Bring back Infinite Scrolling on all applicable "Discover" page sorts

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.

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I hate to be one of those people who just replies with stuff like “yeah this’d be cool”, but this is just an amazing feature that has no reason to not be on the platform in my opinion. It would make it so much easier for me to find games that I could potentially like, and could help so many developers get discovered further. I really hope this gets added

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For the sake of connecting things, I feel this post would be a great addition to changing Roblox’s general discoverability: Game discovery is fundamentally broken and only getting worse, it needs to be fixed - #16 by xoroshoh

This post provides some great info, makes a good argument, and makes me question why Roblox took away “infinite scrolling” in the first place. The only thing I can think is “performance” or cutting back on what is all on the website. Even that justification seems weak to me. I’d love to know why the “infinite scrolling” was initially removed.

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Indeed, I also see random games with just 90 players in the Top Earning sort! I doubt they are indeed earning so much to be on the top and be the first one to be shown. (It was a clothing game)

Everything is now more disorganized noting that games are not even ordered from most played to lowest. They are just popping randomly in any spot and probably Robux per Visit is involved in this.

Discoverability is getting worst and worst as time passes by…

When they talked about changes to discoverability this wasn’t what I was expecting. Scrolling down in popular was really the last way to find new games other than guessing in the search bar. If they want sorts to be the main way to find games great, but why are there still the same problems with them?

Why only 40 games in each sort? It is impossible to show more than one page of any sort. No tricks either, refreshing gives the same games every time. I don’t like this set, why can’t I ask for a new one?

Why are the same games often in more than one sort? As slots are so limited it makes no sense to have duplicate games. Yet up to have of a sort can be repeats from other sorts.

Why don’t I have a way to find new sorts? Why does roblox have to tell me what sorts I like?

Roblox says they want to attract older users, but right now older users are joining and immediately leaving because nothing appealing is put in front of them and they don’t have any recourse

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I don’t understand why this decision was made, and I’m not sure the people making it do either.

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This would be very nice. Having my favorites tab being limited to the most recent favorites is really annoying.

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Yes, and if Roblox accept to add this feature, it will be better even for Roblox players! As an active Roblox player I can say players will like this feature.

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Infinite scroll is a technique used by successful social media companies. The goal being to show people what they came to the site or app for. Go to youtube, scroll down on your homepage, there are continuous videos shown to you. Go to Twitter, there are continuous tweets shown to you. Go to Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, all are infinite scroll. This is for a reason, it is designed to keep you online, looking for what you came there for. People come to Roblox for experiences, and discovery of these experiences and games should be paramount. There should never be an update that makes it harder for developer’s games to be discovered. In the event a bored player is scrolling down what was previously an infinite scroll into the long tail, they are now blocked by an arbitrary wall. If a player is not able to find a game to join into, repeatedly, they are less likely to continue to visit Roblox.

An unforeseen consequence of getting rid of this ability is that players who did used to scroll to view the long tail surface up the content by virtue of giving obscure or less popular games a chance. Within that chaos, via friend activity and continued surfacing, games rise to become the top games on the entire platform. If that is chopped off, as it was so atrociously, the likelihood of new games succeeding decreases.

The removal of infinite scrolling will decrease player retention to Roblox, and decrease new games surfacing. Roblox has to answer to their developers. Does Roblox want to become a stagnant platform where new content can no longer reasonably surface, or will thousands of developers be able to live the Roblox Dev dream of making a niche game of their interest?

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And better yet, why do we not have sort/genre sliders again? Why not revamp the genres and make them easily sortable in a drop-down sort of way. There surely are better ways to find game discoverability on Roblox, aside from scrolling for hours down the Popular sort. The consequence of stifled sort pages for me is that I need new games that I actually engage with, as well as the cost to my game’s discoverability.

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People didn’t make this decision. Roblox has put a Paperclip Maximizer AI in charge of monetizing their sort algorithm. Their corporate board of directors then decided that they must not go against the AI’s recommendations, as it might result in fewer paperclips.

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I want to add more onto this: (I also noticed you guys added back “infinite” scrolling to the sorts found in the Discovered page, so that’s great)

Can you guys extend all sorts to “infinite” as a whole, including the ones in the Home page? My game rarely shows in this sort (it has shown sometimes) and is mainly because you guys have it in a way which shows only 6 Games from all the considered survival games on Roblox.

Quick update, it seems the change got reverted on the tabs that infinite scrolling made the most sense on, so users will now see Infinite Scrolling making a return on the Popular, Popular Worldwide and Top Earning categories!

Going to mark this as solved for now.

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Indeed it did, though hopefully they also make it applicable to the other sorts, because they still have the same exact limit. I believe just the Popular, Popular Worldwide and Top Earning are the ones with only infinite scrolling.

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This is definitely not fixed. The Infinite Scroll functionality of the Roblox website still has the issue.

This problem is related to the web browser’s viewport width.

When the discovery pages are viewed on Desktop with a wide screen, it will not trigger the normal infinite scroll behavior. You will see only the top 64 items, there will be no scrollbar, and you will have the illusion that there are only 64 items on that page.

The workaround is to simply resize the browser window to a narrow width, which will cause a reflow, and the infinite scroll will begin to function normally.

Related:

This is a serious issue affecting discoverability of all but the top experiences. To establish a level playing field for all experiences, this should be addressed as a Severe issue with a High Priority.

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