Starting today (Friday February 2) we are changing the default thumbnail system. For those of you out there with custom game icons and thumbnails this change won’t impact you at all, but if you rely on the default/auto-generated thumbnails expect a new beautiful default icon. If you prefer using your old default thumbnail switching back is easy and completely free. We are also reducing the overall cost of thumbnail changes to help everyone find a fresh game icon they enjoy.
Here is a preview of some of the new icons:
Interesting? In case we didn’t know the site we play games on is Roblox? Was there a problem with auto-generated thumbnails? It might be useful for brand awareness for embeds on places like twitter, although I can’t imagine too many links with these default thumbnails floating around… I guess as you said it may at least make users think about custom thumbnails as I can see these being rather nondescript and uninteresting after seeing them everywhere.
Not really against it since all the previous options are around, but it just seems like a pretty random change.
Edit: Another thought. Perhaps a minor issue, but this may hurt the discoverability of showcases and the like, particularly ones that aren’t maintained that use a generated thumbnail since there would be no way to know what you’re getting into before playing.
I think the images headlined are actually the images that will be used. I believe this means ROBLOX will be putting these ‘default thumbnails’ on all games. If you want your thumbnail to be of your in-game scene (like we have it now), you can do that for free once it is approved by Moderation.
I think this is great!
EDIT: After seeing it on the site, I think the Scenes are a little out of place. This makes every game look like some kind of Nature/City game. The variation is also a little offsetting. I think it would’ve been better to just have a neutral, branded image that maybe changed background colors if anything.
EDIT2: These filler thumbnails should be extremely neutral and basic to apply to a large veriety of games. Here’s an example of concept:
I still question even charging for the normal-uploadable thumbnails, that’s still an insurmountable barrier unless you cough up money for Robux. How are they any different than the now reviewed place-generated ones in terms of moderation processing…?
also not to mention
this doesn’t exactly scream “beauty” to me, it looks incredibly cheap
Uh… Why even have thumbnails/icons if they’re not even related to the game? I can understand wanting to review the auto-generated icons, but why are they being defaulted to misleading assets that have nothing to do with the games they represent? At the very least, the thumbnail/icon should just be a ROBLOX logo so it’s clear it doesn’t relate to in-game content.
I’m strongly against this. It shouldn’t be too surprising that a preset icon/thumbnail is not even remotely appropriate for the overwhelming majority of games on a site that preaches “Fueling the imagination.” It’s a tad bit counterintuitive.
And could the Icon default at least go back to a cropped version of the game thumbnail?
Personally I don’t have a problem with the update, but in the future can we have a tad bit of warning when something like this is going to occur rather than having no warning that a major update is coming at 3:30 PM on a Friday.
