As a Roblox Developer, it is currently too hard to be discovered on the platform, or should I say it will become too hard as of the recent changes I, alongside other creators, have started to see on the platform.
I, along with other developers have noticed, almost all of the sorts on the front page, or discover page have had infinite scrolling turned off, coming to the detriment of ALL creators who are trying to expand their work’s reach. This means that sorts will now only display a limited number of games and experiences, that meet a list of criteria which is mostly unknown to the user base.
Millions of experiences… that aren’t shown on the front page and have to be searched up?
With the added changes of preventing advertisements to kids under the age of 13, smaller and mid-sized creators are now going to have an even harder time getting their work picked up by the younger demographic, which takes up more than 50% of the platform’s total userbase. At first, I was quite okay with the removal of advertising, as although it was a dent in my ability to get discovered, I could still get discovered. With the coming changes here, it not only harder to reach that demographic, but all of the audience Roblox provides, which is primarily the major offering that Roblox has as a platform.
Drawbacks on creators and businesses
Market analysis and understanding your market is a crucial part of how to succeed on Roblox. Given the volatility of the market, it is important to know what trends and games are doing well, so we can learn from them and develop our own experiences better. Limiting the sorts, LIMITS our ability to understand this.
This affects my ability as a game designer to design games. How am I meant to understand what games are doing the best, and how to implement intuitive design, and perfect and create my own experiences if the Popular, Popular World Wide, and Top Earning sorts are limited to 50 spots of the highest-performing games. Hundreds of other devs use these sorts to understand platform trends, such as what themes or genres their players like, or what niches are oversaturated, or even how eager an audience are to pay for specific products, but now this isn’t possible.
This affects our fundamental ability to do market research as a whole because there is no way to figure out how to compete in a market unless you can actually see the tangible products you’re competing against, and discover the reasons why they do well. Without that information, I’m basically making unguided decisions, and this makes the Roblox platform a much riskier market to enter for both new businesses and existing businesses that don’t have a fully established presence as of yet.
Drawbacks on your audience
It also comes at the detriment of users too, who would usually scroll through these sorts for the various different kinds of content or games to play, only to find now that they can’t “endlessly” scroll, taking away the ease of use of the platform and not only making it harder for our audience to use the platform and discover the games they want, but potentially discouraging users from searching anything up, and thus harming us and our games in the first place.
Conclusion
If the issue is addressed, my development experience would ultimately be improved because I, alongside other creators, will be able to continue creating content as before, and rely on the front page as a good source to tap into for our market research. It’ll also address the problems experienced by a player, as they might like to scroll endlessly and see what games are available, rather than being put in a position where they actually have to search and come up with a game they like, as opposed to trying something new.
