As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to scope discoverability of our games to certain niches and genres. Roblox already had a great user-driven genre sorting feature but had it axed for non-issues like “lack of use” and “no way to set a default genre” without a handy replacement.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would not have to compete for discoverability on sorts completely irrelevant to me and I could be more discoverable for users searching for a specific type of game rather than have to break my back financing ads and sponsors. I would also not need to compete against arbitrary metrics or staff selection for sorts which have already been dominated by a select number of top games for years.
Original post archived in this dropdown. This was written at the exact time when genre sorts were announced for removal in October 2017.
Original title: Restore Genre Sort for Games Page
Some of you may have noticed that something is missing from the games page. That would be the second drop-down which allows you to search for games based on their genre. This is not a bug, this was intentional.
The genre sort is a wonderful tool for players to search for games in specifics rather than being drowned out in one mainstream sort that is mostly infested with clickbait or games not appropriate to the user’s criteria. For developers, they can have their games well recognized within genres by competing to gain or hold top spots so that players join their games when opening up the genre page.
The genre sort feature is as important a filter as the current one (consisting of Popular, Top Earning, etc). There is obviously room for improvement of the genre feature, but that’s for another Feature Request; the focus of this one is to restore it.
ETA 01/25/2024: For posterity, the original “announcement” for the removal of genres can be found here, genres were stealthily removed without a formal announcement. In case this thread ever gets hidden, deleted or is inaccessible, a picture is supplied with the details. Do not shoot the messenger, focus on getting our voice heard and being respected as first class citizens on this platform.
If they were to bring it back, it would require a heavy update. Most of the genres did not make any sense or fit in with ROBLOX games. I don’t see how sorting for games using the previous genres could be helpful at all.
I personally didn’t use the genre sort because nothing matched my games.
This doesn’t seem practical at all. How is this helpful when you remove a chunk of good games. Even bad games set their genre. At most, you just get a huge mess of randomly assorted games.
Clickbait games can set genres as well. Sorting to remove bad games isn’t want the genre sort was for and it shouldn’t be used as an argument for why it should be brought back.
I’m in support of this removal. I do think they should bring it back with something different, though.
I’d like them to overhaul the genre system and replace it with custom “tags”. Using this you could search for games using multiple tags, and they’d be more relevant to the game.
This could also improve the search system by having it only search through tags and not descriptions and by having a limit on them (5-ish), you’d get more relevant results.
I support bringing back a system like genres as there is no other way to find games of a specific vein. For example, if I want games with custom characters or with roleplaying, how am I supposed to find them?
Tags seem like an excellent way to do this, and I entirely agree with the idea of having a maximum number of tags to prevent users tag-clouding their games. Also perhaps having a large preset collection of tags instead of allowing players to type their own custom tags.
I hope it comes back, or they give us data on how it was doing. My game was near the top for every category of its genre. I wonder how much that was helping me. How would anyone find an RTS game on roblox without genre search? Those games are not the types to be at the top of alltime popular or earning.
I’ve found looking for your ideal game is more reliable by searching through genre instead of typing the name of the game.
Issue:
Click bait is annoying though by removing the genre search, it’s been difficult on my part to identify games I either liked or haven’t seen before. Also forgetting removing this feature didn’t help with click bait as this issue can just continue on the search bar. By searching for something like ‘British houses, or by typing city.’ You find majority of the information (games) is irrelevant.
Interestingly, as someone else answered. They removed this feature because of the lack of use. Understandable. Yet, if this feature were to come back, it would need to be presented differently and not the same. This way there would be more use, as everyone else discussed in this topic. Having tags would be more assessable and accurate if this also contains the limitation to how many you can have.
The genre feature has never been an important part of discovering games on the platform, partially due to the genres/categories not adapting to the type of games players were looking for. It was removed as the majority of players did not utilize it, which doesn’t surprise me as I have never used the sorts and have never set the genre of any project I’ve worked on, ever.
I think the removal of these sorts are only logical and instead of creating a feature request to bring back the sort, which doesn’t provide Roblox with much value regarding how to improve the feature and is just a duplicate of the previous topic, focusing on ways to improve the genre feature itself is the way to go.
Hm - I wouldn’t say that it’s a super good idea to restore the genre sort.
But focusing more on the types of genres in a way that can more accurately match a game would help - and the ability to put tags (multiple!) to games.
Concept (using genre types that @glurbman came up with):
Extra
Personally, I haven’t used genres a whole lot - not for discovering games, but also not setting my game as a specific genre just because none of the now discontinued genres matched the essence of my games.
Though, I do think that being able to see at glance what a game has to offer - such as only allowing 1st person view - would be helpful when looking out for games that fits what the player wants to see.
Besides the old one-genre search system, the ability to use multiple genre types could allow users to look for some genre types, but exclude other, making it much more powerful of a tool.
Just a little thought - I don’t think ‘first person’ and ‘third person’ would be necessary tags but otherwise we REALLY need a categorization system exactly like this. Can we get a feature request post?
Removing the genre filter was a really low blow. It deeply hurts every game that isn’t on the front page, and greatly helps the games that are on the front page stay there. This is like telling Americans the only places to get a hamburger are McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys because they are the biggest, so they must have the best hamburgers.
The genre sort system helped games and their discovery. With it gone, the only options are to hunt the front page or use the search bar. Both are equally horrible.
The front page is infested with clickbait and low quality games that somehow manage to bury other games, the ones that developers spend so much time on. The search bar has filtering (can’t remove that) as well as producing results that are nowhere accurate to what was searched.
Speaking of searching, gotta make another Feature Request later.
Other than using the first dropdown to reach my favorites or my recent, I used the genres dropdown often. Genres were an useful tool to find new games that weren’t on the front page - I would always check on the sci-fi tab to see if something fresh was coming, but now, I have to resort to the broken search system and the almost-always-the-same front page.
I think the main reason players didn’t bother use it was because the dropdown was left sort of in the background and nobody ever thought of exploring it, as well as it not being inviting or appealing. It was literally a white box with “Gender” written on it.
Lastly, I always set the genre on every new place or model I publish, because they do help quite a lot when searching in the library or in the catalog, be me, be others - a small relief from the inaccurate search bar.
