Boost Your Discovery by Building Games People Want to Play

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Hi Creators,

I’m John Ciancutti, Chief Growth Officer at Roblox. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we help more people find great games, and how we help creators build lasting businesses around them.

Following our June update on Recommended For You (RFY), we’ve been listening closely to your feedback and questions. We’re testing an update that will better recognize long-term player value: games players choose to return to over time, and where players find value in making purchases.

We expect to update RFY in late August or early September, and we’ll share more when this update launches. To prepare for this update and get the most out of discovery on Home, follow our guidance below.

How to Get Discovered on Roblox

The most important thing is to build games people want to play, and keep playing.

When you make a game that players enjoy enough to come back to, share with friends, and make part of their routine, you’re building the foundation for a sustainable business. On top of that foundation, monetization helps you invest more in that game. Both long term retention and monetization drive impressions on Roblox.

The clearest path is this: if your game has strong retention, focus on building thoughtful, sustainable monetization that adds value for the players who already love it. If retention is low, focus first on making the core gameplay experience more fun, clear, and rewarding.

Start With Your Players

Open Creator Analytics Overview Page, and Creator Analytics > Acquisition > Home Recommendations to understand how your experience is performing today. Then use this simple rule of thumb:

If your game has low retention: focus on core gameplay

Monetization alone can’t create a sustainable game if players aren’t enjoying the experience enough to stay and return.

Start by asking: what would make a new player want to play and come back tomorrow or play with their friends?

Focus on:

  • A great first session. Make it easy to understand what to do, remove early friction, and give players a reason to keep going.
  • A satisfying core loop. Make the moment-to-moment gameplay fun, clear, and rewarding.
  • Reasons to return. Give players meaningful goals, progression, social play, fresh content, and improvements that make each new session feel worthwhile.
  • Listening and iterating. Fix problems, learn from player feedback and analytics, and keep making the game better.

Your first priority isn’t to optimize a single metric. It’s to build a game people want to play again.

Explore retention and discovery resources here.

If your game has high retention: build sustainable monetization

If players are already returning, you have something valuable. The next opportunity is to give those players optional, meaningful ways to support and deepen their game, without undermining the gameplay that brought them back.

Focus on:

  • Value players can feel. Offer items, passes, developer products, subscriptions, or rewarded video ads that are clear, useful, and connected to how people play.
  • Natural moments to purchase. Integrate offers into progression and player goals rather than interrupting gameplay or putting enjoyment behind a paywall.
  • Choice and trust. Design monetization to feel fair and transparent. A lasting value comes from players who feel good about returning and spending over time.
  • Keep investing in the game. Continue shipping content, improvements, and new reasons to play so your community sees the value of staying engaged.

Thoughtful monetization helps a strong game grow sustainably. It supports your ability to keep improving the game, and can help unlock more opportunity through Home recommendations.

Explore monetization resources here.

Create For Lasting Play

As a reminder, there’s no single metric or shortcut that makes a game successful. As always, Home recommendations consider a range of signals to understand whether an experience is creating value over time, and the best approach is not to chase one number.

Create something players love. Help them discover reasons to return. When you have strong retention, add monetization that respects and improves the player experience.

Visit Creator Analytics Overview, and Creator Analytics > Acquisition > Home Recommendations to see where your game is strong and where to focus next. We’ll continue to share meaningful updates to RFY as we make them. We welcome your feedback and questions below.

FAQs

My game is strong only on retention, will I still receive Home recommendations?

  • Yes. Games that are strong in only one area—either retention or monetization—will continue to receive Home recommendation impressions.

    However, games that perform well in both retention and monetization may receive broader distribution. As a result, games that are strong in only one area may see some changes to their Home recommendation distribution.

    We’re sharing this update now so you have time to optimize your game and maximize the Home recommendation impressions you receive.

How do benchmark games impact discovery algorithms and Home recommendations?

  • Benchmarks and benchmark games do not impact the recommendation algorithm, but are meant to provide you with a point of comparison on the creator analytics dashboard. Benchmark helps you to identify signals that are low as areas of opportunity.

What factors influence Home recommendation impressions?

  • There are 4 factors that impact how many Home recommendation impressions each game gets:

    1. What you do (changes to gameplay, updates) influencing signals of Home recommendations,
    2. What Roblox does or Discovery algorithm changes (we share any meaningful changes/updates transparently),
    3. Total users or people visiting Roblox Home (seasonality). There are many forms of seasonality: weekly seasonality which usually peak on a Saturday and lower during weekdays, and summer/back to school seasonality, holiday seasonality, and
    4. If other games are significantly more successful at engaging and monetizing players, your game’s distribution may decrease, even if your own signals remain steady.

When will these changes to the Discovery algorithm take effect?

  • We are looking to target the end of August or early September. As always, we will share when we launch.
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Looking at the algorithm changes, I think Roblox might be looking for a more sustainable business nowadays!

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What about possibly giving R6 games the over 18 rate as well?

There’s tons of R6 games that bring many paying players, especially over 18, to the Roblox platform, for example Deepwoken, The Strongest Battlegrounds and Blade Ball. I also know of many in-development R6 fighting games that have been given the choice of being shunned away from continuing development or continuing development for another year just to support only R15 by reworking thousands of animations, VFX, systems and coding just to lose the style and aesthetics of R6 for 42% more income for 18+ users. However, Blade Ball attempted to switch to R15 and saw a massive decline in their playerbase and had to revert the update. Many 18+ users, me included, love both R6 and R15 games, and would especially continue playing Deepwoken for instance in R6, I prefer it in R6 and would continue spending money to play it as R6. They shouldn’t be shunned to continue developing on the platform and bringing many paying users to the platform just for using R6.

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I dunno how much good this advice does when nearly every category on the Games page is filled with the same handful of games, and search gives you maybe ten vaguely relevant results before feeding you those same games again.

Creators are being told to prove that players want their games through retention and monetization, but new and smaller games need meaningful discovery before they can generate either of those. Otherwise the games already receiving most of the exposure simply collect more data, earn more impressions, and continue crowding everything else out.

People can’t discover the games they actually want to play if Roblox won’t let them meaningfully look for them.

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How about you let us boost our discovery by letting us make games for ALL ages and not just 16+??? REMOVE THE AGE-GATING AND 100,000R$ REQUIREMENT!!!

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this is all about home reccomendations not charts or search

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Doubling down on sustainability, huh?

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You destroyed the algorithm and now after you realised how badly your changes impacted the platform you make this useless announcement /e laugh

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Good read! I’m glad Roblox has been working towards making sure creators who create meaningful and engaging games are rewarded the most. I felt I’ve been able to play a vast majority more games outside my usual genre for once in many many years, these last months.

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Boost your platform by allowing players to chat with each other.

Roblox has been swamping developers with updates that directly harm our ability to reach and engage with our audience for a year now. Your algorithm, your chat, your social features. It’s simply out of our hands.

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Why should developers put effort into ‘games people want to play’ when your company will at whim decide to wipe out genres by implementing palantir ID checks, arbitrarily favors games that fit your idea of the ‘metaverse’, subject games that have existed for 3+ years with random moderation takedowns, and implement increasingly requirements just to get our games visible?

When you have 60+ year old boomers deciding to pay games that feature rthro hands and feet more money than games with custom artstyles and unique visions, why should developers put any effort into originality instead of just slopmaxxing? You talk about how you want older age groups, more serious games, less brainrot slop, yet every platform decision you make pushes people away from making the games they want to.

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Why not go back to the old algorithm? It seemed much better. I feel like it’s almost impossible for an indie dev to break into the market now without a huge investment in ads. It used to be more accessible.

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This feels like a damage control post to try and recover their stock seeing as it has fallen by 70% in the past week. After blaming the developers for not making “viral” games that earn money, this is how Roblox chooses to respond?

Your first priority isn’t to optimize a single metric. It’s to build a game people want to play again.

That is if we can even get our target audience to play the game because the age-gating, requirement to give your ID and face to 60+ year old men and ridiculous publishing requirements prevents this. People can’t play again if they can’t access the game in the first place. That is if your game even gets picked up by the algorithm. If your game isn’t what’s popular (such as AI slop or cashgrabs), then it is simply thrown off the algorithm and left to die. Works of genuine passion are simply thrown off and forgotten about in favour of vibecoded slop engineered to squeeze every last penny out of your credit card. The publishing requirements make it much harder for niche games to even reach all ages. A small game cannot easily gain 500+ 16+ age-checked spenders from thin air within 60 days, and your game is expected to reach that in 60 days to even have a chance.

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Home recs still recycle the same handful of games that already dominate Charts and repeatedly get injected into search results.

Yeah this post is specifically about Home recommendations, but the larger discovery problem affects Home, Charts, and search alike: the same bakers dozen games are promoted across nearly every section of the platform. And fixing that lack of variety would improve Home recommendations far more than telling creators to optimize retention and monetization for a chance to appear beside the games already shown everywhere else. Roblox’s discovery surfaces all pour into the same little algorithmic cesspool.

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This REALLY hurts games designed for niche audiences. An example would be my game Empire Clash, which has a “historical” setting and quite complex gameplay. Most of the Roblox audience is looking for casual games, which is fine, but when they play a complex niche game like ours, they normally leave fairly early on. However, the players that enjoy games like ours stay for a really long time, spend a lot, and retain really well.

With the old algorithm, we were able to make up for the player churn due to being a complex niche title with really high monetization and engagement from the players who enjoy this type of game. We have seen a decrease in home recommendations by almost 50% out of nowhere starting in late February, presumably when the new algorithm went live, even though our stats did not change.

I would really encourage Roblox to rethink large algorithm shifts like this and attempt a more balanced and nuanced approach that doesn’t just assume a game is a “cash grab slop game” just because it has good monetization and low retention. A lot of games like mine designed for niche audiences will get lost on the crossfire and the platform will lose a lot of its game variety as a result.

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Yup.. I think Roblox is trying to fix their BAD decisions .. mostly moderation.. that led to Player Revolt.

If Roblox only listened to the players & DEV’s in the beginning.. they wouldn’t be in this position.

This is also good advice from Roblox… but it doesn’t help when they make bad decisions - that is equivalent to them shooting themselves in the foot… and players/Devs are skeptic if they are going to shoot themselves in the other foot too.

I really do hope Roblox recovers.. but the Exec’s need to run a better ship.. for Players.. not just Investors.

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With all due respect, how about doing the bare minimum for developers by for example reducing the publishing fee to a correct amount and making it so we can refund it even if we don’t get 100 ‘highly engaged’ players for the 90 days.
Seriously, if you want game developers to make any kind of games, Roblox could try… I dont know, maybe viewing us as actual human beings instead of sources that it can exploit to maximize profits? Or is that too much to expect from a wonderful corporation such as this?

I’m pretty sure that even the investors would rather see the “Powering Imagination” than the “Developers Powering Our Profits” everyone’s seeing right now.

Instead of investing into the marketplace and other cosmetic stuff, Roblox could invest into actually improving the engine and making it worth the effort for a change.

Places where Roblox could improve
  1. Rendering engine(Custom shaders, more control over rendering, ex.: hiding specific objects or models and its descendants, better viewportframes)
  2. Physics engine(Support for custom physics functionality/engines, pausing physics for specific assemblies, timescale option)
  3. Moderation, I could list a thousand things wrong with it, but for now I will just say that AI moderaton is way too inaccurate to be used on the scale it is being used right now.
  4. Overall stability of Roblox Studio(There are frequent issues with the toolbox and the new explorer UI that have never been actually fixed despite existing for months)
  5. More control over UI(UI shaders, UI masking for text and more, etc.)
  6. More flexibility for game features and content(less restrictions, for example allowing curse words in games could be pretty awesome, and instead of age checks, there could be a warning/disclaimer about sensitive content that pops up when a player clicks play, and the player would need to acknowledge it before playing the game.

I’m sure other people can find even more stuff Roblox could improve on, there are already a lot of feature requests dating back to as far as 2018 that have a lot of awesome features that we would love to see being implemented, so please, go and check those out, the people who posted those can explain that stuff better than I ever could.

also don’t tell me that this is the wrong category for this, cause I know, I’m just writing examples to make a point and to try to help Roblox do a good thing.

Maybe the issue isn’t the developers and the players but the Roblox platform being so horrible that people who literally grew up on it would rather switch to any other competitor than tolerate this.

I don’t even know why I’m writing this post, I already know and feel that it will either be removed or ignored completely just like the thousands of other posts like this, I guess I’m just too hopeful…

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I often find myself wanting to create games that would fit very nicely into the Roblox ecosystem, but cannot proceed due to Roblox enforced policies.

I have games I’d love to create that would fit a more mature audience (not going overboard with violence or 18+, of course), but cannot due to existing policies.

And some games that would usually fit both the younger and older audiences also cannot be created due to the Free Form Creation policy. (which would be perfectly doable with moderation! Roblox has changed a lot from what it used to be, most games now have moderation teams of their own, it’s extremely limiting to expect games to cover for every single situation by blocking features)

Are there any plans to address these or consider implementing appropriate checks via something like the PolicyService?

Adding 2D in the future will not be very helpful if the current moderation limitations don’t change.

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When you make a platform that players and developers are constantly restricted by, banned by faulty moderation with a lacking appeals system, with poor UX across the platform, and a system that seems to ignore critique while doubling down on poor investments, you create a foundation of distrust and an unsustainable business.

A part of my routine on Roblox was to play an aim trainer before playing Arsenal. Yet, this routine was destroyed due to Roblox restricting games more and more: @captiongoosebut Please do the Questionaire to Allow people to play Arcade FPS v1.1 [3D Aim Trainer]. The developer is inactive, and thus, I’m unable to physically play the game. But consistent erosion of culture, restrictions, issues, and questionable investments make me not want to play Roblox at all.

The clearest path is this: if your platform has strong trust with the community, if you tackle your issues of safety with better UX, if you tackle your reputation at large without eroding the people and culture that made you.. we could have a stronger, more profitable, Roblox.

It really Starts With Your Players.
If your platform is losing stock: focus on why people come to Roblox: Games.
Start by asking: do players use Moments? Why are we investing in this?

Focus on:

  • Rebuilding trust with the community
  • Features on the roadmap and the backlog of feature requests instead of AI investor slop product investments that people don’t use
  • Your reputation as a limited engine with a child-focused video game platform with safety issues that serious developers don’t want to touch with a 50-foot pole. But do that without eroding your own culture.

Your first priority isn’t to chase the metaverse. It’s to build a platform people want to come to.

I feel like the answers are in the feature requests and whatnot.
My history of topics or otherwise.

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