this change using the algorithm to become prescriptivist?

You say it’s only a recommendation of best practices, yet you clearly tell us the game will be punished through the metadata rather than community choice.

Your icon should be unique and original . Using default Roblox icons or taking someone else’s game icon may result in low ranking.

If it’s really only a recommendation, then is the demotion or lower-ranking of a game purely determined by whether a not a community approves, and the algorithm depends on that, or does it skip straight to the game search?

Anyways, thank you!

32 Likes
#4

Thank you for this. I do have a few questions though:

Q: As for titles, many game developers use emojis and prefixed text to indicate updates, sales, and more.
Is Roblox planning to create better features for the game page so developers won’t have to rely on titles?

Q: Off topic but, do you plan on adding a dedicated tags features and genre sort? I feel
this addition will help game developers as we won’t have to rely as much on descriptions
for important information.

18 Likes
#6

I understand that these are good practices, however the issue with games not showing up is still a massive issue. Here is my post about it, and
here is a bug report.

Total support for this! This would be very helpful to roblox developers. This should have been the case for a long time. It would improve my development experience so much. Please add this!

8 Likes
#7

This is a really good tutorial! But, in my opinion adding “Simulator” or “Tycoon” words to your game name boosts it because the majority of the games on the platform are these types and people usually search for that keywords. This tutorial is absolutely what you need to do for a successful game.

I know a lot of games use this keywords in their names and boost their game up. I don’t really think that this should be allowed on the platform. For example there’s tons of RolePlay games use “Simulator” rather than “RP” in their names. Bootcamp games are examples of this.

5 Likes
#8

This Is Awesome!! I am releasing my first game in a few weeks and I had no idea about some of these things like you can get your game demoted and its good to have a nice description to get the readers attention.

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#9

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With this being in the practices of Game Metadata, couldn’t there be a feature or setting when changing the game name by studio or configure place to limit the number of words used in both the title and description? That way, the search engine won’t have to show spammed/botted games that would contain multiple words in the description or title.

^ For example, you can’t use the word “OBBY” or “FOOD” once or twice in a game title and maybe a random limit in the description.

Overall, the article itself is a nice addition to Roblox developers on the forums and on the Developer Hub, I would like to see some more notes and additions for Game Metadata for possibly this article and this article as well for future and current developers. I’ll make sure to star and pin the article whenever the product of my game is finished.

4 Likes
#10

Be careful not to clutter your description with irrelevant words, though, because it could result in the demotion of your game in searches.

With an update to the “Genre” part of the website, developers wouldn’t have to spam “Obby obby obby obby etc.” or put emojis/special characters in their title/description to get recognized, a player could just simply go under a category and look for their game.

In all due respect, the “Genre” part of the website is useless, as most of the genres don’t make sense, and/or haven’t been updated/barely updated since Game Genres were introduced.

While also introducing/re-introducing this feature, you could add “Filter by Genre” back as well. Many people (at least people I know) would use this feature a ton, and it would help developers who are struggling to get players even though they have a good game.

3 Likes
#12

Two questions which I don’t think the article properly addresses:

  • It says to use keywords. Did you mean that we should use keywords in sentences describing the game, or are we allowed to list keywords in the description so long as they are relevant?
  • Are there any plans to add a tag feature? I think it would be highly beneficial to be able to tag your game with perhaps 5-10 keywords that would promote it in the game search bar.
2 Likes
#13

Yes, Finally we can get rid of Spam Games!!!

2 Likes
#15

@zooweemama911 did you noticed that sometimes this games are made by bots, and sometimes they are adopt me free pet scams?

1 Like
#16

This is a really good and important topic to talk about. People these days keep confusing other players with their false ADs. This isn’t really good to click on an AD that promises you something, but actually it doesn’t. Distractive/False info ADs are effective only for a click, but not for a result. (This is my personal opinion.) It’s important to stay clear, short and stand out!

2 Likes
#17

Hmmm just 8 days ago I answered someone’s question on whether tags help your game. Boy do I wish I had this article to just link!

This is really great and it’s also great to hear that there is punishment for games that spam tags!

I think either way you should use keywords in sentences like seen in the example in the article. While I can’t say whether or not you’ll get punished for it, I can say for certain it just looks better and should probably be considered best practice to just have sentences with keywords

3 Likes
#18

May we see website quality of life improvements for official places to put update logs, game credits, and social media links (such as instagram)?

With those moved out of the game description, I think we won’t have any problems avoiding “irrelevant words”.
For example, I don’t know if adding Roblox names to the description as part of game credits is counted as irrelevant and therefore hurting game search-ability.

6 Likes
#19

Would Roblox consider a feature to add tags to your game?

A long time ago Roblox gave you the option to list your own game within a “genre”. Not many people made use of this so I assume that is the reason why it got removed but I do think a tag system could help people to find games within a certain theme or type for example “Combat” , “Tycoon” or “Co-op”.

10 Likes
#21

This is helpful to new developers!

But how should we notify updates?

1 Like
#22

We are working on both things:

  1. A feature to enable effective communication of updates to players on both the game tile and game detail page.
  2. A better way for players to discover games through genres and sub-genres.

I look forward to sharing these new features with all of you in the upcoming months. :slight_smile:

19 Likes
#23

Are we going to get a response on games just not showing up? I detailed the issue above.

It’s good to know that these features may be added in the future. This is going to help us developers a lot.

4 Likes
#24

I struggle a bit with these best practices outlined as such because the game sorts do not reflect these practices. To tell people things not to do while the front page games they see highly do these things feels… misleading at best.

Here’s my 20 games shown first to me when I open the Games tab. Highlighted in GREEN is any game that includes an update it’s it’s title (and does so first). Highlighted in RED is any game that also includes some kind of update/news in it’s title AND the game overflows the text area (most but not all of which no longer show the full name of the game.

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Of 20 games:

  • 5 are green.
  • 8 are red.

This means that 13 of 20 (65%) of my front page does not follow the Best Practices. That no longer sounds like a statistical oddity, and instead begins to sound like, “Best practices if you want your game here one day too.”

It makes sense that updates are a first thing people wanna know. What drags me back to a game that felt stale? An update! The better they can tell me that the more likely they are to retain me. Until Roblox can house update information and inform returning players a game has updated quickly and easily I imagine including update information in the Title will remain actually a best practice for player retention, or at least appear that way based off games that are doing well.

16 Likes