How to Successfully Grow Your Game (Ft. Sensei_Developer & Vikinglaw) | Promoting and Advertising your Game

chach_chach28 · August 18, 2023, 4:03pm

Introduction

I have noticed a lot of people struggling with advertising and getting people to play their games. So I decided to create an article on this topic but wait there’s more. I also had the opportunity to talk to Sensei_Developer and Vikinglaw about this topic. Sensei_Developer and Vikinglaw are wildly successful game developers which I will give more information about later in the article. I will list some methods on how to grow your game and advertise it. I will also be adding parts of my interview with either Sensei_Developer or Vikinglaw into some sections to give examples and to help you better understand what I am talking about. The last thing I will do is give a full rundown of who Sensei_Developer and Vikinglaw are and highlight and put the full interview so you can find more useful information. This article was also a little rushed so I apologize in advance. This article will go over things that front-page game developers do not want you to know. Anyways without any further ado let’s get started.

Article

Nowadays advertising your game is not an easy task but you can do it more efficiently and more effectively if you read through everything in this article. Right now it is very easy to just spend a ton of Robux on advertising and call it a day but if that was how that works everybody would have a successful game. There are a lot of different methods that I have discovered and that Sensei_Developer and Vikinglaw have used. Here are a few tactics/methods that you should do if you are going or trying to advertise your game.

Networking

As a developer on Roblox, you should always be NETWORKING. Now what is networking? Well, networking is the process where you as a developer interact with other developers/influential people on the Roblox platform to exchange information. Now you may be wondering why this is so important and I have many answers for this. One of the many reasons is you can get connections with developers that may have popular games that can allow you to then partner with other games to promote your game. Another reason is that you can get connections with influential people that can also promote your game as well. There are also so many other ways networking could help with promoting your game but I have plans to make a separate article on Networking. One thing I forgot to mention is that you can also ask friends to play your game and they can also give you advice on how to improve your game.

Advertising Using Social Media (FREE ADVERTISING!)

Social Media is an amazing way to advertise your Roblox game. Some good social media apps for advertising are TikTok, Youtube, Discord, and Twitter. Let me go over these different social media apps though. Let’s start with Discord. You have probably heard about Discord but if you haven’t then let me give you the rundown of the platform. Discord is a social media platform where you can talk to friends, create servers, and also join servers. It is a great way to talk to your players and announce updates on your server dedicated to your game. Let me give you some pros about the platform. You can easily manage your server, you can communicate with your game’s players, and you can announce updates/news. Here are some Cons of Discord. It can be difficult to get people to join your Discord server, it can be difficult to create a Discord server, and it takes a lot of work to advertise your game. Now let’s move on to TikTok and Youtube. Tiktok and Youtube are different apps but they are very similar when talking about advertising your game. Let’s talk about some pros. First, you can easily create an account, it can also be sometimes easy to create short-form videos, you can also create long trailers that can be very helpful when promoting your game, and it is very easy to get people to play your game using these methods. A con is that it can be hard to get views/publicity on Youtube but not really on Tiktok. Finally, I will go over using Twitter to advertise your Roblox game. Now I haven’t used Twitter to advertise my Roblox game so I can’t say much about it but I can say it can be useful when trying to get a few players to play your game to help give it publicity.

Have Small Youtubers Play Your Game

Oftentimes you can get small youtubers with around 1-10k subscribers to play your game for completely free. These small youtubers can play your game and then people that watch your video might also want to play your game because they like your game. You can simply do this by just shooting a small youtuber a DM and then most of the time they will respond in a timely manner. You can also give youtubers codes that can be redeemed for rewards in the game which will make people want to join the game. You can also contact bigger youtubers if you would like but it might be harder to get them to respond. So if I were you I would consider trying this out.

YOU MUST HAVE A High-Quality Game!

You must have a high-quality game but not necessarily a complex game. Now in order to get people to play your game you must have a high-quality game. Now what do I mean by that? Well, you see a good quality game can be defined as many things. The first number one is people don’t want to play a copied low quality game. So don’t make a game that has already been made. One thing that makes a high-quality game is making sure your game is engaging. Take Sensei_Developers game Dummies vs Noobs for example. If you read the description it says “Dummies vs Noobs is a wave-based cooperative shooter that puts you in a squad of 8, against a seemingly endless horde of noobs that utilize modern and near-future weaponry. Adapt your weapons, fine-tune your tactics, and stay alive to see the end of the line.”, Now why is this important? The first thing to keep in mind is that in the game you are always doing something. Just play the game and you will notice you are going to be playing/doing something 99% of the game. Now this is engaging because you always have something to do you always have an object which is to destroy noobs if that makes sense. This stimulates the mind of the player and produces dopamine so that the player will continue to play. Another that makes a high-quality game is that it is easy to understand. We will take Dummies vs. Noobs for example again. Dummies Vs. Noobs is a fun but also difficult game but at the same time, it is easy to understand just like other shooter games because the main objective is to shoot things for example in Dummies vs Noob you shoot noobs. This is called the core loop it is what makes your game addictive. YOU NEED A CORE LOOP! Now in my Interview Sensei_Developer he said “I spent a decent amount of time making the core gameplay loop satisfying and simple.”, This is very important to note because if anyone wants to make a successful game they are going to have to do the same. Another thing related to this that Sensei_Developer said was “After Dummies vs Noobs was made, when I started seriously studying game design, taking notes from VALVe games, and seeing what went wrong with my previous games. I came to the conclusion that ‘graphics ~= good game’, and that what happened in the core gameplay loop was the most vital. I also learned various other lessons, such as showing player dedication to the game is necessary, or players will never work together in public lobbies, etc…”, now I hope you were able to away something from Dummies vs. Noobs because when asked “Did you ever expect to have such a popular game?”, in an Interview Sensei_Developer responded with “No, Dummies vs Noobs was originally a simple test place I had converted into a quick game. It borrowed some elements and assets from a previous project, and was really meant to practice my AI-making skills.”, you see this didn’t happen by accident it happened because of what Sensei_Developer did in making the gameplay enjoyable and high quality. Recently I did a interview with Crazedbrick1 which if you don’t know who he is he is a game developer who has contributed to a decent amount of successful games. When asked “What advice would you give to people wanting to create a successful game?”, Crazedbrick1 responed with the following.

In my perspective, success is more than the number of people playing and the amount of income the game generates. A successful game is also something previously unheard of and starts trends, not joins them. Avoid making games based on fads in the community. Instead, make unique games that start a new era of games on the platform.

Harbour a Social Community

The game Dummies vs. Noobs gained popularity because people invited their friends to play the game and then it got into the Roblox algorithm and then it became very popular. Here are some suggestions for getting people to invite their friends to play. You could reward players for inviting their friends and you could also add an invite button to remind players to invite friends. This is a very small thing but could lead to your game getting a lot of players.

Roblox’s Game Recommendation Algorithm

I don’t see many people talking about Roblox’s recommendations algorithm which surprises me. Roblox’s recommendation algorithm decides which games get promoted and which games don’t. Most of it is about playtime so that is the key reason why you need to have an engaging game. Some people have also told me that it is about the amount of Robux a game makes but I am not 100% that is true but you might want to make sure your game is well monetized just to be sure. One thing that is very Important is having a good title and description. Something you should have in your description is keywords. Keywords are stuff related to or about your game. When someone searches for a word that is related to your game then you want that to show on search. So that is why you need keywords. Let me give you an example using Dummies vs. Noobs.

In Depth Example

Now say I want to play Dummies vs. Noobs. I could search Dummies vs. Noobs in the search bar and it would show up. As shown in the image below.

But say I have played the game and forgot the name or say I want to play a specific type of game. Here are two examples of the game showing up even when I didn’t type the title.

How does this work? Well, if you look in the description of Dummies vs. Noob it says all the words I searched up.

Which one the following would you click on?

Png (13)160×600 106 KB
or
Png (5)160×600 195 KB

More than likely it would have been the second one. The reason for this is Red is a highly popular color in marketing because it’s bold, captures attention and can evoke powerful psychological responses. Also red shows up on light and dark themes. So here are all the colors you should use: Red, Green, Blue, Gold, Yellow, Orange, Purple, and Pink.
Now let’s try another example.

Which one of the following would you click on?

Png (16)160×600 153 KB
Or
Png (17)160×600 134 KB

More than likely you picked the first one. This is because fonts also have a huge impact on what the player is gonna click on. Larger or more bold fonts immediately catch people’s attention especially when you are trying to make a statement.

Now don’t try to do anything sneaky like this either because this is cool and all but it doesn’t help with getting people’s attention.

Which if you didn’t realise this thing appears on both themes in a strange way.
Screenshot 2023-08-18 11.20.42 AM

Do Research
It is good to always be adapting to what works and what doesn’t. So say you have R$40,000 that you can use for advertising. You use R$5,000 on Sponsored ads and R$5,000 on a normal ad, and then R$5,000 on another normal ad. The statics show that Sponsored ads had a 0.5% CTR, the first normal ad has a 1.2% CTR, and the second normal ad had a 2.0% CTR. Now using this information you should be putting aside R$10,000 into the second normal ad with a 2.0% CTR. Now you still have 15,000 robux for advertising so what should you do now? Well, you should maybe think about making more ads or also continue doing what you are doing if it is giving you the results you would like.

Recently I did an interview with Jevangelise who is a small game designer but also a Marketing Analyst. When asked “If you have any advice for new developers what would it be?”, Jevangelise responded with the following.

Don’t be scared to fail. Plan big, do big, learn big. Dedicate whatever you have to it; if you give more to Roblox, Roblox will provide more to you; if you give nothing, you get nothing. You sow what you reap, even if the harvest takes a while to come.

Interviews

Full Interview with Sensei_Developer

Dummies vs Noobs is a PvE game where you and 7 other players fight against hordes of enemies, each with their own unique niche. You can upgrade your weapons to more cooler and gimmicky items, and use pre-set kits to start your build. There are multiple game modes available, including Siege, Mastermind, Attrition, and Epilogue. My development career was rocky, to say the least, I started around 5 years ago because I was bored, but quickly found my footing as making games felt fun. I made several games, most of which were buggy and clunky, to say the least. I often got harsh criticism and a lot of targetted exploiters, but I powered through and moved on. Dummies vs Noobs was a complete accident when it came to success, as I did not expect it to get many players, as with many of my previous games.
No, you do NOT need robux to grow your game. I’ve spent countless hours studying how my game got successful, and I narrowed it down to the fact that the game was Unique , eye-catching, easy-to-learn, and didn’t have predatory monetization schemes. The game had a simplistic and unique artstyle, and didn’t radiate ‘cash-grab’ energy, because of said artstyle. During the entire course of development, I did spend a single robuck into ‘growing the game’ via advertisements and sponsorships, as the game randomly exploded due to friends joining each other in a ‘friend-join-wave’
No, Dummies vs Noobs was originally a simple test place I had converted into a quick game. It borrowed some elements and assets from a previous project, and was really meant to practice my AI-making skills.
I didn’t use anything to ‘advertise’ my game. As people joined and found the concept to be unique, interesting and fun (I spent a decent amount of time making the core gameplay loop satisfying and simple), they invited their friends, then their friends, then their friends, etc… Eventually, your game will reach a point of stable player counts. That player count is determined off of how fun your game is, enough so to keep that much players coming back.
Dummies vs Noobs was coded kinda roughly, as back then I didn’t have as many good coding practices. A lot of the original code was hard-coded and buggy, as the first few months of its success was spent fixing up the code and patching bugs.
Obviously with other developers, I had made previous games. Their concepts were… not exactly the most original, but I tried to make them with “good graphics = good game” in mind. Unfortunately, it’s hard for only one developer to make such type of graphics, as I do not trust other developers with working on my games. After Dummies vs Noobs was made, when I started seriously studying game design, taking notes from VALVe games, and seeing what went wrong with my previous games. I came to the conclusion that ‘graphics ~= good game’, and that what happened in the core gameplay loop was the most vital. I also learned various other lessons, such as showing player dedication to the game is necessary, or players will never work together in public lobbies, etc…
My best advice for newer developers wanting to create a successful game is to have good coding practices, only hire when absolutely necessary, create unique concepts that actually work and aren’t just unique for the sake of being unique, don’t be afraid to experiment with wacky ideas regarding in-game gameplay, playtest a LOT and find what players think of your game/behave (so you can model the game accordingly), and DO NOT MAKE GAMES FOR THE SAKE OF MONEY, MAKE IT FOR THE SAKE OF ENTERTAINING PEOPLE

Full Interview with Vikinglaw

My development career began way back in 2016 when I first discovered my niche, roleplay games. My games are all fundamentally rooted in the same concept I discovered as a child, roleplay.
In today’s age you most certainly need Robux to grow. It is unfortunately much harder to grow now than when I first started. Old school methods such as grinding out Group Recruitment Plaza still work but are not as effective. Not to discourage however, it is a valid method. When I first started I would grind out GRP (or similar games) for up to 12 hours because I had no capital. Once you have actual sustainable revenue it should all be invested in advertising your game.
As a teenager never expected to work full-time on Roblox and never really thought I’d make it as far as my idols back then, but I have been blessed with the opportunity to work at Roblox for over 4 years now.
I utilize a variety of tactics in my marketing but these are safeguarded tactics that I unfortunately cannot share.
Development is a long and often tedious process, but if you are passionate about what you are working at you will know what direction to take it. What I can say is that you ought to have a like-minded partner, it makes the development process a lot easier.
If you want to find success on Roblox you need to be consistent and willing to fail. You can expect for first 3-4 games to be a close-to complete flop. You will have to embrace failure and be humble. Understand why your games are not good and why you are not performing. Experience and consistency is key.
I always struggle with motivation, at the end of the day, motivation is not a consistent factor in game development. You need to build personal discipline to work regardless of where your motivation is at. Going to the gym consistently 5 days a week and practicing meditation has allowed me to take control of my habits and emotional inconsistencies…

Helpful Resources

Article by Sensei_Developer (Related) Game Design 101 – How to make your game fun, enjoyable and replayable
Most Recent Article Helpful Tips and Advice For Developers | Part 1 (Includes More Developer Interviews)
Most Recent Article Helpful Tips and Advice For Developers | Part 2 (Includes More Developer Interviews)

One last thing is that I plan on making a free project management course and what I want to know is what people think of the idea so please tell me.

FroDev1002 · August 18, 2023, 6:46pm

This was actually really useful! Haven’t finished reading the whole thing yet but it is pretty good! Nice work!

chach_chach28 · August 18, 2023, 8:01pm

Thank you. I’m glad you found this useful. If you ever need help with anything to do with marketing you can let me know and I would be happy to help.

PlanckDEV · August 18, 2023, 8:39pm

Hey, thanks for the advice. It’s informative and truly helpful however, I can’t seem to be able to shrug off the feeling that it is far deeper than that. It’s to the point where I’m considering doing a controlled experiment, where I fully replicate your steps in order to see if it would truly work. I will use your advice and see what I can perhaps achieve with it.

BroOfNoob · August 18, 2023, 8:55pm

Very interesting. But I don’t give very much hope to ads. I have one game that about 10 people play per month, and the time they spend in the game is maybe a few minutes. It takes at least an hour to finish the game. If players are not interested, it is probably useless to promote the game. The game doesn’t even have an English name and I did it for two years.
But it’s my hobby and I’ll do games even when no one plays them.

chach_chach28 · August 19, 2023, 4:46pm

I am glad you found this information helpful. I haven’t really shared any of my advertising or marketing tactics with anyone but I am glad I did because hopefully people are able to use this information to create an amazing game.

Replying to @BroOfNoob
I plan on making a tutorial on how to properly market and make your game more appealing which you may find helpful because it will go over getting better player retention, making your game more playable, and making your game more appealing. If you are talking about your game mountain climbing then I think you will find it very helpful.

PlanckDEV · August 19, 2023, 5:30pm

Hey I have been excessively thinking about this. I have come to a few conclusions I would like your opinion on.

Game Quality and Demographical targeting

Firstly, a good game has no criteria. It simply needs to be “enticing”/“attractive”. These words are extremely vague so it’s hard to understand what I mean by that. What I mean is that a successful game can be unoriginal, it can have bad gameplay, it can have a horrible core gameplay loop, as long as it’s a game which is simple(meaning easy to understand the concept of it,why someone would enjoy it) and manages to target a demographic which with the help of the algorithim, it manages to maintain, a game can be successful. There are of course many strategies which can increase your likeliness of a successful game, the main one being promotion. Now, these claims are something I made after analyzing current and past front page games. Front page is generally split into a four demographics. Roleplay games(ages of 6 to 17),Simulators&Obbys games(ages of 4 to 12), Anime games(ages of 9 to 18) then finally Quality(ages of 9 to 50). Now, using these categories, lets compare them to the demographic of Roblox as a whole. Roblox’s demographic is from the ages of 7 to 25 with the largest group by far being 7 to 13(prepubescents) which take up roughly 50% of Roblox’s userbase. From 13 to 17(adolescents) make up 30% of Roblox’s userbase. The other 35% is split with 18 to 25 having 15% then 25+ having 5%. Those are my estimated figures and not based of the dubious demographic statistic Roblox has posted(which do not have verification). Using this demographic data, it is clear as to which games would be the most popular. The most popular games will be Simulators/Obbys, then Roleplays, then Anime games then Quality games. I may have had some confirmation bias with this, so if you believe I am incorrect, please provide some clarification with evidence.

Networking and Appealing to people

Secondly, the best way to network is to be a slave for others.This guide will be very unethical. I will demonstrate a guide. Generate a set of social media accounts and for a month or two, continue to post fake portfolio content, such as scripting systems, animations,vfx,gfx,music and modelling. Bare in mind, these have to be either made by you or untraceable in order for you to do this. Also, they need to be of a high quality standard. Whilst doing these, make sure to drive the algorithim to make you go towards Roblox-centric content, having developers and content creators at it’s epicentre. Make sure to frequently post on social media platforms such as Twitter and Tiktok till you are on regularly good terms with the general community. Now, you can start doing comissions with premium comissioners. Continue doing these and develop a friendly relationship with several teams. Preferably, have most transactions be in Robux. After doing this for 4~5 months, you have a great track record. Now, you can trace popular developers and content creators and respond to their social media actions rapidly by having notifs. Now, if these developers need comissions or favours done, make sure to respond asap. At the 6th month, you can now make some games. I would recommend amassing a team with your connections and participating in many game jams. With a positive track record, you can now make official games. You can either develop your game jam ideas or, make entirely new ones. My recommendation is to go for games such as simulators,two player obbies or advanced simulators(games like work at a pizza place). Within month 8, you will be a popular figure and will be able to do whatever you like. This in all reality, is the best means if you truly want to be sucessful by any means. For me though, I am far too romantic to do such a saddening thing. With any profit you make, you should use this to either hire people or advertise on Roblox or on other platforms using Roblox as the currency.

In all reality, networking is not something many developers can do because the more popular a developer is, in general the less they use social media and with rare cases who do, they will still likely not speak to you. Networking is far better done with content creators as they have to use social media but even with them, they still don’t really reply to others. Using Discord is the best tool if you are attempting to network but that requires serious time dedication. To even scratch the surface, you’ll have to invest atleast 2 months of your time in order to become a regular who is reputable and to develop relationships with moderators and higher ups.

Advertising

Advertising using social media is definitely something you should however, all social media platforms have an inert ‘cap’. This means that unless you pay the companies, your chances of being algorithimically recognised are about 0.001%. Even with support from other creators, this only becomes 0.005%. Youre better off buying an account to be honest but, people tend to be quite extortionate.

With small youtubers, I do not actually know too much. This is something I do actually think might work so for my next game release I will give it a try.

A social community is a must, as I have made clear in my unethical guide.

When it comes to advertisements, I recommend that you do not use sponsored games and instead, go for banners. When it comes to banners, my key tip is to use bright contrasting colours such as Red and Purple. Make sure to have an unique ad because otherwise, it’ll be 90% ignored. Games should only be advertised when you have a lofty sum to offer and have also done prime research on key times which players play roblox and on what dates. Additionally, you should change your advertisement every week if you are planning a long run.

Overall, I think the key message which a lot of top creators hide is: Be 100% tactical. Do not let anything go to chance and make sure you are hitting every criteria possible. Of course, it is possible to get lucky however, for anyone who cares, such an idea is ridiculous to fantasize about.

Please let me know what you think of this, either in messages or here. I hope the algorithm blesses you and thanks for reading

chach_chach28 · August 19, 2023, 11:41pm

I made a pretty long response and I don’t want to flood the chat with it so I made it hidden.

Response

Let me break down what I think about almost everything you said. So first you said a successful game can be unoriginal which I think is somewhat true because if you copy an already successful game why would people want to play your game instead of the already successful game? Well, they don’t but if you make your game better than the already successful game or if you put a twist on it than you have a reason why people would want to play your game over a already successful game. I made an article around 12 days ago where I encouraged this.

Now the next thing you said is that you can have bad gameplay. Now I don’t 100% agree with you on this either. It would also be nice to see some examples of games like this that are successful because this article is about having a successful game after all. So I really don’t think it is possible to have bad gameplay and a successful game but I would like to see some examples because I don’t have much to say about that. After that you said that a game can have a horrible gameplay loop and still be successful. What I think is that isn’t true because again I don’t see any successful games with a horrible gameplay loop because really to have a good gameplay loop you need to have a simple one or one that is easy to understand. Then you said “and manages to target a demographic which with the help of the algorithm, it manages to maintain, a game can be successful.” Now the Roblox algorithm only goes for games that have players playing for a while that is why Pet Simulator X is so popular is because people will sometimes afk grind and therefore roblox pushes it out to more people to then continue to do the same thing. I really don’t see any games that are popular with a horrible core loop, bad gameplay, and unoriginal.

You also talked a lot about player demographics and I believe that what you said is somewhat true. Now when you say “The most popular games will be Simulators/Obbys, then Roleplays, then Anime games then Quality games.”, that really isn’t a good speculation because you said that quality games are last but quality games aren’t really a type of game in my opinion because I would argue that there are a lot of high quality simulators, obbys, roleplay games, etc. For example Clicker Mining Simulator is a high quality game because it has a very good core gameplay loop, good visual effects, and nice UI. Also Altitorture and Draw Obby are also very high quality games and they are both a obby. I could also say that Emergency Response: Liberty County and Southwest Florida Beta are also very high quality games and they are Roleplay games. This is just the tip of iceberg there are also so many more high quality games that are simulators, obbys, and roleplay games.

I took a look at your opinion on Networking and that is just crazy. I only skimmed over parts so tell me if I missed anything important. First you the best way to network is to be slave which is simply not true and that is not how networking works. You don’t need to make a bunch of fake social media accounts and fake work to get commissions all you need to do is make high quality work that is original and there will always be room for improvement. Developing on Roblox is also a talent/hobby it is not normally a business. If you ask almost every developer who made a living on Roblox they will always tell you that at one point they did it as a hobby not as a business. If you have a mindset of doing it for the money then you will get nowhere. You then went on to talk about a bunch of random stuff revolving around development projects. After that you said "In all reality, networking is not something many developers can do because the more popular a developer is, in general the less they use social media and with rare cases who do, they will still likely not speak to you. ", which is not true because I have talked to a lot of developers who have successful games and they were happy to talk to me. Then you said “Networking is far better done with content creators as they have to use social media but even with them, they still don’t really reply to others.”, which again is not true in my experiences and you really didn’t give many examples of this. Afterward you said “Using Discord is the best tool if you are attempting to network but that requires serious time dedication.”, which I am not really sure what you are talking about there. Then you said “To even scratch the surface, you’ll have to invest atleast 2 months of your time in order to become a regular who is reputable and to develop relationships with moderators and higher ups.”, which I don’t know if you are still talked about discord. So no comment.

In the advertising section you said “all social media platforms have an inert ‘cap’.” which is not true because why would a company stop someone from becoming big on the platform that makes no sense. Then you said “This means that unless you pay the companies, your chances of being algorithmically recognised are about 0.001%.”, which again is not true to get recognised on social media platforms you have to post consistently, have high quality content, and actively engage with your audience.

Now you said “When it comes to advertisements, I recommend that you do not use sponsored games and instead, go for banners.”, which I do agree that sponsoring your game isn’t really that effective. Another thing you said was “my key tip is to use bright contrasting colours such as Red and Purple.” which I also agree on. Then you said “Make sure to have an unique ad because otherwise, it’ll be 90% ignored. Games should only be advertised when you have a lofty sum to offer and have also done prime research on key times which players play roblox and on what dates. Additionally, you should change your advertisement every week if you are planning a long run.”, which I do also agree on.

PlanckDEV · August 20, 2023, 12:59am

Summary

You don’t need to copy a successful game in order to for an unoriginal game to become popular. Originality is generally something which is not within Roblox as a whole, and where there are original games, they are not purely popular because of such originality. Personally, I am struggling to think of any games which are actually unique aside from Deepwoken which is still not entirely unique. As for popular games with bad gameplay, Blox Fruits takes no.1,Natural Disaster(although I and many love it) has bad gameplay,pls donate has bad gameplay. Although bad gameplay is subjective, these games have bad gameplay(as unbias as I possibly can be). For a horrible gameplay loop, most games on the front page are as such. Murder Mystery 2,Rainbow friends,Natural Disaster Survival,DOORS,any tycoon or obby. I do agree with your next point. I used “Quality” to encompass all other categories, not to specifically mean that all roleplay,obby,simulator or anime games are bad. Quality was referring to unique game ideas which do not fit any of those. I suppose the best category to replace that would be Horror since the rest of the games are typically horror. The social media accounts were not to be false rather, a whole different virtual identity. I disagree with your point about “if you’re doing it only for money, you will get nowhere” as I know of many,many examples were people are money-oriented and still manage to become pseudo-successful not to mention, most top creators are in it for money, even if they were originally different. I think sucecssful is too broad of a term in order to determine things, for my interpretation of successful, a game must have atleast 1 million total players and 1k ccu avg. Regarding Discord, Discord has isolated communities which in general, regulars whom do participate in such servers typically do not accept/get friendly with other users till they speak to them for long periods of time. Therefore, I was referring to this and speaking that if you truly want to network on Discord, you have to invest a lot of time and communication in order to climb up social rankings in such servers till you are at a position of power in which you have direct contact with people of interest. This again, is subjective. I believe in general, you are dubious of my whole speculation on that aspect which I do understand why someone may think so however, thinking purely tactically, I do not see any flaws in my methodology. To iterate regarding advertising, this cap I was referring to is the beginner’s cap not for the entire platform. Companies are businesses and of course they want people to pay them. It is purely logical and is proven by statistic, I am unsure of what you do not understand. When it comes to the actual posts themselves, high quality content is once again, something which does not matter. Engagement is by far the most important aspect in attracting customers in any business/service. I suppose that is what I was attempting to speak about.

Let me know what you think about this.

I think from this conversation, I have been able to recognise that Engagement is the prime factor for a game. It does not matter of the quality nor of much else. If you can sucessfuly engage a large group, you will be successful. Engagement can be purely incidental, with the algorithm or it could be methodical, targeting specific demographic,appealing to them and lots and lots of promoting. I think these are the key ideas to take from growing a game.

chen_soholife · August 20, 2023, 2:37am

This article is exactly what I want to see, and I am currently struggling to promote my game.

I tried placing Sponsored Ads on roblox. But the effect is not significant.

Some incoming players can play for over an hour, with an average time of over 15 minutes. However, due to the inability to obtain sufficient users at the same time, the churn rate is high.

Starcraft Simulator (RTS) - Roblox / About

Lucifaux2 · August 20, 2023, 4:47am

It’s important to remember engagement is partially a derivative of a game’s quality and a million other small things, avoid neglecting quality just because you can succeed without it.

PlanckDEV · August 20, 2023, 4:51am

Oh for me, I am someone who (sadly) is hyperfixated on being the best. If I make a mediocre game, then lords knows what would happen… I still believe though, when speaking purely analytically, engagement is the most important thing. As long as you target a demographic and do the things which that demographic truly wants then you can succeed(to a degree).

Road_Gamer2 · August 21, 2023, 5:54pm

This was a very comprehensive and quality guide. Although I think the point that a game needs to be high quality to be successful is incorrect. You can see many examples of low quality games exceeding numbers such as 10k active.

chach_chach28 · August 21, 2023, 6:05pm

I definitely think I should have worded that better. So I do agree with you don’t need to have a high quality building or scripting but what I do think is you need to have high quality gameplay mechanics most of the time if you are going to have a successful game. For example if you look at the most engaging games on the front page most of them don’t look high quality.

But each one of these games has a good reason for being successful. For example Escape Running Head is a game that is very engaging. The reason I think this way is because there are a good amount of stages where you are trying to not get caught by a running head. Then there is a game called Hero Brawl which is also engaging and has good gameplay because you can become one of your favorite superheroes and fight on the battleground with unique powers. Which is pretty interesting to the average child. So hopefully I made a little sense.

Road_Gamer2 · August 21, 2023, 6:08pm

Your point about even having good gameplay mechanics is false. There are literal simulators based around clicking a button that easily reach successful player counts.

chach_chach28 · August 21, 2023, 6:17pm

Simulators based around clicking a button can be engaging. Especially to a child and most of the Roblox platform is children. When a game is engaging and people want to play it the Roblox algorithm will push it out to more people and it will become very successful. One thing that you should note is that those button clicker games are more engaging to children than some people might think. When I look at one of these games I say it said
“ Click your way to the top of the leaderboards!
Unlock awesome islands using rebirths!
Upgrade your stats to become more powerful!
Unlock OP PETS with gems!
Compete with other players in PVP!
Raise your combo to achieve more clicks!
Enter BEAST MODE every 2 min with INSANE stats”, which these are some very interesting gameplay mechanics that make the game unique and enjoyable.

chach_chach28 · August 21, 2023, 6:31pm

I think your game may be good for normal ads but I would be careful about that. You might also want to think of having more appealing graphics for your game thumbnail. Another thing I would recommend is getting small youtubers to play your game if you can.

chach_chach28 · August 26, 2023, 2:51pm

Now I saw some people personally reach out to me for help and I kinda felt like I didn’t give enough tactics to help with advertising and growing a game. So I decided to reach out to some friends to try to find more methods. Hopefully you found this stuff helpful.

Target Search

Now you may be wondering what I mean by target search. Well, what I mean is you are trying to find stuff that is trendy that you can implement into your game but don’t try to be spammy. Also make sure to try to find something that not too many people are making games on. A good way to do this is to use Google Trends or the Roblox search bar.

Having Youtubers Play Your Game

Now I see a lot of people struggle to get youtubers to play their game so I think I should explain it a little better. First you can really just contact any Youtuber but it is going to be better if you contact smaller ones because they are going to be more likely to do it. Then you should offer them something here such as a promo code, a pet, access to something, or anything unique. You need to give them value and if you do that they are going to be very likely to play your game compared to if you didn’t. One other thing that you should note is your game needs to be high quality and complete. What I mean by that is it shouldn’t have a lot of bugs and it must have engaging gameplay so they can make content on your game. Now one last thing I would like to tell you is that it is not a good idea to pay youtubers large sums of money but if you are you should pay them based on how many people from there youtube video play there game. You can do this by having a tracking url such as a bit.ly link which you can use to see how many people click that link.

I had another method but I decided not to add it because it is kinda controversial right. So sorry about only having two tactics. Hopefully you found this somewhat useful and I look forward to hearing feedback on these tactics.

chach_chach28 · September 9, 2023, 1:35am

Information Release

Now I would like to add somethings to this this article’s thread which is about understanding how Roblox’s Discovery algorithm works which I really didn’t explain much. So first I would like to talk about the Roblox homepage because the homepage is the biggest place for discovery on Roblox itself. This means you will probably want to understand how the Roblox homepage works which you can learn more about that by clicking here. Next I want to go over updating your game. Now updating your game is probably one of the most important parts about growing your game. You may ask why that is? Well, when you update your game you can have people that want to check out the cool new update and sometimes you will find people that want to produce content such as a youtube video on the games update. Which leads me on to my next thing I would like to talk about which is having youtubers play your game. So one thing some people don’t realize is when you want youtubers to make videos on your game you must do certain things such as produce content for youtubers to make videos on, allowing free cam so youtubers can make stuff like cinematics on your game, and so much more. Which a lot of people surprisingly fail at. Anyways that is everything I wanted to share and one more thing I do plan on making a detailed google doc that will go over everything about growing your game which when finished will have over 50k words.

Don’t think that to have a successful game you need luck because that is simply not true.

pjhinthehouse · September 11, 2023, 3:48pm

Really useful. Ever since twitter changed its approach to non-paying members i definitely don’t get the same views. So will be focusing on other methods of advertising.

I guess what i need to do is push the selling point that I probably have the only high quality MOBA on Roblox right now.