Yesterday we launched Swordburst 2 on phones, and it was doing very well. We were almost 1:1 with phone vs PC players after running a 50,000 R$ ($175) sponsor.
Unfortunately we woke up today with reports that nobody could access the game on phones. We tested this on our devices (iPhone X and iPhone 7) and found this was the case. Our device stats also show the drop off in our players happening:
Today our mobile users are hovering around 40-50 players, we’re not sure how they can play the game but we know a Galaxy S10 can join. We don’t know what other devices can join, or why it’s being limited per-device. That being said, the game is available on all platforms:
I cannot see the game in the sorts, my favorites, recently played, but I can see the sponsors running which is how I got to the game for the screenshot below. (meaning it is advertising the game to users who can not join it)
I’ve also experienced this. After running mobile sponsors and seeing pretty significant clicks on the sponsored game, there are hardly any mobile players on at all even though no devices are filtered and play time is the same as pc and xbox.
Update: Checked all subplaces of the universe for filtered devices, only found iPad Air / iPad 2 at 30% on one place.
That being said, the game seems to be visible again on phones. We didn’t touch anything. Looking at our dev stats, you can see where the game was suppressed and then un-suppressed, at 00:00 each morning.
Still looking for an answer as to why this happened + a refund of our sponsored robux that was eaten.
I think when I originally posted this I meant to say PC. I was featured on the Rthro sort and only around 10 days into the feature my PC player count fell to almost nothing while Phone and Tablet have been rising. It may also be correlated to the monthly games stats not working because I haven’t been able to access them since July which is when PC player count dropped out of nowhere.
PC player count went from 900,000 players in July to only 300,000 players in August while mobile player count barely fell at all.
This picture captures the exact date at which PC players fell drastically for no reason when mobile player count rose. Nothing changed on the game to cause this meaning it wasn’t broken and everything worked fine which means the PC player count dropping significantly is a mystery to me.
This was last night into today when Roblox was down. Mobile players skyrocket but PC barely moves at all.
Should I post a separate web bug since I misreported about it being only for mobile?
This bug seems to happen when we put a PC game onto mobile, launched, and ran sponsors. We haven’t launched another game on mobile so I’m not sure.
But we also haven’t run sponsors on the game since last time it ate our money + hid our game. If we could be refunded the Robux from the initial sponsor that failed we would be happy to try running it again!
We never figured out why the game got blacklisted, or reimbursed for the $175 dollars (50,000R$) that we put into the ads.
We’ve yet to run ads for this game again as we don’t want to
lose players if the game gets blacklisted again
lose more money as we were never reimbursed when trying to help investigate this bug
I recommend developers avoid dumping lots of money into sponsors for new mobile games, and to gradually work up to larger amounts to avoid triggering whatever system may be in place.
