As a Roblox Developer, it is VERY VERY difficult now to get your smaller game up and running. The removal of the categories on the game page has caused MANY problems to both the players and the developers. The removal of the categories system completely shadows newer and lesser known games, while front page games continue to flourish. I believe everyone is entitled to get their game recognized. Not only to benefit themselves but greatly benefit Roblox as well. For example, great games that are less popular will be easier to find, thus resulting in it climbing to the front page, causing more players to spend robux thus giving money to both Robloxand its developers.
Me as a Roblox developer and a player, its very difficult to find new games. Games like jailbreak, and bloxburg are GREAT games don’t get me wrong, but after a while they get boring and I want to try new things. However its pretty much impossible unless I scroll for 15-20 minutes to find nice games that only have 4-5 players. I find myself playing more “underground” or lesser known games than I play mainstream frontpage games like phantom forces. Not to mention that the majority of front page games today are all “simulators”, which I myself do not enjoy.
I’m a big fan of Phantom Forces, but after playing it so much, I get bored, and if we had categories back, I’d simply go to FPS category and find a new shooter. I want to do a group raid with my live stream? Nope cant because the military category removed. I want to enjoy a casual driving game other than “Driving Simulator”, oh well too bad because the Town and City category is gone.
Basically what I am saying is its very difficult for the PLAYER to discover new games unless the developer sinks THOUSANDS of robux into advertisements. Its very difficult for the DEVELOPER to get his/her game out there unless they somehow get lucky OR they spend thousands into sponsors or advertisements. At the end of the day, each game on Roblox that is worthy of reaching more than 100 players will be making Roblox money anyways, so why stop them from doing that by pushing them under the rug by moving categories.
I may have not got my point across in an effective way, but to wrap things up, me and all of my friends both miss this feature, and due to the removal we can only play the same games over and over. We’d like this feature to return so that all players can enjoy Roblox and its creative freedom that players deliver to this site.
I wish they were phasing out game categories for the eventual arrival of “user generated game tags”. There are too many niches for a curated category system to work efficiently going forward.
I don’t want categories back, I want players to choose tags for games so players on the games page would be able to look through the most popular tags, and many other tag sorts. Roblox should continue to buff their algorithm for game searching.
If anything they should add an up-and-coming category to the games page similar to the popular category except that it automatically excludes all games that already have more than X amount of place visits, this would give new games free visibility while also giving the players an easy to access list of games they haven’t played yet without having to go through pages and pages of games they already played.
It could certainly replace the Top Earning category which currently only is the Popular-category renamed and slightly reshuffled as it currently is completly useless for the players and at best only gives some insight for other developers which monetization methods are the most effective.
This, so much this. I can’t explain how much I relied on game categories. Be it launching a game and trying to get it on the game categories front page, or even searching for fun games to play. Now-a-days I can’t find any new or interesting games because the game categories are gone, and its almost always the same stuff on the front page. This leaves a very small selection of games for both veteran players, and new players who might not find something that suits their taste on the front page.
I mean I know everybody in the world didn’t use it but I used it when I wanted to find a new fighting or adventure game to play.
Now I go onto the front page and I mostly see town and city games. A genre I’m not really interested in.
I’ve came to the conclusion the game categories got removed to promote front page games, therefore the games that make Roblox money will continue to make them money, and the lesser known games will just have to struggle their way up there. At this point its like unless you have somewhat of a following it is difficult to get your game out there. From a business move, its a pretty good decision, however from a player’s perspective and a developers perspective its annoying and is a hindrance to our overall experience on this website.
I feel like yelling “Bring back game categories” is like me yelling out “Bring back Tix!”. I doubt it is ever going to make its return, and I respect their decision for that, however I just wish it was never removed because I used to find very cool and unique games by using the categories filter. We just have to accept the fact its gone and move on, and maybe in the future we can rely on features TheAmazeman mentioned, where players can search games via popular tags like they do on steam. That being said, the way players search for games now is very basic and ineffective, and Roblox does need to do something to fix it if they are going to remove the categories system.
As someone who is in the dwindling sports game genre, it was really useful that I actually had a chance at getting to like Front Page or Page 2 or 3 for Sports Games. Now I’m like page 10,000th and a half, so the only way I attract people is friend to friend contacts, random searching, or advertising.
Or you have hundreds of thousands to dump into advertising each week.