Player Count Changes on Experience Tiles

Updates Announcements
#1

Hello creators,

Last month, we announced that 16:9 experience tiles are coming to Home in April. As part of this change, we’ve also been testing how to improve the metadata available on tiles.

Starting on April 8, in conjunction with the move to larger tiles, Player Count (Concurrent Users) will no longer be displayed on the larger 16:9 tiles. However, users can continue to access Player Count on the experience details page and alongside smaller 1:1 tiles in Continue and Favorites.

We’re committed to providing a platform where creators with great experiences can thrive. We’ve found that displaying player counts on experience tiles discourages users from trying new or less-popular experiences, favoring only the popular ones. To address this bias, we’re reducing the emphasis on player counts on tiles while still providing the information in experience details. We think this balances how users make decisions to play an experience without being solely influenced by player counts.

Our recent experiments show that users enjoy Roblox more with this change. We saw that removing player count contributed to a 6.79% increase in users discovering unique experiences and a significant increase in engagement for new and emerging experiences. Additionally, overall engagement from recommendations also increased by 8.24% (on desktop & web), indicating that users are enjoying these experiences. We think this benefits all types of creators and makes Roblox a more vibrant ecosystem long term.

In addition, both Friend Presence and Experience Rating will continue to be available on experience tiles. This metadata along with the larger 16:9 thumbnail will remain as useful indicators to help people make decisions about what experience to join.

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Friend Activity and Experience rating metadata is shown.
CCU will still be available on experience details.

What’s next

We’re working on more ways to help you optimize your experience tiles on Home.

  1. Moving forward, we will continue to test various insights and metadata, such as Genre/Themes of the experience, updates from creators, improved Friend Activity, and more to make your experiences more compelling to our users on Home.

  2. Thumbnail Personalization: We are actively exploring a feature that will let you show different thumbnails for different Roblox user groups, which could provide additional ways to boost your conversion rate and engagement. We will share more updates on thumbnail personalization in the coming months.

  3. Our recommendation system is continuously evolving to recommend relevant and enjoyable experiences for our users in order to have your creations reach the right audience.

Please let us know if you have any questions.
Thank you.

237 Likes
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#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

no, please don’t do this

When searching for new experiences, when using the discovery, when comparing your games, we all focus on the player count. This is an important metric for almost all of us, especially us developing on the platform. Don’t make it less accessible to view.

Just provide us an option on settings to continue to view player counts or show it in a corner of the thumbnail on hover.

Also, wouldn’t it look cool, if all the metrics on the detail page are animated similar to how the view count and likes are animated on YouTube?

  • easily viewing the player count is crucial for me
  • I don’t care about this change
  • I prefer not to see the view count for increased engagement in upcoming experiences

0 voters

216 Likes
#4

but why is friends hiding the rating , I don’t think that’s a good idea because I would rather see the rating when looking for a game

the other one they added also hid the rating too why not add it to the side or something

132 Likes
#5

After reading the replies about the good counterpoints on my post, I am now okay with this decision from Roblox. The reason why I’m okay with this is because player counts can be exploited[1] and therefore, it is not really a useful indicator to see if whether a game is active or not. Player counts are mainly useful in scenarios where you want to collect statistics about games on Roblox.

About the friends indicator being a replacement, I think there should be a more useful replacement to player counts rather than that but I currently have no ideas for a better replacement. The reason why I’m asking for a better replacement is because I limit my Roblox friends to mostly my real-life friends which makes the friends indicator a useless replacement.

[1]Player Count Changes on Experience Tiles - #89 by BritishTrainspotting (I think @BritishTrainspotting did a fantastic job on explaining how this can be exploited so I’m linking their post above)

Below is the old message which was completely misunderstood and slightly exaggerated.

Old message (Only kept for contextual reasons)

Removing player counts (even if it’s only on 16:9 game tiles) is like removing dislikes on YouTube; at least that’s what it feels like to me. It’s an important statistic to keep and removing it wont let you know whether a game is good and popular or not.

Player counts tell a lot about the game, like how a high player count will tell you it’s a good and genuine game and how a low player count tells you it’s either a good but dead game or a bad game.

About the friends presence indicator being a replacement to player counts, I don’t recommend that as a replacement as I don’t have much friends on Roblox because I limit it to mostly my real life friends so the friends presence indicator being a replacement would be useless, so please, Roblox, keep the player count.

99 Likes
#6

I’m gonna have to disagree with this change. Who’s also with me here?

Like rating, concurrent players help identify genuine games. I’d rather be able to see the count on hover than not having it at all. Please rethink about this.

136 Likes
#7

Having communication is nice (even if the change is less than good) so I’ll give you that… I like the design of them and 16:9 but removing CCU is still such a randomly useless change and makes the UX far worse and I still disagree with changing it. Just wastes space and makes it harder to see useful information.

38 Likes
#8

Cautiously optimistic with this change. As a developer I appreciate my experience being given a better chance of being played despite being on the lower end of CCU. However as a developer using the website I do not like losing visibility on stats that give me a good birds eye view of the state of the platform. I wish I had a portal to help me do research on the performance and content of other experiences. I’m happy CCU remains on the small thumbnails.

71 Likes
#9

I think this could be a good change but the rating should always be shown no matter what

54 Likes
#11

PLEASE, don’t remove ccu. It is such a useful metric when browsing games. I do not care if my game gets less players honestly, that metric is just that important (and one of my games strait up cannot be found when searching for it, unless quotes are used…, so that is not going to improve that)

The friend activity tag has already been annoying enough… The new tiles should leave you plenty of space to not have to hide any information on games

Can we get the Friends Playing sort back…

Sounds good, can’t wait to see Genres making a comeback, I hope this will come in the form of a filter (though what are themes?)

39 Likes
#12

Will recent friend activity still appear under these new tiles? I do not like how it shows “1 Friend” or “4 Friends” underneath an experience instead of just showing the rating. I would not mind having “X Friends” and the experience rating shown at the same time, but just showing “X Friends” feels unnecessary.

image

I completely get it if your friends are in the game and it then it appears, but if they’re not in the game I just don’t see the point in seeing that they played it recently.

63 Likes
#13

I second this, there are a lot of copied and imitation games out there, seeing player count also helps to see whether it’s the real game or not.

Player count can say a lot about quality and engagement of a game at the blink of an eye in most cases.

52 Likes
#14

I love purchased marketing.

I think this somewhat useless update of the website to talk about accounts is irrelevant or just a convenience.

20 Likes
#15

Great update, remove the player count! (no like actually do that for low player count games please)

17 Likes
#16

I agree with this, though typically we use external services (e.g. Rolimons) since they’re a bit clearer and have more historical information.

It would be nice to have a section of analytics dedicated towards our performance compared to similar experiences our players play, as well as experiences that are recommended under our own experiences.

12 Likes
#17

I am not sure if they’re doing this due to Analytics.

The Player Count can be an impacting information for a User’s Decision on things.

Clicking on an Experience to view Details is a way to give Analytics information, which speaks information out. The information it’s telling, is that the User was interested on what the game was about and decided to click on it to view specific information.

It is impossible for a Computer to read a User’s mind through magic. If the User was ONLY after the player count, the user would have not clicked on the Experience if the player count was shown in the front page.

 

If removing the Player Count, was not a decision made for Analytics. Then I don’t understand why the Player Count is being removed from fast accessible information.

Roblox should not remove this crucial information away, as it delays to find a game quickly, to those that seek to play with more than one player.

But if you read the post, it literally talks about an Experiment aka. yes they seem to have done this because of Analytics and other.

 

I would not have an issue with this change, if you can simply hover your mouse over an experience to show “quick-info” rather than loading an entire new page.

 

A LOT want to see the Player Count. But Roblox wants to change something. We should take both things in consideration eventually, to find another solution.

If Roblox prefers to experiment with Analytics, maybe a hover-card thing would be more interesting. Not only is it interesting, but you can differentiate between “Clicking on an Experience” and “Hovering over an Experience for quick-info”, allowing for variety in Analytics.

(This will only be an issue on Browsers, not the Apps)
Okay, it will be an issue on PC too, not Mobile, Mobile is built differently

It’s just a question on how to implement such a hover-card that keeps up with user-friendly design.

 

This is speculation, I don’t know how this change will look like on Desktop. Would be a question to @ivy_poisond

 

Third-Party Extensions prolly gonna show them anyways if their devs change it so that it does still show

17 Likes
#18

W, games should not be promoted just because they are popular, but because they are good games, and removing biases is very important. good to see good discovery changes happening

36 Likes
#19

On one hand, players might give games more of a chance if they can’t see the player count (i find myself judging games based on their player count), but on the other hand, like PeZsmistic said, losing an easy view of the state of roblox games is not great. There was a bit of this when friends hid the rating and player count, which brings me to my next point. I do not like that rating will be hid by friends. I want to know if a game is good or not.

Not sure how to feel about this.

11 Likes
#20

I strongly recommend against removing CCU on the game tiles.

If the concern is that there is a bias in favour of already existing popular games, then would it not be more prudent to instead improve searching for said underrated games in the first place?

For one, return searching by genres at the very least (which is vastly long overdo and the fact that it was removed without replacement is just unacceptable)

At the absolute bare minimum, let the user MOUSE over the game tile to reveal additional information.

19 Likes
#21

The change makes sense. People will brush off games with smaller CCU more quickly. Just leaving it only to be seen after expanding the experience details page makes sense since they’ll at least get to see what the game is about, along with its playercount.

The knee-jerk reactions seem unwarranted since the post claims Roblox did its fair share of research prior to getting these conclusions. Best to see how this turns out.

23 Likes