A new way to test before launch: Experience Betas

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators,

We are excited to introduce Experience Betas, a new testing feature designed to give you greater control over feedback collection and your launch strategy. This tool empowers you to gather feedback and data from a smaller audience before making your experience discoverable by our global audience of 151.5 million daily active users (as of Q3 2025). Now you can test new ideas, identify issues, and refine your core loop before opening your experience to the masses.

  • Throttle your audience: Test your experience with a select audience without it appearing on recommendation sorts like Recommended For You on the homepage, while still making your experience accessible, searchable, and linkable. This fulfills a frequent request we’ve heard from creators, that your experience should not be tracked by our Home Recommendations system until you are 100% ready.
  • Iterate at your own pace: While in beta, you can flip your experience back and forth between private and beta as much as you’d like, letting you continue to iterate and improve before taking the experience out of beta. Monitor key analytics and player feedback to identify bugs and areas of improvement before the experience is shown on RFY.

How to start an Experience Beta

To put your experience into beta:

  1. Go to the Experience Dashboard on Creator Hub,
  2. Navigate to Settings,
  3. Set Privacy to ‘Public’, and
  4. Toggle on ‘Enable beta mode’
  5. Click ‘Save Changes.’

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Best practices for running an Experience Beta

While your experience is in beta, you should:

  • Choose who you want feedback from: Consider who your beta testers are going to be. You can invite friends for initial feedback, notify players from your existing community by linking directly to your experience, or use Sponsored Ads to reach an unbiased audience that matches your target demographic.
  • Track your metrics and feedback: Keep a close eye on your Analytics and Feedback Dashboards. Low playtime might indicate a bug or a confusing objective for new players. Enable users to provide feedback in experience by providing them a UI or NPC they can click, which calls the new Player Feedback API. Use this data to pinpoint what needs fixing or clarification.
  • Leverage Funnel Events and Custom Events: Integrate these features with your code to track how users progress through your experience’s first-time user experience (FTUE), the core loop and other gameplay markers to identify where they may be getting stuck or otherwise dropping off

Consider benchmarks for launch: Define what success looks like before you leave. Set clear benchmarks for metrics like average playtime or Day 1 retention. Early betas with only a couple days of content should focus on D1. If your beta is below your KPI target, keep iterating on the gameplay and user experience. When you are confident users find D1 fun, you can build on the core loop, content & features to D7, D30 and monetization goals in future betas. When your beta experience consistently hits all of your goals, it’s a strong signal that your experience is ready to leave beta.

We’d love your feedback

We’d love to hear from you on what’s most important, on what you’d like to see from Experience Betas, and what we should consider working on. Leave us a comment below!

FAQs

  • Will the link to my experience stay the same once it’s out of beta?

    • Yes!

  • Will players know which experiences are in beta? How?

    • By default, players will not have any formal indication that your experience is in beta, to ensure that the players will respond similarly (with similar KPIs) to the general public when the experience is launched. This is especially important for late betas or release candidates where your experience is nearly feature- and content-complete and you are validating that it is ready for full marketing launch.
    • However, you can always inform potential players that your experience is in beta on your Experience Details Page, title, icon, thumbnail, etc. You may choose to do this if your experience is in early beta, with very little content and rough around the edges. You might expect this to affect your KPI reads (e.g. ‘casual’ users may stay away, depressing CTRs on your sponsored ads, and D1 retention might be elevated), but in return you may acquire more ‘friendly’ users who are willing to give you constructive feedback. (To take advantage of that, make sure to provide them the option to give you in-experience feedback via the new Player Feedback API!)

  • How do I target users with Sponsored Ads?

    • Ads Manager can help you reach new users that may be interested in your game. If you just want any player to try your Experience Beta, simply select “Maximize Plays” in the new Ads Manager. To get more specific, you can add targeting in our ‘advanced targeting’ section to select things like location or device type. We’re continuing to expand advanced targeting options to help you reach more specific players, with even more capabilities coming early next year.

  • Do I need to fill in the Maturity & Compliance Questionnaire for an Experience Beta?

    • Yes. Because Experience Betas can be played by members of the public (e.g. reached via Sponsored Ads), you must fill in the Maturity & Compliance Questionnaire, which will generate a content rating for your experience.
    • To find the questionnaire, navigate to: Creator Hub > Creations > Select an experience > Audience > Maturity & Compliance Questionnaire

  • Why can’t anyone play my experience, after I have put it into Beta mode on the Settings page?

    • Firstly, check that you have selected “File > Publish to Roblox” within Studio. If you have only selected “File > Save to Roblox” the experience may be empty or non-playable by others.
    • Secondly, make sure you have submitted the Maturity & Compliance Questionnaire for your experience.

  • Can I invite only specific people to be testers in an Experience Beta?

    • If you intend that your experience can only be accessed by specific people, then you should publish it in Private mode, add those people as members of the Community which owns your experience, and give them access (e.g. by assigning them the default “Tester” role, or a new role you create with the “Playtest all group experiences” permission)
    • If you would like to acquire users via Sponsored Ads and invite specific people to test your beta, then you should publish it in Beta mode, and share the experience’s link with those specific users. They will be able to access it like normal.

  • How often can I re-enable Beta mode after disabling?

    • Your experience can only enter beta mode once every 10 minutes. If you find you are temporarily blocked from re-entering beta, simply wait up to 10 minutes and try again.

  • Why am I still seeing some users attributed to “Home Recommendations” in my “Unique users with plays by source” Analytics chart?

    • This is a known reporting edge case on Desktop. Occasionally, users joining from sources like Sponsored or Continue Playing are mislabeled as “Home Recommendations.” Rest assured this is just a reporting error, and we’ll have a fix in the coming weeks. Your Impressions chart is accurate, and correctly shows 0 Home Recommendation impressions.
186 Likes
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Looks very interesting, we’ve been needing something like this for a while! Some quick questions:

  • While in beta mode, will the recommendations system completely ignore the experience until it is out of beta? Does this mean that as soon as I turn off the beta, it will only consider analytics from that point, and not analytics from during the beta?
  • As a clarification, if an experience does not initially perform well in recommendations, does that mean it’s permanently less/not visible at all on home recommendations, or is it possible for the experience to “revive” itself?
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sounds like a cool feature, shame there won’t be like anyone left to use it

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there will be a lot of people… just less people stealing and copying games

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This is great, we had a rough time while making Jet Fighters because it hit the algorithm in an unexpected time (yes its a thing). We first thought its great, but as we pivoted the game algorithm cohorts changed, therefore giving us less users. Team motivation halted, if we haven’t seen the algorithm at all we would have been fine experimenting with ads.

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this just makes me want to go all in to spite roblox :broken_heart:

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I don’t agree with the changes either but stop harassing random employees

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yeah i agree with this preventing uncopylock games

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Extremely interesting feature. Thanks for sharing

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I don’t see why Roblox engineers should be expected to make public games. If they develop the engine, then they already know how the internals work. If they work on the website, then they don’t really benefit from knowing much about the engine because that’s not part of their job.

Also, you don’t know what kind of private experiences they have. Why would they make their experimental experiences public if no one’s going to play it anyway? This argument is counterproductive and takes time away from focusing on the real issues.

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Other than marketing spend and tech debt, what is the downside to launching an MVP immediately? Is there a long-term harm to a game’s recommendation reach potential if it is launched with “bad stats” and iterated later?

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How is this different from just making a testing place separate from the real game? Kinda seems useless unless your game is actively launching, but making testing places seems superior. Cause if player’s data somehow corrupts or an exploit is found, then you can fix it in the release place and not have to worry about past glitches effecting release.

I feel like I am missing something about this announcement though.

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Otherwise, they have absolutely no clue how their changes actually affect the end-users. This should be trivial to understand.
Not doing so would be like Notch neglecting to play-test his own game in 2010 and just randomly throwing out updates because

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this sounds like a cool feature, i may be using this in the future

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Does this do literally anything other than unlist your game from recommendations?

The phrasing is unclear; it’d make more sense for the toggle to say something like “Hide from recommendations” instead of “Enable Beta mode”

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How do Experience Beta’s play into the Recommendation Algorithm after an Experience leaves Beta? Are all of its Beta statistics, like Day 1 Retention, Average playtime, etc. forfeit? Are Likes/Dislikes reset?

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And making their games public helps how exactly? Who will play their games? Give me one example of an insight that they would get from making their own public games that they couldn’t get from their developer QA team. As I said, no one is going to play the experimental games that some dev makes. How does having a public game with 0 players give you any clue about how your changes affect the platform?

If a game has 0 players, you get 0 feedback. You can’t expect every Roblox engineer to make a successful game just to maybe get a slightly better idea of how their changes affect the platform. Roblox engineers probably don’t make most decisions, rather they implement what they’re told to implement by their higher-ups.

Roblox engineers already work 40 hours a week, so you’re basically telling Roblox engineers that they have to engage in extra work off the clock. That may be easy for a high school kid with little responsibilities, but these engineers are trying to make a living.

So you’re not going to give the benefit of the doubt? You’re just going to assume that not having public games on your profile means that there’s a 0% chance that you have private games that you playtest in?

At best, you’re asking for something unrealistic and not that helpful anyway. All Roblox engineers test their own work; it’s part of their job. I guarantee you, Roblox engineers making public games changes nothing about the platform. It’s not going to influence the decisions of the suits at Roblox. You’re just looking for things to make a problem out of. There’s a reason you’re the only one making this point, because it’s not important.

I don’t see anything wrong with this feature. If you don’t like it then don’t use it. I understand Roblox has been making questionable updates, but you should recognize how you’re just taking out your (valid) frustration on tiny irrelevant details. Roblox engineers making public games makes you feel better, but it objectively changes nothing.

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This is equivalent to just using two datastores

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How can likes & dislikes be managed for betas? As you’re developing a game, issues and pain points are likely and users may be more inclined to just leave a dislike due to unfinished content. Those dislikes are lasting and for short betas the effect could be reduced by getting more likes, but for longer standing betas the like percentage may end up much lower than what’s actually representative of the complete product.

This statistic is pretty important as it’s shown next to the game’s ccu, and may have an influence on a user’s first impression.

8 Likes