New Game Sort: "Recommended For You"

Updates Announcements
#21

Finally, I won’t get bored very easily! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished to find new, small games that can satisfy my needs while I endlessly scroll through the front page, all bored. You all know how searching a single word will bring up copy-cat games and absolute ripoffs, but the new system will finally be beneficial to both the players (that get to play new games that they like) and developers (whose relatively small games can get exposure).

OML, is this foreshadowing the end of our worries?! Will there be tags and a search-by-genre feature? Right now, the search system is quite faulty in which some games don’t show up when you search for their name. Also, I’d love it if there is a filter option for searching (like “date created” or “high rated”, etc.).

One last thing (I promise): is there going to be a stat for this? Like “number of times your game has been recommended” and “CTR in the recommended sort”. It’d be good to know how much our game’s genre is performing and how our individual games are doing among other games in its genre.

Overall, I’m so happy for this as this shows that Roblox is willing to take steps in order to improve game discovery and make the platform fun forever. Anyone who starts cannot stop playing! Muahaha—never mind.

Kind of giving me them YouTube vibes NGL.

9 Likes
#22

This is a great step in the right direction in my opinion, as game discovery on roblox hasn’t always been the best.
Here are a few features that I think might improve this:

  • Add an “I’m not interested” button on games, a bit like YouTube.
  • Playlists! This would make game discovery easier, because people can find playlists made by people who like the same games that they do, and find even more games that they would like.
  • Lower the Popular section. Placing the popular section at the top just makes these games popular, because they’re popular. Sounds a bit weird to me.
  • Filters that the user can set, for example a minimum like to dislike ratio, or filtering out a game genre(parents might not want children to play horror games!!! idk)

I am curious as to how it gathers the recommendations, because COPPA restricts you from collecting data from children. So would it be against the law to gather data on your users to recommend them games they like based on previous games they played? Correct me if I’m wrong on the previous points I have made.

11 Likes
#23

All the games I want in one place!
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Now I can play two of my favorite games at the same time!

In all seriousness, this sort could use some work. I like the idea, but the algorithm isn’t great. I don’t like horror games at all, and I have quite a few Piggy-themed or other various horror games in the sort. The tycoons and obbies are more what I expected, but I already have the tycoon and obbies sorts for that.

21 Likes
#24

Whilst I appreciate the improving efforts towards Game Discovery, I’m a little unhappy that my Favourites sort has been booted to the bottom of the home page. Could the sorts be re-ordered again on the home page to move it higher up again?

2 Likes
#25

It would be nice if it filtered games that are already on the popular sort. If the entire purpose of this sort is to increase game discoverability, mine isn’t really doing a good job and is filled with games that I’ve already discovered (aka a repeat of the popular sort).

Maybe it’s because I don’t really play Roblox games all that often. There was one new game that I found on there though. It’s a good start but the algorithm might need more work.

Also – as developers, can we get a tool to see how many people see our game on this sort? It would be helpful to know that my game is actually popping up for other people.

6 Likes
#26

Last I knew, the “Recommended for You” was based on location data in the past at least, so in America where Roblox is super popular, the Popular Sort & Recommended Sort have always been identical. It sounds like there is some changes being made to this however, so hoprefully this won’t be a continued trend anymore.

4 Likes
#27

This is awesome! Developers have been requesting Discovery-based sorts for ages, so this helps a ton!

Next up, genre sorts? :eyes:

4 Likes
#28

Hopefully, or at least for a possibility of tags like mentioned here:

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#29

First impressions, my recommended doesn’t feel very tailored for me. The only games on here that I’d be interested in playing at all are two games I’ve already played. The rest completely miss the mark of what I’d enjoy vs what I don’t.

I’m assuming however this is taking into account recently played games as I just played a “scary” game recently when following a friend and you can see 3 “scary games” among the list. :man_shrugging: Should take into account games I :+1: only, imo. But maybe this will get better with more time and more data. Only time will tell.

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6 Likes
#30

Ah yes, solidifying the fact that I only play anime games.

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Aside from this, will there be less front-page games and more hidden gems so that there will be a true wider variety?

8 Likes
#31

It’s way better than the “Recommended” sort, but it’s still not 100% correct. Two of the games there are games I have already played, so I guess that works well.

7 Likes
#32

I’m curious, what are the parameters or criteria for games under this sort?

I’m a fan of the SCP Genre, and some games that appear are from it, which is accurate, but a lot aren’t. Also, my own SCP game doesn’t appear in it despite it being a game I play a lot.

For example, I personally don’t like Mad City, and have barely played it, but it appears almost at the top of Recommended for You.

6 Likes
#33

I have recently found a very good game recommended for me because of this update and it isn’t a very popular game!

This change will make lots of new games change forever and rise up! These sort of games are what you may find interesting, I would really like it to be categorised also from if you play like a game from ROLVE - The creators of Arsenal, you can maybe get the game ‘Typical Colors’ inside their as maybe that appeals to you due to you playing arsenal and it’s made by the same team!

4 Likes
#34

This is amazing, I’ll finally be able to go a day without seeing Pizza Factory Tycoon because this new sort is personalized! This new sort has improved game discovery a lot!
Thanks for this!

5 Likes
#35

Its a step in the right direction but still needs quite a bit of work considering i’m not gonna be playing the vast majority of these:

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#36

Wow! It should improve a lot the experience of players trying to find a new game; but I have a question. Why does the game genres sorting was removed? It was pretty helpful to find Adventure, Roleplay or many other gane genres.

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#37

I like this update because my game has almost 5x the usual amount of players now :wink:

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#40

This is really awesome! Now we just need a way to sort games by genre, by free to play/paid, by suited for (age), and by platforms.

3 Likes
#41

is very epic to see that roblox is taking care of making players have more fun with underdiscovered games, it can make people play more time and have fun discovering games!

anyways, i think it should be a good idea to first check the games roblox recomends. I play doomspire a lot and i got recommended a copy of it

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lol and instead of being called doomspire its called doomSpire

5 Likes
#42

This is a nice first step, but the game page still is severely disorganized. This hopefully is just the first step toward reforming the entire games page. I really hope you don’t stop here, and honestly, I am a little concerned it took this long for this problem to start seriously being addressed. For every day that goes by where the games page is filled with the same game everywhere is wasted time for many games.

The biggest though, in my opinion, your top priority should be to asap make it so the same game can never appear twice on the games page. This has been continuously stated and explains as one of the biggest problems with the games page right now.

I hope within the next year at least (next few months ideally) this “Recommended For You” sort gets removed and instead divided by genre. What is the point of just having one sort of game recommended for you? Every game shown beside the popular sort should be games you may like. There should be genres like “Fantasy”, “Sci-Fi”, etc.

What happens if a player often plays games of multiple genres? How quickly will one sort for recommended games become disorganized and messy?

How do you plan on not showing incomplete games or games that are not of high quality?

It’s not just about showing a game that players may like but also showing high-quality games. If low-quality games make their way to the front of the games page, it’d hurt Roblox’s reputation.

It sucks seeing really high quality and good games buried deep in Roblox. Some games are so awesome, I feel like they could instantly raise Roblox’s reputation if they made it to the front of the games page, but they are buried. Maybe its time for a better rating system?
A rating system like a questionnaire that actually asks you questions like, “Was this a visually appealing game?”, “Did you experience a lot of bugs?”, etc. And the user can answer with a 1-5 kind of thing. You could use these more detailed ratings to creates sorts like “Best Graphics” or “Best Gameplay” or you can just use it to make sure the best quality games get on the games page and on the top of the searches.

A better rating system may also prevent bots.

How will the new content rating system contribute to this?

Will it be used to create sorts like “For older kids”, “Family games”, etc.? Will games with a filled-out content rating have a better chance of being noticed? (This could prevent amateurish games from hurting the games page)

Also as you are adding new sorts, can’t you remove old useless ones?

5 Likes