I get Roblox is trying to show off games that have already proven they can hold players for a decent amount of time per play session, but blocking upcoming developers out of an opportunity that can potentially help launch their “career” on Roblox is a harsh move.
The games that are being rotated right now already are noticed by the community, and they can manage without the special spotlight…
Not every upcoming developer can throw in a couple hundred thousand into advertising their very first game they worked hard on.
I and I’m sure many other fellow developers urge the Developer Relations team to either revise their decision on the featured sort, or create a system dedicated to helping upcoming developers get the love they deserve.
Doesn’t this defeat the exact purpose of the Featured Sort? I use it to find games that haven’t been noticed yet, not the same repetition of the Popular Sort. Now it’s the same thing, and without any benefits. Now, new developers can’t get their game out there without spending robux.
Once again, the removal of another opportunity that was once offered for new developers to get the chance to actually become successful on roblox… there is a reason why you see the same games 24/7, because the games that are actually good, but not as popular or doesnt have the funds/capability to push their game out more cant be noticed. This basically removes the chance for new developers to even get a chance to become noticed on roblox.
Hope you’re actually considering better ways for new developers.
Is total engagement hours based on the start place or all games in the universe total? Time Clash looks terrible based on the start place numbers but when you take the total retention of the players from the time they start playing until they exit completely the numbers are great. One flaw of Time Clash is that players need to bounce between places every 5 minutes, which was a part of the challenge I was given for the accelerator internship. Just making sure you’re tracking the metrics in a way that doesn’t exclude multi place games.
Thanks!
Edit:
The feature sort just became less of a “cash grab” and more of a reason to create quality content. Fair business move, probably came from the higher ups of Roblox. I don’t see a problem with this change IF you plan on pooling together smaller games (15 AvgCon - 50 AvgCon) and basing which gets the most impressions on the play time relative to that pool of games. I do NOT like how we can’t submit games anymore though. It takes review time away from DevRel but I do think this will end up reverting back eventually.
Can you explain in more detail what your target game looks like, the average concurrent players you plan on promoting, what retention numbers your looking for, etc? I don’t think this is as bad as everyone suspects, more info would help. Is there a way we can get our games on your radar? I’m creating and launching a new game soon and I would like for it to be reviewed for featuring.
I am very disappointed to see this change. Considering that it’s “designed to surface a greater variety of engaging content”, I don’t understand why relying solely on games that are already established is going to make a difference. The majority of these games already have a large following and have their place near the front page, so you’re essentially taking away a larger variety of engaging games and replacing them with a much smaller selection.
I think a much better way to achieve this goal would be to keep the application form and post a combination of approved user submissions and pre-established games, rather than simply choosing one of the two. This allows for more variety in the featured tab, and also means that new developers with their own high-quality games aren’t left in the dust due to their much smaller audience.
Disappointing. This is just going to be popular v2 by the sounds of it. The whole application process may have been tedious, but for the most part made sure there was some quality control.
This is going to hurt small developers badly.
Now that they cannot use the application system to get their game into the Featured Games Sort, it’s just going to be the same thing as the Popular Sort, as @i_ncendiarism said.
If any staff is reading this, please reconsider the changes to the Featured Sort.
Well this is a god awful change that practically neuters the featured sort in basically every way.
“You know what’s better than ONE popular sort? TWO popular sorts! And why should we stop there?”
In all seriousness, if games on the popular sort are not strictly barred from getting on the featured sort with this change, then the featured sort is officially ruined by this change. I really don’t know who thought this was a good idea. The entire purpose of the featured sort was to allow games that were not popular to have a chance at some recognition (as @Intended_Pun and @Kord_K have said already).
I’m extremely disappointed and quite a bit angry with this change. Highly hoping this does not stick.
While there is quite a lot of issues/concerns/elaboration on the systems we have now. I’d like to really note that I appreciate the ongoing (and very frequent!) changes happening all throughout regarding featuring and game displaying by the dev rel team, and I hope we have a stable and working system later down the line!
Clarity and just overall accessibility of these features I think is a big concern, with redundancy being a large confusion point. Points being:
How can we get fresh, well-made games to be seen with limited funding?
What are the requirements now specifically? Prior to this it was the top 250, is it still the same?
How is this different from the popular sort in a meaningful way?
Now automated, unusual content seemed to have slipped through, does this mean that it is garuanteed that passing the “popularity and engagement” requirements gives you a spot? Or is there still human input before live?
General clarification on all these interesting systems…and how they differ (Live ops, Featuring, Planned events)
Being part of the last featuring cycle before the big top-250 change, I have to say it was…sudden, but its definitely interesting to see all these changes, regardless of opinion.
Any plans to have a category that atleast get’s games with no players some attention? There are hundreds of games with amazing content that get no recognition. Popular devs already have no problem whatsoever making games that get attention, but people with no following have nothing. No robux to support funding for advertising, no fans, no following, no way of getting their game across.
Seems a little ‘odd’ (there’s other words I could use there but I won’t ) to just feature games that already have players playing them. It’s basically just a wasted category then. Popular, Top Rated, Recommended, and now Featured all show the exact same games. So they are all practically redundant of each other.
No point showing off games that are already making millions of dollars a year when there a newer devs barely trying to get any recognition, especially when these newer devs games are a lot better than most of the popular games atm.
I quite like the idea of players deciding if their own personal game was good enough and reaching out to Roblox and providing the fact, that their game exists. Featured should be for unique and quality made games, not current games that are dropping in player counts and etc… plus having it as random as this system appears causes extreme bias; more-so towards Roblox than before. As before you at least had a chance to get yourself noticed, now everything is completely random and I can feel a lot of negativity from this on it’s way.
Would be nice to have players submit games and etc… and vote on them if they are good enough to be featured to the broad audience that front page is. To have the honor and chance. I do think the correct move though, was to make it a week/performance based instead of a single day which would cause even more of this imbalance on games and attention/available players.
With all due respect, this is a ridiculously bad idea.
It will hurt smaller developers - with this and the removal of events, there is now no way for developers to get recognised without having a lot of Robux or social media followers. Every time I’ve worked on a game and had doubts that it’ll ever get popular, I’ve thought to myself “the featured program will help!” The lack of a featured games program has already demotivated me and I’m sure many other developers.
Featured should be to show off high quality games - to show what the platform is capable of. Picking games at random will not ensure quality.
Roblox has been on an automation run recently, and I fail to see how this change, or for that matter any of the recent changes, will help new developers at all. This is just the Popular sort. Disappointing.
As pointed out by others, this is a decision that is so very wrong on so many levels. You are basically making it impossible for small developers to succeed on Roblox.
Impossibly Difficult
I am not sure you realize on how very difficult it is to grow the population of a Roblox game from the ground up, if you are a small developer. I have tried just about every marketing strategy from social media to advertising. Basically nothing works unless you have a ton of money to invest in it. The ONLY thing that works reliably is getting your game on the featured sort list.
A Real Example
Let me give you an example from a real Roblox game. My first game, Battle as a Giant Boss, was sitting in obscurity for months. I tried everything to build the popularity, but nothing worked. The game was getting about 10-20 players at a time. Due to this, I was not planning on developing any more games on Roblox. I was ending my career as a developer. Then about 3 months later the game got featured. The game concurrency went up to 10,000 players the first week, and had a successful run. The only thing that made this possible was getting the game featured.
Our Only Chance
The featured game sort is a lifeline for small developers. This is literally our only chance to get our games noticed and a chance to be successful. It is otherwise far too difficult to increase the population of a game, unless you have a lot of money to invest in advertising and such.
Please Reconsider
Please reconsider your decision. We don’t need another automated process to decide what games to feature. We need humans to make such decisions and pick out curated content that would otherwise not see the light of day.
For God’s sake. What is the actual point of creating these kinds of opportunities when they’re only locked to games with enough exposure than they reasonably need? These programs should be here to support new, upcoming and aspiring developers, not those who already clog up the front page every day of the week for months on end and have other mediums of influence (social media, word of mouth, constantly being used in promotional material such as ads, etc).
Applications were the one source of comfort in knowing there was even a fighting chance at getting your game promoted by staff. The Featured Game Sort was ideal for small developers looking to get some exposure. That’s over now.
So what about new games? How are new games supposed to get exposure, like they did previously with the featured sort? New games don’t inherently start out with a large playerbase (unless it’s made by an already popular studio).
So this change has got me thinking - it’s clear that the featured sort right now is, well, not great to put it nicely. For instance, there’s an abundance of simulators on the featured sort despite one of the original goals of the sort being to feature a variety of games, popular and less popular. Don’t get me wrong, the sort still has other good games and the simulators can be well-done but with this change, I fear we’ll be seeing less variety in games on the sort due to the automated system now in place.
I also feel like this change doesn’t respond to developer concerns over the sort, for instance there were complaints over very popular games being featured over less popular ones. I’m aware of the “it’s up to you to promote your game” argument but the Featured Sort certainly can help as seen above in this thread. Yet this change STILL emphasises engagement hours and popularity to be featured. And to top it all off, the games are only featured for a week now.
I admit it’s a bit early to judge properly whether the new system is effective or not but it certainly seems like it ignores or fails to address recent complaints people had with the Featured sort. With the addition of Live-Ops virtually creating a second featured sort, it makes me feel as if the current featured sort is almost unnecessary. I hope ROBLOX notices the complaints more and makes changes accordingly to make a cool Featured sort, but considering how they’ve gone almost radio silent on the seasonal events issue, I’m worried that this may not end up being the case.
) to just feature games that already have players playing them. It’s basically just a wasted category then. Popular, Top Rated, Recommended, and now Featured all show the exact same games. So they are all practically redundant of each other.
and feel free to reply!