It’s difficult to document replicating this, but my game called Seal’s Kingdom with over 300k visits and a concurrent playercount is consistently getting recommended below a random game with 8k visits and 0 concurrent players called Vanessa’s Kingdom whenever you search for the keyword kingdom. The algorithm clearly has some strange edge cases that ruin the recommendation system, pushing active games down below games that no one ever joins.
Expected behavior
If the algorithm was working correctly I’d assume that since my game is higher in every metric that mine would pop up in the search bar above the other game if you search for the keyword kingdom. Instead, it’s pushed below less relevant content.
It’s probably to keep less popular games from being pushed farther and farther down the search, trying to give everyone’s game a chance at being discovered.
I don’t think this is the case, since it’d be at the expense of games that could otherwise be earning Roblox more money. If you’re wondering if the game being new has anything to do with it, it was made in 2022 while mine was made in 2023, so it has had its chance to grow.
Could I please get some support from Roblox staff on this? There is no reason why a tiny game with worse statistics, a lower like-to-dislike ratio, and no concurrent players should be pushing my game down on the recommendations. It’s not just this one game either, random irrelevant content from similar type games are above mine, this is just the one I can isolate as being better in every metric compared to it. I’m almost to the point where I make a clone of my game to get the Roblox algorithm to treat my game decently again, but then I’d have massive data transfer issues. It’s incredibly frustrating and demotivating to only get a couple of thousand impressions per day despite maintaining a decent concurrent player count.