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.
Looking back on this post, there’s a couple of things I want to say, since it seems to still be relatively relevant and is still gaining likes.
This feature request is asking for the restoration of the genre sort because no prior warning was given necessarily. I ideally would like the genre sort to be restored until an appropriate solution to game searching can be found - a feature should not be removed until an alternate is found, if one is requested or needed. No reliable alternatives are available for our usage.
Yes, there is the fact that people don’t use the genre sort or misuse it to boost themselves somewhere; however that alone doesn’t mean the genre system has been entirely futile in its purpose. The front page is hardly a fine place to find suitable games to play if it’s cluttered with botted or low-effort games. The search bar has filtering on it and the results displayed are far from accurate - there’s so much you need to do to get a relevant result.
With the genre sort, this allowed developers to reach the front pages of a certain genre and get recognition without having to fight to get on either the Featured Sort or the front page of all games (which has been hogged by the same games for straight months/years now). This is also vital to the UX in terms of finding a game of a specific genre - I haven’t found a good horror game to play in a while now because they aren’t readily available for display to me and I’ve had to rely on friends, favorites and other tabs that are far too broad. Genre sort is also helpful for developers to gather information on what players like to see and play.
The genre sort undoubtedly needs work, given the games that are showing up now, that much is right. But to call it useless, I think is greatly untrue and is only based off of personal visions for what some developers do nowadays - those opinions aren’t necessarily representative of the past or every player’s preference. The reason I ask for it back is that it gives us more time to formulate ideas as to how to improve the system while not completely removing it during that time. People still use it and want to use it, evidently. No one wants a mass of games on a singular page and people want to see what they searched for, not irrelevant results.
There was absolutely no reason to remove it, it isn’t like the space was needed for something else. The fact is that the smarter players used it and found it useful in discovering fresh game concepts that don’t necessarily cater to a 7-12 year old demographic, therefore never having a chance of getting on the front page.
The majority of newer Roblox users now think that Roblox consists of Jailbreak, Bloxburg, MeepCity and a few others and may never ever find that special game in their favorite genre because there is no sure way to find it. Even if the developer pays boatloads of Robux to advertise their game (which is a huge expense that front page games don’t have to bear), its a spread shot that doesn’t necessarily target players that would be interested in the genre you are advertising.
Apologies for the necrobump, But this really is a problem. Personally the removal of genre sort cut off the constant supply of players into specific game communities, effectively drowning out roblox’s infamous quality games with…whatever is popular. In fact- the harder it is for audiences to find the game genres they are looking for, the more likely those audiences are just going to use a different platform to play those genres. it’s very much pushing down the quality games and starving those communities and cliques of new players,effectively killing their own original, dedicated community of players- who eventually turned into developers- in favor of appealing the new wave of kids taking prominence in the platform. If Roblox’s motto is “powering creativity”, shouldn’t they promote it?
Totally rooting for this. Tagging systems would both improve the aged search feature as well as restore game sorting. You know what they say about killing two birds with one stone
I’d also like to add that I have always used this feature up till the point it was removed,
and highly favour it over weird “facebook-ish” things like ‘Because You Liked’ and ‘Popular Near You’.
My thoughts and opinions about the sorts as they are now:
[Popular Near You]
Honestly, what the actual heck? I don’t see any purpose in a ‘Popular Near You’ sort.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the one sort people use the least. Why? Because it’s literally a collection of everything you see on the game page. Absolutely useless, and I will never use it.
[Because You Liked]
Yeah, okay. This one isn’t even useful. It’s suggesting me a list of games based on a game I liked more than a year back. It’s not relevant. I mean, most of you should recognize this game from back then.
(See IMG1 at the bottom of the post)
Don’t you just love how we have two recommendation sorts? Woo, more things to write.
[Recommended]
There’s nothing much to say about this sort.
Everything featured here is almost identical to the popular sort.
The thought behind this sort is also very similair to the featured sort, which is doing a way better job at whatever it’s supposed to do than the recommended sort.
casually noticing even more problems with the Games page as I’m writing this
[Top Earning]
I’m running out of things to say. Most things I wanted to say about these pages, I have already said. Theres a few that just have too much in common and don’t deserve their own sort.
This one is identical to the Popular page. And honestly, I’m not even interested in what game is making the most profit, because I can already tell just by looking at the Popular sort and everything else that is thrown at me when I go to the Games page.
I’m sorry for the wall of text, but I really had to speak my mind and rant about this.
It’s honestly surprising me, and at this point really bothering me that we can’t sort by genre.
My advice?
Please rethink the entire Games page. I’m very sure we can all agree that it needs just that.
(and please get rid of the ‘Because You Liked’ and ‘Popular Near You’)
I don’t even really like that “Because You Liked” tab. I can’t select a game, one is randomly selected for me and I have to refresh or wait until the game I want shows up.
and i can’t reply in full because im in class and my internet is bad
Agreed - as a player, why would I want to know which game is earning the most money?
I think people want to play games that are fun to play - for them. That has nothing (at surface) to do with how much money the game makes, and the continuous movement of removing our ability to narrow the tons of games available to our preferences is greatly suffering to people who want to play games that aren’t necessarily the top popular sort.
There are a bunch of games of good quality that I cannot find because I don’t have the tools to find the games I like to play on the platform.
I think the information team would really appreciate you going into this with full detail, seeing as this entire topic has been created almost a year ago and we still don’t have any improvement on the Games page whatsoever.
Top Earning is not identical to the popular sort, that is a false claim. Backup claims like this with evidence. Example, one can collect data on the first 50 games on those 2 sorts, and create a percentage statistic of how many games are in both sorts.
No one is going to force you to be interested in what game is making the most, but if you delve deeper, you can see games that generally monetize better or worse than some average, and you can take-out or put in monetization tactics in your own games accordingly.
Top earning is invaluable to developers and hence, the progress of the platform, do not advocate that this sort does not deserve to be there without first understanding the ramifications.
I agree with everything you’ve said.
Although, I still can’t help but notice that this sort is similair, if not identical to Popular.
Sure, the games in top earning will be displayed in a different order, but in the end,
all we want to do is choose a game to play. And that does prove to be quite difficult when there’s multiple sorts that exist out of mostly the same games.
I recently saw a thread as I searched “top earning purpose” advocating for top earning and featured to switch places.
I am going to assume that top earning is second because it is a safe bet on Roblox’s end. However, for developers not in top earning, that sucks, yes. The entire distribution of games on Roblox is incredibly exponential. I only know this because top earning is a sort based on past week earnings and I can calculate it using my dev stats. https://devforum.roblox.com/t/having-an-actual-game-studio-company-on-roblox/179062/12?u=theamazeman
There needs to be dialog between how much we argue for the hierarchy (because we know it works best for earnings since it is a free market) and for the little games (because we know it works best for hope, dreams, promise, potential)
Sorry for necroposting.
But restoring game genre is really important for small developers. It’s ok all children play Jailbreak, but some players want to play another genre, and cannot find at all.
The lack of game genre is a real push for developers to leave roblox and develop by their own, so lowering the overall game quality level …
Still don’t know why they haven’t brought it back. I have hardly played any roblox games since it wasn’t removed since all I can find are the boring games on the front page.
