Maybe they’re underplayed because people don’t like them? Not suggesting anything, just my ten cents on the issue. Moving the slot of a game people don’t like won’t make people suddenly like it
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10k for 1.5k clicks seems like a ripoff. With user ads I got 1,500 clicks flat with a 2k bid, which already was more efficient than my sponsors before the change. Pretty sure this is the death of sponsors
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IMO i think the best would be to have popular at the top or at least near the top, it helps to see what’s new and whats really trending.
Please revert this update or push popular games to the top, It only has made it harder for new developer to get known.
Today I bid 1k on sponsoring my game and only got a fraction of the normal clicks this may be due to a change of game icon but the icon still is similar to the old one.
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Switch to user ads, sponsors are dead now
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On paper, putting the featured sort at the top is a really good idea. Featured helps expose developers that are trying to gain traction and have made a quality game. However, restricting the featured sort to the top 250 games, forcing it up to the top, AND putting games that were already popular to begin with on the sort hurts everyone except the few people on the featured sort. It hurts the smaller developers because now they can’t release a well made game and then immediately apply for a feature to expose their game, it hurts bigger developers who are on the popular section and have development teams they need to pay, and it hurts the players because as @Nikilis said:
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This doesn’t add to game diversity, it kills it. The popular section helps smaller games grow, and you have to work (at least kind of hard) to get to the top 250. It’s meant to keep the top 250 there, and stop newcomers. All this does is decrease the little game diversity there was on the front page.
This is not the direction that Roblox is going in. There’s a reason why they opened up the developer forum to a lot more people recently. If they wanted the top 250 to stay there then they wouldn’t be spending resources to help train new developers in how to make games.
They’re trying to increase diversity on the front page, but I’m not really seeing that happening
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Not really, take Reason 2 Die as an example, it usually got under 1k concurrent players, after it got featured and sorted to the top of the game page, it nearly got over 2k!
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I wasn’t talking about all of them, I was talking about the “Underplayed” featured games. Sometimes the featured games are great, and they get tons of players as a result.
That CTR hurts to look at. Updates that potentially effect advertisements/sponsors should not be pushed without asking the community or even better, disabling new sponsors and advertisements, then pushing the update after all of them are over.
Thank god my game had some extra features we wanted to add so we couldn’t sponsor this week. Guess I’ll be waiting because I’m not a fan of user ads.
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The popular sort allows anyone to gain exposure for their game, as long as it’s fun and focused on hooking players to keep the player count high. A relatively small run of ads (<10k R$) was all I had to invest to help my game go viral, and that’s part of what makes Roblox compelling. When I first released Bee Swarm Sim, I was new to developing on Roblox, didn’t know people in the community, and had no idea about programs like the featured sort. If over time the popular sort / other player-driven means of exposure are replaced in favor of curation, I think that could end up hurting newer developers who aren’t established in the community. For example, I don’t imagine Bee Swarm Sim would have had a chance to be featured when I released it given how rough it was and it being my first game on the platform.
I see the value in having more control over what gets seen, as it can help Roblox steer and refine the image of the platform as a whole. But at the same time, the success of Roblox is largely dependent on the ability for spontaneous genres and design trends to go viral, and it’s often hard for individuals or teams to predict what those trends will be (and even harder for them to be persuaded / forced). The popular list does this job more naturally, and that’s a big part of why I feel it should be prominent, but it’s definitely not perfect (eg. having to design your game to keep players online almost artificially).
That said I don’t think this test run is a bad thing at all, these are more thoughts on the direction as a whole. I read a few comments saying how this is obviously beneficial for new developers, and I wanted to suggest that that’s not necessarily the case. For brand new developers, any player-generated list that measures engagement (be it through player count, return visits, rating, spending, etc) offers more of an opportunity to stand out since there’s no barrier of entry beyond creating a game and the lists themselves promote games going viral by design.
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I’m confused at people talking about sponsored game ads CTR going down, I understand impressions could be going down because less people are clicking on game sorts that have space for sponsored game ads, but why would CTR go down too?
People look at the top. They don’t look at the bottom. It’s inside all of us (me and you) that the top of a list is the most important
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The sponsored game ads are where they’ve always been, within the game tiles on certain liquid game sorts. I noticed they weren’t on Popular Near You so once someone clicks on a game sort with sponsored ads there’s no difference.
The first 2 sorts not having sponsored game ads at all can explain why the impressions have gone down, but that doesn’t explain why CTR (Click through rate) would go down.
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If it’s on the player’s screen, it still counts as an impression even if they don’t see it with their eyes.
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I don’t think it’s fair to say “the majority”. The devforum is home to thousands of people and the Roblox platform home to millions more.
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This sounds interesting. Glad to see some more detail on the games page here and there.
The whole point is that it’s a scaled-down version of the developer forum. I would agree that the sample size is too small, since there are only 33 voters, but the overwhelming 91% majority kind of overshadows that.