UPDATE: We managed to completely stabilize and regrow our portfolio now and assume this was a temporary setback as the new algorithm needed time to gather data. From personal experience, the algorithm now seems to be in a very healthy state!
The algorithm as it stands seems extremely unstable and literally impossible to grow on - it’s almost as if it’s constantly recommending different games for a few hours on rotation, leading to temporarily CCUs increases that then completely tanking them. The Top 100 games list has never been this unstable, and is everything but sustainable given it creates unrealistic expectations and leads to this rollercoaster of metrics that completely affect the heath of games and make it rough for studios like ours to operate without knowing where our visits will be tomorrow.
Below you can see Carry A Friend (https://www.roblox.com/games/14448662003/Carry-A-Friend, one of our games that’s been exploding to crazy numbers today, and that as we speak, is completely tanking (it fell 28 positions so far (still going) in platform share in the matter of a few minutes, this is everything but natural), almost as if the algorithm stopped recommending it all of a sudden.
It seems like we’re not the only ones being affected either, as I’ve seen other people bring this up on Twitter (example here: https://twitter.com/2Steady4U/status/1779550854279786845). Would definitely appreciate if this situation is looked into and fixes are released to this algorithm, because we’re seeing major financial losses due this constant rollercoaster of metrics (that seems to have started midweek this past week), and it’s extremely demotivating to keep trying to fight something that at this point is unpredictable and impossible to understand.
Game had 0 players, slowly increased up to 900 CCUs, now fell back to 140s.
However I don’t think that this is a bug. The algorithm is always changing and favoring different metrics over time and we saw a huge boost with increasing some metrics however also saw a decrease with some other metrics being below average. The test traffic is also very visible with the current recommendation system.
This is a huge problem for smaller groups like ours, however I don’t think that this is a bug. Social media platforms (or Roblox in this case) seems to do these analytics based evolving algorithms a lot. I’ll enable notifications for this post anyways to see the replies, I’ll be surprised if this was not intentional.
We’re also seeing the same issue with our games. But yeah, we’re not the only ones, I’ve been monitoring our competitors throughout our genre and they’re experiencing similar change in traction. Looking at our graph it did seem to start early last week when the homepage was updated. I have a feeling that may have had something to do with it, but I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve also had the same issue with one of my games, player count was stable around an hour ago but all of a sudden dropped by over 100+ in 10 minutes and has been steadily declining since. I don’t understand why the game would be dropped by the algorithm considering it was performing extremely well in the past few days.
Exact same decline happened to me. Game was stable for a few hours then suddenly dropped 200-300 players randomly. Noticed this started a few days ago too.
Same thing happened with plane crazy since a few days ago.
The game is being killed despite it doing better than ever.
A lot progress from the last few years of getting the game this big is being lost here with a big revenue loss for the future which prevents me from being able to pay the developers working for me.
Experienced a 30% drop from our expected player counts. Very similar to the bug that happened last week where we dropped a significant amount of players.
Despite many updates and trying everything, we are losing so many players that we’re now forced to let go off our developers and soon enter a state of development hibernation.
It’s affecting my position as a full time developer on the website I’ve dedicated 15 years to.
No large spike on our end, but as the changes went live on the 8th we lost over 30% of our players, and this has caused our update at the end of the week to be the worst performing update we’ve ever put out since our release in December.
The algorithm change that was made on friday started killing my game for quite literally no reason. I publish frequent updates and each time that is done, my stats become better. My game was a top performer in almost every aspect, and most importantly, monetization.
My game is currently ranked #215 on top earning sort, while having 950 CCUs
While games sorted by CCUs from Highest to Lowest, around rank #215, have around 2.4K - 2.7K ccus.
I do understand there are different target audiences and such, but previously my game had 2K - 3K player count for months, and was earning lots of money for the Roblox Corporation and Myself without a problem.
How does it make sense for algorithm to just throw away it’s top earning games like that?
For years and years, for small experiences, the same games have been in this little tab, including Plane Crazy. I saw you reply and took a look, and plane crazy is not there anymore, so that is my guess
Whatever roblox did needs to be reverted because games shouldn’t be punished like this by this bug, a lot of games have been growing steadily for months → years and all of a sudden they are dropping CCU like flies for no reason. It’s completely unnatural decreases in playercounts and developers can’t do anything about it until the issue is fixed.
We saw an increase in CCU (doubling), and still remains much higher than usual.
I think the algorithm is being changed to favor smaller experiences. I’ve been seeing lots of small experiences on my home page feed.
Before only the big (boring) games were being recommended at all times.
Also happened to me… but I can see why it happened to me though, the retention metrics literally halved, some even went down 4x. It used to average 500-750 CCUs and now rarely gets over 50 CCUs, averaging 20 CCUs. It’s really frustrating but I understand why it’s failing right now, I just don’t get why the retention would be so high before and now being at such a low point.
Avg. playtime also dropped with my retention drop.
Roblox was doing some A/B testing with different Home Page layouts. One of which pushed Continue and Friends Playing down 4 rows which might explain your drop in Retention. Many others are experiencing similar effects and I hope Roblox reverts this change as Continue Playing should always be at the top in my opinion.
