Hello, i started developing on roblox two years ago. Last year in december i finally got the motivation and finished one of my projects to the end. To encourage players to join and try it out, as i wasn’t getting ANY players other than my friends, i spent some money on the new roblox ads. Here is my experience, and why (in my opinion) you shouldn’t use it if you don’t have waaay bigger budget than what i had (total ~60 USD).
- Budget
I promoted the game in 2 intervals, once between december 2023 and january 2024, and second try was yesterday, in July. For the first try i spent total of 26 USD. For the second i spent 32 USD.
- Impressions, clicks and visits
Impressions number seems overwhelmingly large. For the price i paid i got 2 million impressions, 6.6k clicks and 1211 plays. That means, for 1 visit i paid around 0,05 USD. I’d say it’s not really a bad score, but that’s not my main issue.
- Players who joined
Here’s the dealbreaker for me. Let me split up all the newcomers into different categories and i’ll explain them as we go:
- Engaged - 5%
- Interested - 5%
- Humans - 10%
- Robots - 80%
Okay, the names may sound ominous, but lets go one by one:
Engaged - These are the people who joined from a sponsored ad, played the game for 10-15 minutes, invited me to friends and favourited the game and wanted to keep up with the development after they left cause there were no other players around. One guy even bought the only gamepasses i have and AFK’d for few days to be at the top of the leaderboard. It’s what kept me motivated and up to try and deliver my game.
Interested - These are the people who joined from a sponsored ad, played the game for 10-15 minutes, and then either gave their feedback or didn’t do anything, leaving the game afterwards because there were no players around. It’s what i hoped to be atleast 10% of the new players, but that’s still not a bad amount for the visits i got.
Humans - These are the people who joined from a sponsored ad, played a few rounds/stayed for longer, leaving when there were no players anymore. I was expecting this to be the majority of the playerbase, players who joined, understood the most basic mechanics and played the game. The problem is i don’t even know if they liked it or not, because there were not enough players to keep playing, as the game is based on a PVP solely. You cant “Player vs Player”, when the most of the playerbase is them:
Robots - I don’t know if it’s a general problem with sponsored ads or is it just me, but when the server finally filled up after getting a burst from an ad, almost ALL of the players seemed like they were bots. When the game started i could walk around them, chase them, punch them, and they would have absolutely no reaction. Even if i wanted them to kill me, they couldn’t, because they would punch me once and then just run some other place. It was hillarious that i could run around a person for 2 minutes straight and he couldn’t land a single hit, while the above mentioned Human category could easily engage into combat. It’s not even that the controls are complicated, you literally press mouse and sprint with shift, and on the phone you tap the right side of the screen and have a button for sprinting. They were even walking into walls and entering the zone mindlessly, ignoring red screen and big warning that they should run away. I tried talking to them, made the game as accessible as possible, put a big bold controls rundown in the lobby, still situation is the same. Oh, and half of them didn’t even start the game, as they joined, sat in the lobby for few seconds and left.
- Ads are over, what now?
Here is another issue, after the ads ended, the game went radio silent. It ties to the last-mentioned point - if most of the players are literally bots, and the small portion that actually liked the game/atleast played it left because they didn’t have anyone to play with. Ads actually gave me 0 replayability, as all the newcoming players are literally from sponsored ads, and like 30 of the unique users are my friends (some of which played from the sponsored ads first)
- Conclusion
Ads only made me spend money, left me unmotivated, and killed my spark as a small dev. Issue with my game is that to be fun it must have players actually playing it. If there are no players, there is no game. People are saying that i should make updates, that i should promote it on tiktok and youtube. I tried all of that, i updated the game once, rebranded it totally and made it more appealing, wrote to countless youtubers, tried promoting it on tiktok. Maybe im bad at advertising games, but it’s just sad that roblox doesn’t give game makers some way to get recognised other than paying them. I came to this platform to create fun experiences, not to be a salesman. I suppose that RNG is a key factor too (double meaning), as i saw stories of devs who went from zero to front page. I open studio, start making some new content, and eventually close it after 5 minutes, knowing that im just wasting my time.
What’s your story on sponsored ads? Im curious if the robot incident is just me or is it a well-known occurence.