Discovery on Roblox: Past, Present, and Future Vision

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

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Thanks a lot. It’s really what we want to know.

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Pertaining to discovering communities and experiences, I’d like more information about whether or not Roblox actively shadowbans games. There are quite a few games, even my own, that do not show up at all when searched for… even using the exact title of the game. There’s no emails, calls, messages, reasons, warnings, nothing… Just one day it’s like your game just disappears unless you have the exact link to it. Nobody will ever find your game again on Roblox, unless you buy ads.

What’s up with that?

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Finally! I can’t believe it, but it seems they have finally made exact search with quotes work!! I don’t know when they added it but I can now search for my game and find it by using quotes. This would never work before with the flood of tycoon games, but now it works:

I hope they don’t break it again.

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My input on the new search results

I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing, I guess Roblox is different than it was before but I did notice something →

Let me explain
I have a showcase called The Eiffel Tower Showcase
My goal was to make a nice Eiffel Tower on Roblox, was just a small project but nevertheless, some people can go and visit the experience.

Here’s what I noticed:
back in 2022, when I would search Eiffel Tower, the first result was my experience followed with some other related results of Eiffel Towers.

But now, when I search “Eiffel Tower”, it barely shows up, and if I go a step ahead and search “Eiffel Tower Showcase” which is a quite specific search, mine which has the exact same name is hidden down, and the other results have nothing to do with my search query:

Conclusion, I’m not quite sure what is going on with the behind the scenes of this new search results, I’m guessing that it rewards games with good revenues and not simple experiences such as showcases, maybe that’s where were at. But I do feel that such a specific search should have given me more relevant results?

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Thanks for the transparency! This is a really good start to open and honest communication about discoverability on the platform, and I’m excited to see what the follow up posts are here.

I wanted to bring to your attention though the contradiction between the events platform system made available about a year ago and these thumbnail-discoverability experiments. Currently, the same thumbnail that is being shown in people’s sorts is the thumbnail that gets used for future events. I’m worried this is tainting the thumbnail experiments / discouraging people from communicating future update to players through this really cool feature! I linked below the feature request for this, please take a look!

Thank you for the transparency!

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would be nice to fill out a form that connects you to the types of games you like while also showing potential games you might like instead of roblox guessing since i barely play roblox games anymore unless they look at all ur past played games

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No one would fill it (in my opinion), but yeah it would be better if Roblox had a better way to check what you like.

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Bake Da Baby is actually a fun and well made game, and I follow the developer on twitter. They produce some cool games!

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tldr;
you cant win ever because other games are bigger, have bigger teams, and can roll out more updates than any single person ever can.

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Actions speak louder than words. I’m not getting my hopes up until I see change.

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This is very interesting. Hopefully it helps quality games get more recognition and attention!

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its like spotify and facebook when u first join i think people will fill it out
and if u think about it, as long as i can remember, roblox has NERVER asked for your preferences they even removed the option to filter games, so i think people would like it

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This is so exciting to hear!! Great roadmap and love the thoughts dump, appreciate the clarity and communication!

As with some other comments I would also agree that there should be a way to “reset” audience impression data or postpone the initial scan, as I personally have old projects which are very alpha and don’t have much content but I want to develop.
And please bring back the genres feature, it made it so much easier to find specific games.

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Awesome! Let’s hope there will be a future where a game with a good idea, quality and effort put into will automatically become popular without any external promotion.

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I remember already searching with quotes a year ago and it worked back then, so it may not be new, but it is always a great thing to have, especially if someone wants to look up your game and it isn’t listed within the results without using quotes.

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I had 7k ccu and upates did nothing. We had a steadily decreasing player-count. I am a believer that my game will be filtered out of the algorithm regardless “to keep the platform fresh and exciting”. It’s incredibly difficult to keep a sustainable experience on this platform.

Ad purchases with the new ads manager have been ineffective for my new releases. 20 robux per play was an outrageous spend to reach an initial audience.

LifeTogether is a new hit. If games like that can have a sustained playercount and simple initial discovery I am happy.

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I don’t know what to think about an algorithm which keeps recommending games not enabled on phones to a mobile player.

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Personally, I really think a play-later sort should be added. I see tons of good looking games all the time, but rarely have the time to play them. So I favourite them all on site so I can find them again when I have time to play.
This is not ideal for two three reasons.
A) I had to sacrifice my favourites sort for this
B) It is linear and previously favourited games may become hidden behind new ones.
C) The favourites sort is currently located at the very bottom of the page and not convenient to access.

The addition of a play-later sort would
A) allow me to use the favourites sort as intended
B) quickly find games that caught my interest in the past to play when I do get the time

A play-later sort should have/be:
A) quick and easy to add games to and remove games from
B) have an option to sort by most recent
C) have an option to sort by random (so older ones can be shown instead of only the most recent)
D) optional algorithmic filter to allow the algorithm to predict which from the list one would be most likely to enjoy (last minute suggestion and the least important)

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