When searching “anime” on the website, the top search result belongs to My Hero Academia Battleground as of today. This doesn’t seem correct, as of the time of writing, the game is paid access, sitting at 30 concurrent players and has a 28% like rating. All of which we understand to lower a game’s position in search results.
I would expect that the search results of the “anime” keyword would return the highest rated and most relevant games first, and that games with fewer players and a lower like rating would appear lower down in search results.
After discussion with the discovery team, they told me search results are entirely algorithmic and that they do not curate or hand-pick games for the search results. However, the image shown in the original post blatantly shows that as not being the case. Either I was lied to, a severe bug occurred, or someone went over the team’s head. #1 and #3 do not comfort me.
This needs to be fixed. This has a huge negative impact on businesses in a similar genre and sets a bad precedent, which would open the possibility for the system being abused & corrupted. It’s also extremely anti-competition, which hurts businesses longer term.
I would also like to voice my discomfort about this. I’m perfectly happy to accept that this may have been an error in communication somewhere, or perhaps a policy misapplied. But I don’t really care for blame games with these things and I don’t care really if anyone is at fault. What I care about is that this sort of thing makes it so much harder to trust what we’re told about how search and discovery works, and it makes planning for business much more complex than it needs to be.
To be specific, I don’t have a problem with notable creations being treated differently than tiny ones. I don’t even really have a problem with notable creators being treated differently, to a certain extent. What I do care about is accessibility; if I were to become a popular cash cow tomorrow, would I have the same options as someone who hooked up with some internal brand relations-esque team? The answer seems to be ‘no’ here, and that has serious implications.
This isn’t just about games, really. It could be about any asset type; think UGC, or even tools and assets in the upcoming creator marketplace. That’s why I’m concerned in large part. Perhaps I even benefit from shadowy preferential treatment today with my own popular products. I wouldn’t be surprised if I did, though I haven’t heard anything about it if so. But what unfairly benefits me today can also unfairly hurt me tomorrow, and more to the point, it means that maybe others are being snuffed out based on things other than the merit of their work, which can become blatantly unfair in the extreme. I am not comfortable with this being the baseline atop which business is expected to be performed.
The field for competition should have an open rulebook and everyone should play by them. The rules need not treat everyone equally, but they definitely need to stipulate a common rule set. I fear that this… ‘bug’ is showing us that there are more rules in the book than what we hear. Perhaps search terms are not ordinarily hand picked, but this glaring discrepancy points to a whole truth left unsaid.
So whatever went on here, it would be imperative to know.
This may be beside the point here but I do think it’s interesting that it’s simply the first result but not the larger highlighted tile that is given to real notable top results. Not sure what to make of that.
Hello aidan, I doubt that the Roblox team would manually put a badly rated paid game high in the search results. The algorithm might be showing you this game because it’s monetized very heavily or because of some tags attached to it. Who knows? It’s the Roblox algorithm…
This could be a result of them sponsoring the game upon searching a keyword, which they have every right to do with the advertisements tools Roblox provides.
Or, as you said, the search algorithm could be bugged. In that case, it’s a weird bug, because this doesn’t appear out of nowhere on a Thursday night.
Gamefam has preferential treatment by Roblox, thus promoting their game
Gamefam is doing something unknown by others to exploit the search / algorithm and is keeping this information secret
Complete coincidence
Anything other than the 3rd outcome spells disaster.
This speculation is what happens when one of the most important parts of the platform (Game discovery) is a black box that nobody other than roblox is allowed to look in to.
We appreciate you flagging this to us and we apologize for the delay.
We identified the issue on the same day and promptly addressed it. The heart of the issue stemmed from our efforts to democratize discovery by mitigating our search system’s bias toward popular experiences. Typically, we deploy specific strategies to bring fresh experiences into the spotlight, but these are intended for very narrow search queries. In this case, our approach inadvertently extended to a broad term (“anime”), leading to the mix-up. We have conducted a thorough review to ensure we have sufficient guardrails in place to avoid similar issues for broad search terms.
Furthermore, We are working on overhauling Roblox search to make sure that results are entirely determined by algorithms, providing relevant and quality results. You can find our vision for discovery and search here.
If this is the case, wouldn’t the algorithm have boosted more than just one small anime game? Why was the game with the IP deal the only game that got boosted?
By “fresh”, do you mean experiences that are recently created?
