I recently released a game and all seemed well right before this Pilot Home update. The first 3 weeks of my game’s release consisted of only my core discord audience since I got NO home page recommendation impressions. After those 3 weeks, my game FINALLY started to get recommended to new players and my CCU and home impressions were steadily growing. Fast forward to this home update and my CCU and recommended impressions have dropped over 5x. This is incredibly debilitating to see considering all the work and time I’ve spent to create my game and keep up with updates this month. So I would like to voice some things:
We acknowledge that growing your initial audience is hard, particularly for new and unique types of experiences. This pilot is a first step in awarding initial impressions to new and recently updated experiences so that we can better match them with the right audience.
This home update made this process harder. I have a new and actively updating game and the game has gotten punished due to this update. Therefore, whatever claim that is trying to be made here has either failed or just flat out not followed.
I go to my home page and what do I see? I see 8 games with crazy CCUs and games that I have seen being recommended for years. This is not the purpose of this update as stated above.
I would like to know what changes are being made and what to expect. It’s gotten to the point where I will not update my game or work on the platform until this update is more situated. All the work I have done for the last 6 months has felt lost, and further work at the moment does not reward me at all.
This new update is a killer for games at lower CCU, I recently had a game blow up with the old algorithm implementation but with the new one it’s currently at a death rate. On top of that what is the point of CTR on our icons and working hard on them, if you are going to just change the home recommendation from showing icons to thumbnails?
Most of my games just dropped almost 60% of their player base due to the Roblox algorithm no longer pushing them. This is just ruining more of creators’ hard work.
There was an unrelated issue with one of our services affecting the recommendations being served earlier today. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Please note that this was not an intentional change. The recommendations you were seeing are not representative of the personalized recommendations for your user
So far Roblox has only promoted games that already have tens of millions of users, who already get enough recognition from Roblox on various platforms and some who were even in the hunt less then a month ago. What is the point?
If the point of this sort was to promote smaller games then you have miserably failed. Roblox’s curation team seriously needs a mix up, just because a game is incredibly popular doesn’t mean it deserves to be promoted more. Promote smaller games, promote games that don’t meet your “quality” guidelines. Quality is subjective, just because a game looks bad or low quality to you doesn’t mean it’s bad to someone else.
Consider yourself lucky. My homepage (and a lot of other people) is now extremely bloated with sponsors, recommendations, and “todays picks” instead of… useful information like friends and continue playing.
I’m sorry Roblox but it’s coming to the point where you’re draining new and smaller games so much that it’s impossible to even live on the extremely hard work we put in.
My game is above 90% on almost all KPIs with a D1 retention of 15.49%, D7 retention of 3.56% and AST above 20 minutes. Our monetization is also very good with a ARPDAU of over 5 and the only KPI we’re struggling on is CVR because Roblox shrunk our American playerbase by so much that most people who play, typically come from countries that can’t spend as much. So we lower prices, our ARPPU goes below 90% and now we’re in a loop where we keep having to balance them.
Our players love the game, with a 91% like ratio, but our impressions by Roblox are now 100-500k per day which literally nothing for the great KPIs we’re having. We do weekly updates and work 12-14 hours a day just hoping that one day this algorithm just changes around. But it’s coming to the point where I would need to get a 2nd job just to keep making games. It’s a complete state of emergency and this is killing any chance of new games to exist.
It appears not to be fixed. I have over a thousand players, almost all are returning players because Roblox is not pushing my game whatsoever. 74,000 impressions when all stats are above 90 percentile is so frustrating because I don’t get told what I’m doing wrong, yet there clearly is something wrong because the algorithm is destroying my game.
If this continues for a few more weeks, there is a chance that not only will the game die, our entire living and extremely hard work was for waste.
We have extremely good stats, I’ll even show them to you if you’d like. It’s not fair and I’m already having to cut wages because we can’t afford to keep up the game anymore.
