Good evening developers!
Today I would like to give some advice on how to maximize your chances of making an actual successful game. I’m not going to show you a magical formula that will make any game get to the front page, but I will show you how to play your cards right, so you have a much higher chance of getting at least a few hundred players.
The basics
Roblox has said officially many times that they only really care about three metrics, the three pillars of the algorithm:
- 1. Engagement
- 2. CTR
- 3. Marketing
Dominating these 3 factors will exponentially increase your chances of becoming a successful developer.
Important!
I would like to mention that when tracking metrics such as playtime or CTR, it’s vital to have in mind that in order to get reliable data you’ll need to have at least a few thousand daily visits.
Engagement
This metric is the hardest to optimize for, so in order to make it easier to understand I’m going to divide it in two sections:
Playtime
Playtime represents how much time players spend on your game, and it might just be the most important metric of them all.
The algorithm of Roblox works pretty similarly to the algorithm of YouTube, because it wants users to spend as much time as possible playing, since that usually leads to higher revenue.
I have seen a thousand post about how to optimize playtime with cool tricks, but in reality, the best way to optimize playtime is to simply care a lot about it. If you focus a lot on why players could leave and what makes your game boring you’ll end up with a good playtime.
Quick tip: You can use Rolimons to see the playtime of popular games
Speaking of which, What is a good number for playtime? Well it’s kinda off hard to tell, but if you want to get a rough estimate, here’s some some averages:
- Less than 5 min - Really bad.
- 5-7 min - Average, it’s decent.
- 7-9 min - Good.
- 9-15 min - Excellent.
- More than 15 min - Crazy good.
Again, this is just to give you a general idea.
Retention
Retention represents how many of the players keep coming back for more.
While there are a bunch of little tricks like daily rewards that do help a lot, the main thing to keep in mind is that retention drops when players get tired of doing the same thing.
In order to optimize for retention you simply have to make sure that your game is very replayable.
While this can be achieved in many ways(Achievements, badges, timers for speed runs, difficulties, rebirths…), if your core loop isn’t replayable enough, you simply can’t get a good retention, and a good core loop should lead to a good retention by itself.
CTR
CTR stands for Click Through Rate(Clicks/Impressions), and it pretty much represents how good your icon and thumbnails are.
In order to get crazy good CTRs it’s crucial to understand that interesting ideas create interesting icons.
A good game idea, if it’s managed correctly, can be turned into a great icon very easily, while a very dull/generic title and game idea will be really hard to market.
A game idea like rainbow friends leaves the creators with a million different ways of creating a good packaging.
Since the characters are very eye catching and the game name is pretty intriguing, the developers really didn’t have to do anything crazy smart to get a great CTR.
Marketing
Originally I was going to talk about monetization as the third pillar, but researching more I realised that most developers get monetisation well enough, but almost none get advertising and social media right.
So let’s get the elephant out of the room, Should you do advertising or social media?
Well at least what I found from my research is that advertising is better for the release, and social media can play a role in the long run.
The problem with social media
Here’s what most people don’t realise: Social media almost never picks up, unless your game looks incredibly interesting on a 30s clip, which 99% of games don’t do, social media is likely not going to lead to any results.
It’s also not really sustainable, not every developer can become an influencer.
Contacting youtubers is also usually a big waste of time in the release.
You need to get the most amount of good data and metrics(Which I talk about before) early, since after the first 10-25 days of the game release roblox will decide how much a game will get promoted, and youtubers will only lead to a big spike of players at a certain day, and then go to a very low count or 0, so good data for one day or two and bad data for the rest, not good.
So what I have found most efficient is advertising, it’s not perfect but it’s the best we’ve got.
If your going to sponsor, make sure to do so with at least 10,000R$ distributed slowly over 10-15 days, and then if your game is good enough the algorithm should pick up the game by itself.
Apart from that all I can tell you is to do two things:
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1. Use the right ad campaign settings: make sure that max bid is set to whatever works best, at least at the moment of writing this a low max bid seems to be the best(0.02), at the end Roblox refunds you if it can’t spend the campaign budget, and there aren’t enough people using the ad system to need to bid more.
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2. Experiment: In the first three days of release make sure to advertise for a bit more, so you can get data on which device and age group enjoys more your game, and then sponsor towards that target audience specifically. Also, make sure to sponsor in intervals of 2-4 days, if by the 5-7th day you’re still getting bad metrics, it might be time to abandon the project.
Anyways that’s pretty much it!
Make sure to tell me if you liked the post or found anything wrong.
Also let me know if you’ll like to see a more detailed explanation on each pillar.
Have a nice day!
