Discovery on Roblox: Past, Present, and Future Vision

Lately roblox development has been boring me and making me unwilling to stay in Roblox Studio, this update can really help millions of developers who really strive to make something unique and not a generic game, thank you so much roblox :slight_smile:

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Yeah no kidding.

I think it had way more traffic in the past not only because of the famous former ability to filter categories manually, but prior to the launch of the desktop app, the “Roblox Player” desktop shortcut took users to the discover (former “games”) page instead of the home page. I believe this was also the case even after guest mode was removed.

Not to mention the home page hardly had to do with discovery back in 2016-17. It was more of a place for “checking in” and seeing what’s going on with friends, the community, and the platform. It had the discontinued “My Feed” and status features (which included group shouts), blog links, and then the continue playing, favorites, and friends sorts and then one sort for game recommendations.

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Would be awesome if you could explain the mysterious 100k visits number.

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Yeah, ‘Discover’ should also have a button to get a random place,
Just a random idea I got from another roblox game.

I indeed agree with your statement, Roblox needs to re-add categories, maybe with a system where you can give 1-5 categories to a game, from lots of categories and then filter by category on discover page or when searching.

Yeah, it makes no sense that the ‘Home’ page is more useful to discover games than the actual ‘Discover’ page. The ‘Home’ page should work like the profile page and actual ‘Home’ page combined, showing how many hours have you played each game, checking what your friends are playing, etc.

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Any chance the USD sponsoring system will ever be fixed? I remember when it first came out I spent 20 bucks and I got one of my games from 0 CCU to 200 CCU in just a few minutes, since then I’ve spent various amounts with various settings and I’d be lucky to see more than 300 visits for the entire campaign. What happened? Was it just dumb luck or was the algorithm changed just a few days after ads manager came out?? Just saying spending over 400 dollars on sponsorships just to see not even enough players to make a full 10 dollars worth of profit feels like a major scam to me…

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Whew. That was a lot to read through but I’m super glad that this exists. Thank you for the transparency! :star_struck:


I’d like to challenge Roblox’s vision for Search specifically. It’s stated that…

The issue I have with this is that users themselves are not in control of the filters at play. Rather, Roblox is the one trying to assume and “understand user intent” via semantic search systems. This is amazing for the majority but begs the question: Why not let users filter things themselves?

Having a manual filtering system that end users themselves can toggle, without a string of text via semantic search, is better UX from a ‘transparency to that user’ standpoint.

To be more specific, I’d love to filter by multiple of these at once:

  • Genre (Adventure, Horror, etc.)
  • Single-player vs Multiplayer (Server Size?)
  • Sorts (Ex., “Popular in Country”, “TopGrossing”)
  • Price (Free, R$ 400, R$ 2,000, etc.)
  • Like rating
  • Last Updated (?)
  • Creation date (?)

For things not covered, like 2D vs 3D, they could be handled with a Tags system as many people have suggested to Roblox, without a response:

It’s been a little over 9 years of people recommending this system of tagging. With this new goal of transparency: Could you tell us why this is off the table, if it is? Maybe the following is what I hope it to be:


This would be amazing! I fear my current game will be hindered on marketing launch, despite people being able to play it right now, due to this not being a thing (a beta mode) already.

Should I put my game on a new experience ID, despite the same content, and making sure to take down the old one, to give it a better foothold in the algorithm?


Uh, what does happen to paid access games in the Discovery algorithm? Is that what this is saying, that it’s different? I wasn’t aware that something was happening to them. I am very much intrigued.


As a last note, I’ll definitely need to update My Research on the Roblox Algorithm & Discovery for Experiences/Games. :sweat_smile:

Thanks again,
Reditect

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Made an under 13 account

It took PS99 over 2 months post release to start appearing on the home page. This is with top 0.001% stats. PSX still shows above it.

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It kinda is now. But it’s only for accounts that are > (under) 13

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Sounds interesting and I’ve never thought about this :thinking: nice idea

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Yep and if someone doesn’t like a game… they could mass dislike the game (maybe with friends or alts if theyre really dedicated)

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Why would you want a game to be above 13, if it was a game like GTA 5 i would understand it but its ROBLOX and as we all know big corporations like money, so if you think about it that would be a dumb move if you where to remove users below the age of 13.

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Are there any plans to make search more accurate for genre-specific searches and games with matching keywords in their title? Search has been on and off for a while now, but lately it’s been a lot worse with showing diverse experiences.

For example, my game Infinity has “RPG” in the title, as many others do, such as @Chrythm’s Legend of the Bone Sword RPG. The genres of these are “RPG”, yet for some reason when searching for it, the response is just filled with tons of anime, city/adoption roleplay, and even simulator games, that are all already super popular, as if it’s copy and pasting half of it from the Popular sort.

Games highlighted in green feel relevant, most of the others however do not.

This is what the page looked like around mid 2023 - much more relevant results.

The majority of these games were heavily pushed down by hundreds for this search, and I noticed a decrease in traffic from ‘Search’, where it remained steady from other sources. I’ve encountered players in my community wanting to find RPG games to play, but with no luck, as the search has become so much worse for smaller games, that unless if you’re searching an exact match, I’m better off using Google to find what I’m looking for.

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I just said, that most online games are 13+,
but I saw some exceptions before, like Minecraft (10+), which also has online gameplay, has a <13 age rating.

But, Roblox is more related to ‘online’ gameplay.
Just saying it’s not a dumb move, it’s more of a ‘ethical move’ that would improve overal the game types you find on the main page (Less effortless simulators overall). But, I’m aware this would only occur if Roblox is forced to do so.

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The transparency about the discovery system is very helpful and I appreciate it, but nothing ranks king for me than trying to figure out why Roblox seems so deathly allergic to pursuing any sort of developer-driven curation of the discovery page via genre sorts again. I will see any and every initiative to discuss and iterate every step of the way for better or for worse except in this area, where Roblox falls behind every other market.

Something needs to be done here. I am done leaving my fate to algorithms that don’t benefit my types of experiences because I need to compete on metrics and against other experiences that are entirely irrelevant to the audience I want to target; and need to rely on third party platforms rather than organic growth within the platform itself first and foremost.

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No it is dumb, to make a game that was primarily made for kids 13+ is a dumb move, ROBLOX now has age ratings on games 18 years after its release, ROBLOX want to earn money - not loose it.

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The games in the first two rows were actually RPGs for the most part, so nothing really wrong with the algorithm there.

Brookhaven is a role-playing game (RPG) by definition, but I can see why you didn’t mark it. A lot of the anime games also seem off-topic but anime RPGs definitely exist and not all of them are “super popular.”

The discovery starts going off the rails after the first two rows, but I would say that it did its job for the most part.

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There’s a lot of indecisiveness and no clear definition of the term “RPG”, as Roblox has kind of had its own definition branched from other games like Runescape for most of its lifetime - the problem with classifying it as purely any sort of roleplaying game, means that technically almost every game on Roblox could be considered an RPG.

The definition I’ve always went for it to split “RP” and “RPG” - RP implies roleplay, hence why many of those experiences have “RP” in their title, while the latter are leveling simulators in nature with a varying amount of violence - for example, Vesteria and Shadovia are two RPG games that fall under that logic.

My main argument here is that it feels like it’s throwing in more games that don’t feel relevant at all to my search, especially after the first couple rows. I hope that…

  1. Discovery can be improved to search through genres of games, say “Horror”, “Adventure”, “Minigames”, with very literal search terms, until genres/tags can be revamped someday.
  2. Experiences would appear higher in these sorts if their name finds a partial match - for example, if I search “Obby”, I’d like to see games with “Obby” in their name, since most obbies meet that criteria.
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This sounds like an improvement, but please please place more weight on the actual terms people are searching. Very consistently over half of the search results on the page have ZERO relation to the search term being used. And further improvement would be letting people search for experiences by genre like steam and any other game site.

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Very good post, much needed. Looking forward to updates in this area

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This means - new recommended for you page!!! I’ll hope no scams or “sus” games will be there.

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