My game is failing, how can I fix that?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

(please let me know if this is the wrong topic, I will change it.)

So, I recently released my new game called “Find The Gears!”. I got so many positive feedback and the game quality is great. But it is so hard to get people to play it. I have tried finding streamers. But since I now live in Asia, there are multiple languages, so it is hard to find a english streamer during day time. And the technique of finding streamers to play their game has been used so many times that streamers are starting to not really play games that people have made that they requested to the streamer. I have spent all my robux on a ad and got 36 thousand impressions and only 64 clicks. I don’t know what to do. Can someone please give me tips on how to get players, thank you.

If you want to see the game, this is the link:

8 Likes
#2

That’s my personal opinion but however,
Game concept is overall good, in fact if you target for a minor ages of roblox game might get its activity. Quality is fine as well, only thing is game feels like 2017-2019 games for myself. I’m not quite sure if it’s so, but anyway. It’s also a thing gear decal isn’t looking as good as mesh or gear made out of parts would look. Probably you should also look into sound design and such. Despite of that all the best tip could be not giving up on game and if you do at least take a look on roblox market and find what is it lacking, so your game had a lot more chances to get activity. Failed games is pretty much fine as making them alone or in a small team takes time and experiences.

3 Likes
#3

I’m not too sure, but I’m pretty sure that the “Find the __s” games are dying, just like the “Get rich by __ to get __” games.

That, and also getting players for those games is difficult now as they appeal to a younger audience, which you can no longer advertise to.

I’ve found sponsors to be more effective than ads, by the way.
Here are some stats for a sponsor on one of my games:

Cost: 450 :robux_light:
Impressions: 76,986
Clicks: 211
Attributed Visits: 87

2 other people have also sponsored the game, but I don’t have stats for their sponsors.

And then, here are some stats for an advertisement:

Cost: 800 :robux_light:
Impressions: 43,214
Clicks: 270
Attributed Visits: Can’t view. (Probably 1 to 15 because the game has nearly no visits)

Remember, ad blockers exist and they hide the ads on roblox, but they don’t hide sponsored games.

Personally, I hate the “Find the __s” games, as they’re just the laziest games to make.
All you do is make an image, and then generate 1000 different versions of it the same way most NFTs are made.
You then just throw them around a map and script a simple data saving system to save what ones you’ve found.
Boom. There’s your “Game”

But anyway, I would try sponsors, and if they don’t work, just move onto making a different game.

Adding on, as some of what I have said is a bit harsh, it isn’t bad if a game fails.
Sure, its time that you’ve spent just gone, but its a good thing to have a game fail, because you know what doesn’t work and you can try to make something that will work.

4 Likes
#4

Well, game success is all about money + luck.
Additionally, if your game is unique and very good-looking, it may get additional exposure on yt/tt/reddit/twitter but this won’t give you stable playerbase in the long run.

#5

Nice way to reduce the work of the developers who create these games, including me.

These games are not as simple as taking 70 images, placing them in a map and creating a data. At least not all of them.
Mine took a lot of work (there are certainly people who would have done it faster, yes).
There are game mechanics to create, puzzles, a nice map etc…

And the result has been positive with more than 50 million visits in my game. I know that developers are usually very critical when it comes to talk about games that are not theirs, but that doesn’t mean that there is no work or that it is easy. I’m not saying that these games are extremely difficult to create either.

To answer to Gear_Aviation If you want my point of view, as EZQP3 said, ‘Find The’ games are not hype anymore. That doesn’t mean it can’t work anymore but it’s not as easy as it was about 1 year ago (when Find The Markers often had a CCU of +40k players and it was a youtuber hype). Moreover these games don’t tend to monetize, and therefore don’t bring much to Roblox, so they are probably not games that Roblox will put forward in priority.

1 Like
#6

I played it the other day when you posted about it in #help-and-feedback:creations-feedback and it was a pretty solid game. Just that after a while of playing it slowly began to feel repetitive and eventually got dull as it’s just about going around the map and finding these gears, nothing else from there. I’d say to maybe add a map changing system and have puzzles to complete or something around the maps, it would spice things up a lot more. Overall the game is worth to try though.

#7

Ok, so there are key things when you’re making a game which you want to be popular

1. Don’t make it repetitive
As we continue to progress in a game, we find it boring, because it’s natural. If you even want to make it repetitive, make it fun. Like while repeating, you can increase stats, unlock them something to explore, basically give them a reason to repeat your game
2. Try to understand your audience
Now, just go to a random server, and get their opinion on how you can improve your game, even it’s any one person, go ask them! They’ll be more valuable than anyone for your game!
3. Don’t spend on ads, try something else
Now, the new Roblox ads policy restricted for people under 13. And mature people don’t really play these types of games tbh. So instead, try bringing your friends, tell them to play, tell them to give honest feedbacks, and share with their friends. And try to give something like “Friends Boost”, so they have a reason about why to play your game with their friends and why anyone should invite their friend.
4. Sponsor it
I don’t know whether you advertised or sponsored. But sponsor is a good way. I just sponsored my simple parkour game for like 100 for 5 days, and literally got 2 players, even it would be at nowhere in the list, still I got some players.
5. Think about the core concept
You should think about adding a concept which would resist for alot of time, and if there’s a strong concept, think on how to improve it
6. Make it fun
Ok, so this is obvious, you should focus mainly on people enjoy it, if they do, they’ll be attracted towards your products and will buy it!

That’s all from my side :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#8

Imma be real, I’ve never played one of the games.
I’ve just seen my little brother playing them and hated how simple they looked.
Most of them though do just recolor the exact same image, though. Or use slightly different and recolored variants of the same image from what I’ve seen.

As for puzzles, yeah didn’t know these games had them.

But…

I also made a “get rich by” game in 5 days as a joke to show my friends how simple they are to make and to poke fun at the developers of them (Cough Cough Badass Games… Low effort reskins of the same game…) and it ended up making over 20k robux and has over 50k visits at this time. Which considering it was made in 5 days, in my eyes, it just shows how low effort a lot of the popular games on roblox are now.

Roblox is getting flooded with these race games I’ve never played but seen sponsored everywhere, the +1 a second games and whatever else.

Then there’s the DOORS clones, the ones attempting to fool people into thinking they’re the real DOORS
(Like this one, which is BEYOND poorly made, uses other games assets too and refuses to put [FANMADE] in the title after LSPLASH requested it)
image

And there’s probably the tutorial made DOORS games and the free model ones.

You can’t tell me those aren’t low effort copy-paste games.

I’m just mad with the state of roblox games at the moment, having the lowest effort games at the top and doing really well monetarily while all good games aren’t anywhere near the top and are doing alright, but no where near as good monetarily as the low effort games.

So yeah, never played the games because they don’t appeal to me and I’m just mad at the current state of roblox.

Anyway, I am sorry for how harsh I was about those games, really should look into how they’re made before commenting on them.

2 Likes
#9

Yes, but we’re on Roblox. These games massively attract children, you just have to see the attendance records on the platform almost every week. These developers want quick money, and what brings quick money at the moment are these games (Race etc…) for a fairly fast development time. They adapt their games to the roblox market, to attract players. If one day only very good quality games attract players then the average Roblox games quality will match the new market.

Conclusion: I don’t think we should blame the developer, but rather the players (personally I don’t blame anyone because I think everyone does what they want, according to their objectives)

#10

The game is horribly optimized… I was playing on my phone and I had to turn my graphics level all the way down and I still lagged (my phone is pretty new). If you’re aiming for a younger audience, you should optimize it better as kids usually play on old devices.

#11

In my personal opinion the game design is pretty boring, there is nothing that encourages me staying for longer than few minutes. When I find a gear nothing cool happens that would make me want to find other gears to replicate the same experience I feel the first time.

The soundtrack is good and I like it for both areas of the game however the map is very small and there is nothing to explorer by yourself buy a few mountains. Most players who play this are likely to be mobile users which means you need to somehow keep them engaged through more than find and seek of decals spread around the map.

On top of that there is not clear instruction on what I need to do, where to go and the mechanics of the game. Along with that UI isn’t very well made for all screen like shown here on my stretched monitor:

image
image1920×766 174 KB

If you wish to get more visitors, you need to improve your thumbnail and icon to be more catchy to an average audience (children), most people commission GFX designers for this purpose. After that you will need to know your sponsor amount, putting too little or too much may not pay off enough. For example when I was starting out I would run 5k sponsors on my game, the icon is what mobile players will see your game as, if it doesn’t feel catchy or too spontaneous of other game’s icons they will skip it.I’ve got 64k impressions and 500 attributed visits during that period.

In the end of the day when making a game you need to have a long term plan on what you will do and making sure you don’t run out of marketing cash. This is why I advice you peruse different similar ideas to this styled game.

4 Likes
#12

Some people in this thread clearly don’t understand why games get popular on Roblox.

This is just not true. If your game has a good design and is fun, people will play it. You can brute force people playing the game by advertising massively, but ultimately if it’s not fun it will die off.

It isn’t about luck either - maybe you got ‘lucky’ by accidentally making something people find really fun, but that’s about it. Most of the top devs on Roblox didn’t have to spend any money on advertising because their games are just fun and engaging.

Game genres don’t just die. It may be the case that people are less interested because there’s no new innovation or meaningful updates for existing games in the genre - but that doesn’t mean that type of game is not worth making.

Anyway… Find Everything is an example of this genre done extremely well. I’d recommend playing it if you have the Robux spare to get a few ideas.

Here are some of my suggestions for improving the game:

  • Make gear collection more satisfying. Right now it uses the same (quite loud) sound effect whenever you grab one. You could add more to it, like a smoother popup effect and showing what % you’ve collected in that zone whenever you collect one.

  • The puzzles don’t seem like puzzles. I don’t find it particularly interesting just buying the planks and keys from the shop and then going back to use them - they should be self contained, so you can find the plank nearby or you have to push a button. Again, Find Everything has a load of great puzzles, it’s definitely worth checking that out.

  • Movement is standard and doesn’t add anything to the experience. You want people to feel like they’re improving in multiple ways, so adding some more movement mechanics as you play would help - like double jumping or wall climbing, something different to just regular movement.

  • Show a count of how many gear you’ve collected on the leaderboard, instead of tokens. People like to be competitive and show off if they have everything. This one is just a small change though

  • Do more with your worlds - they’re all pretty small and the gears are just kind of there. Some require planks and stuff to get to which is more frustrating than fun since you need to go to the shop and back. Add more obstacles! Things that kill you, things that move more and more complicated puzzles than what you’ve got right now.

  • I don’t think it’s a good idea to put a button in the overworld to open the barn/stables. I have no idea where the button might be (there might be hints from the NPCs, like the one standing next to it, but you shouldn’t have to read dialog to find them - if you did have to, it should be much more common in the game)

Hope these suggestions are helpful! I think your game has potential, but it just needs to be more fun before you try advertising it further. Ignore the people saying the genre is dying or that you were just unlucky/didn’t advertise enough… that is not how games work here.

1 Like
#13

Ads. Ads are the single most effective way at growing a game.

The formula for a good ad is always hearsay, some people say high quality ads with low R$ work, but others say the opposite. Personally, running an ad for 10K has always yielded good results. It’s also best to only run place sponsors, the change to ads not showing to users under 13 has rendered banner/skyscraper ads useless.

You also shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, ROBLOX doesn’t really have an effective ‘discovery’ algorithm for games. And if they do, it doesn’t work as it should. It’s incredibly hard to get your game to having flowing traction, so don’t stress out about this uphill battle.

I suggest joining discords, communities etc to post your game and get some feedback. In the end, no press is bad press. As long as your games name is in peoples mouth, there will be an incentive to play it.

tl;dr

getting a big game is heavily luck dependant, and how much money you are willing to invest

#15

Funny how you think the game’s success is just how engaging it is.
You can make a top quality game but you need to consider:

  • low player count drastically affects the engagement stats
  • the game needs to be verified by the algorithm which usually happens on 200k - 500k visits
  • your game without the exposure on the platform dies, no matter how “fun” it is

What you’re saying may be the case for Steam where people look for games to play for longer than 10 minutes, not for Roblox.
Here, you don’t get anywhere by just making an enjoyable experience.

Many front pages devs still fail with their new releases sometimes, that’s not because their games are bad, it’s because it’s all about the algorithm.

1 Like
#17

Sure, you need some amount of exposure to begin getting players - but that really doesn’t have to be much if your game is good enough.
Word of mouth is insanely strong on Roblox and games will pick up very quickly if they can hold the players.

I’m not talking about the stats overall… just on average for players, if it’s engaging for a while and people want to play with their friends, it’ll probably grow instead of die off.

That is just a copout. Games fail because they miss the mark for what players want and need, not because of ‘the algorithm’. The algorithm adjusts based on what players will play - it’s not completely random.

1 Like
#18

I wish it worked this way.
Sadly, the 30d retention for top 1k games is 0.5%.
Roblox players hardly ever stick to a game, if they do, it’s most likely a big game with regular content and huge community.
That’s why you need some way to keep new users coming to your game.
Social media is a great boost for a day or two but not for long.
What you really need is the algorithm to start pushing your game forwards.
This is really how popular games are keeping their playerbase.

And if it comes to the algorithm - it’s certainly not random, but since the way it works is very vague, it’s referred to as luck.
You can say the retention and visit length matters blah blah, just to see a game with 2x worse stats getting on the recommended sort.

1 Like
#19

That’s not true, actually the Alghoritm has a logic, someone which I don’t remember the Username knows how, and also, it’s not true that Games stay up like that, I’m playing Jailbreak a lot, but not because of Sponsors, I simply search it, same thing for a lot of other Games

#20

I’ve just said it’s certainly not random, contains random elements, uses engagement stats but it’s not predictable, hence referred to as luck.

Ah yes, you’re searching jailbreak so I’m obviously wrong :person_facepalming:

#21

No it’s doesn’t, maybe only 1-2, but it’s not luck, @x86_architecture knows if I’m not wrong

I’m probably not the only one that plays Games that way, it’s not only luck

#22

I’m not denying that the algorithm helps, it definitely does a lot. It’s just not what makes the top games popular - there are controllable elements outside of the algorithm that you can change (the design of the game and how you’re encouraging players to bring their friends, engagement statistics etc).

Well-made games can fail, because players don’t care as much about how well they’re made as they do about how easy they are to understand, how fun and how engaging they are.

The algorithm clearly isn’t just a linear ‘this gets recommended at X stats’ system. We don’t know clearly how it works like you say, but we do know there are different recommendation types for different genres etc. that factor in.

I’m not sure what your point is with this quote, and I’m also curious where that stat is from.

What’s the outcome of this line of thinking anyway, how does it actually serve you to think it’s just luck dependent?
Games fail because they aren’t engaging, intuitive or fun enough - show me a solid example where this is not the case and I would reconsider my position.

1 Like