This post explains everything about why roblox shouldn’t hide CCU because of it’s importance for most users on roblox. Please reconsider some things before rolling this change out.
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Removing player count does not do that, as long as game discovery is horrible, small games on Roblox won’t ever get attention. This reminds me of when YouTube got rid of the dislike button and said this would stop hate to creators. It didn’t.
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That is not possible. That would involve changing the actual base code of the Roblox website. What Poppy is sharing would only be visible for you and anyone else who is using the code.
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Maybe i’m lost and there’s something super confusing, but why are so many people thinking this is removing the metric entirely off the platform? They’re only removing it from the game’s icon, you can still go to the page and view the active player count there, and nothing in this announcement implies that will be something you won’t be able to do. I genuinely feel like i might be missing something because i cannot understand how many people are misinterpreting this when the post is very clear about it from my eyes.
This update increases the chances people will join the game according to their own research, and it only really adds 2-5 more seconds to view a game’s active player count, i genuinely don’t understand the massive vitriol against this update.
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Because change is disorienting. We (me, Diana, and the original Cuyler) want 2006 back.
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I was not expecting to see so many negative reactions to this change, though I guess I should expect it by now.
First off, this change affects everyone, therefor everyone has a “valid” opinion. I won’t outright dismiss the players in this thread that are expressing how they feel about this change. That being said, I think the majority might not have insight on what this change actually means for them and the platform and may be applying a sort of “big company bad” bias towards this change.
As both a player and a full-time developer on this platform, here’s how I feel about the change and the discussion surrounding it, starting with some misconceptions;
“They’re removing our ability to see CCU”
This one seems to be the most prevalent in the replies however it is very important to understand this change only affects the new thumbnail tiles. We still have access to this metric in many places, including both the game page and icon tiles for players, as well as the creator dashboard for developers. This does make it harder to see the CCU (Concurrently Connected Users) for users at a glance. This does not make it impossible for anyone to collect these metrics nor access them.
“Ratings are a bad metric”
This is true, for the most part. They can easily be botted or otherwise manipulated by offering incentives for players to upvote their game. However, it is important to point out that CCU is also subject to these same issues and, in the case of offering incentives, is often abused even more than ratings. Many, many games offer playtime rewards. This includes the “top” (highest CCU) games and is an exceptionally common practice considering it can be tracked and acted upon, unlike ratings. Ratings also have a system in place to correct these issues when they are detected. I’ve had games get disliked bombed by competitors in the past and though it sucks, it has always been corrected in the end. To reiterate, ratings on Roblox are not a good metric but the same reasoning can be applied to CCU and neither are the only metrics (and IMO, not even the primary metrics) for determining the quality of an experience.
“Roblox is reducing the information we’re shown, leading to less informed decisions”
Correct… sort of? I don’t think wholesale reducing a player’s ability to make an informed decision is a good thing however this issue isn’t as black and white as that. The way I see it, this is shifting some of the source of information from the playerbase onto the developer. Very few if anyone in this reply section has mentioned that thumbnails allow developers to show more information about their game to potential players. However, they have pointed out that this change is a “waste of space” which I cannot agree with. This argument is akin to claiming that showing more tiles to players at once is beneficial and leads to more informed decisions (if that’s our goal). Showing players fewer experiences at once but showing more information about those experiences is an excellent way to show players about the actual content of the experience they’re looking at, rather than how much people enjoy it. The goal here from what I can tell is to get players into experiences they enjoy. This platform has an extremely diverse ecosystem of experiences and it is important to convey what you’re getting into at a glance. To me, this information is much more important than how generally appealing an experience is to a wide variety of players and leads me into my next point.
“Roblox is doing this because they’re greedy”
I can’t speak for the intentions of roblox executives however I will say pretty confidently that I believe this change was made with developers in mind. I don’t think this change was made to milk players for their money. If they wanted to do that, they would be doing the opposite and promoting their big earners and current top experiences. To me, this change is about controlling the incentives developers have when making and monetizing their experiences. At the moment, there is a big pressure on developers to create a game that appeals to the widest variety of players and rides right on the line between ethical and unethical practice. This is usually done through maximizing your influence on the metrics about your game that you don’t directly control (e.g. CCU, ARPDAU, ratings) which is exactly why we’re seeing more and more low quality content on the platform. Clearly Roblox recognizes this and is working against it despite it (I assume) not being their most profitable way forward.
“This just makes it so I have to click an experience, the increase in discoverability is too small to matter”
Yes! And no. To address the first half of this statement, it seems very likely that Roblox does want you to click on the experience. This is how users truly make informed decisions. You can only show so much information on the discover and home pages, if you like what you see then the next step is to click the page and see what else they have to offer. If you like that, then the next step is to play the game and so on and so forth. I understand that this extra step may be frustrating to some players but I think it is very important to understand that this isn’t the only step in deciding whether or not your game is played, nor is it the most important. Unlike YouTube, clicking on an icon does not count as a play/view. Games are much more complicated than videos and it is often hard to summarize them succinctly in such a limited format which is why having these layered sources of information is so important. Between thumbnails showing more information than icons and the personalized demographic thumbnails suggested in the post, I think this will lead players towards making more informed decisions about experiences they will enjoy. Not ones that appeal to as many people as possible to try to make as much money as possible.
To close off this already very long reply, I’d like to answer a question lots of players in this thread likely have; “Why should I care if this benefits developers?”
It’s simple. If you want to see more genuinely fun, engaging experiences on the platform that aren’t focused on draining you of every last penny, developers need to benefit from making those kinds of experiences. Hopefully this provided some insight to people who may feel upset about this change.
This is something I have a very large personal investment in considering I both enjoy games on this platform and create them for a living. It is important to me that Roblox makes changes that benefit the players and developers more than shareholders. If this change doesn’t work out, it can always be reverted. However, in the end I’m excited that Roblox has shown recently that they care about this issue and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
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I don’t take issue with the removal of the player count on the icons itself. Rather, I take issue with the lack of search capability for multiplayer, or single player, games. I feel a filter on the Discover page for Server Size would fix this lack of agency to find those games. A Filter for Free Private Servers too.
If I want to play with 5 friends, I need a Server Size of at least 6. And, I might want to use a Private Server to make getting into a server easier.
But, that stuff is somewhat off topic for what you’re discussing. It sounds like the crux of the issue is people being adverse to change. Which I can understand. I think Roblox should tailor its message to be more sympathetic to those people. Some will understand, but others will be vehemently against it. 
This quote matches that last part:
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I’d like to know who at Roblox even thought of this. It’s such a crucial feature for making quick judgments, but now users will click depending on the thumbnail and (easy botted) rating alone.
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I don’t think you read my post properly or you’re purposely arguing something I didn’t say because your understanding of my complaint is wrong.
I did not say player count predicts if it’s good.
I said it’s to find people.
Between games with consistent full servers or dwindling servers, I prefer games that have consistent full ones.
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That isnt anywhere as convienent as simple glancing at the player count and deciding if the game is worthwhile to play. I dont want to click on a bunch of different games and wait for them to load so I can see the player count instead of just looking at it. I can definetly see how removing player count would affect the discovery of experienced. But I dont want that to come at the cost of forcing the user to try out new game simply because they are inconvienced by the missing player count.
Oh and also
I’d prefer to think of it as if youtube removed the view count from the user. Viewing how many people are playing the game is that crucial for me.
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W Roblox update (this is super rare)
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Honestly I see removing player counts as a benefit.
A lot of players choose games based off CCU so new experiences often get overlooked. Besides, if you’re interested in playing a game you have to click on it anyway, and having to read the extra info in the experience description gives you an extra chance to decide whenever it’s worth your time or not. General platform health can be found on those various tracker websites.
Reintroducing genre search is also important, I’m still astounded that this feature was removed in the first place. Imagine searching for a game on Steam or a product on Amazon without genre/category.
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Seeing how divided this update is going to be, why is Roblox not doing A/B testing with the new layout? I remember seeing reports of a few users getting this layout a few months ago, but perhaps a compromise would be to increase it to 50%.
In this way, 50% of users would see this update, and the other 50% wouldn’t. This would provide much better analytics and I’m sure people wouldn’t be as harsh to this change as they need to be with A/B testing in mind.
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I understand you didn’t say those exact words, but there’s no reason to care about player count at all unless you think it predicts something about the kind of experience you will have.
The justification offered for this change is basically that when users can’t exercise their high CCU preference as easily, they enjoy themselves more than they might expect they would.
I’m not saying that justification is definitely true, I’m just saying it’s what you would need to refute.
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It’s clear to me that you’re purposely not reading the point I am making. Because you wish to continue to argue against a point I am not even making…
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I dont like it, it makes the pages look too blank and monochrome almost would feel like theres nothing going on in the website at first glance.
The player count holds importance to roblox’s allure the change is unwarranted.
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This update is half W and half L for me
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Personally, I think the algorithm changes this will help few. I didnt like the CCU hiding behind the friend played icon As a dev this helped me 0 and I have to click on groups to see my CCU. But I think a change to the overall rating system would help even more. Showcase LIkes of a game rather than a % rating. Rating can tell if a game is utter trash but its far to hard for a good game to crawl out of a dislike hole then it is for someone to glance and see how many players liked the game youtube does this and their algo will rise to the top upvoted games the most vs trash videos. I do like the 16:9 ratio however and will give me a better opertunity to create a better game icon.
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Meh. All I have to do is download a browser extension to bring back the CCU counter anyway. Ones bound to be made.
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Hi Dylan,
We are removing Offline Friend activity(X friends) today as well.Our experiments show that the Offline Friend activity in its current state “X friends” is not useful to the users. In the future, we’ll work on making this information better by showing evidence of whether your friends enjoyed the experience
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