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.
Unfortunately, this can also be attributed to the many game clones that populate Roblox’s Discovery Search. There are guaranteed to be clones of any successful game, which could be what this actually is.
I could also join 100 games, stay on them for a few seconds, leave, and this would probably artificially affect the statistic provided.
To put it bluntly, if Roblox hides the CCU on the thumbnail, browser extensions will just add it back with a toggleable option.
Roblox should really look into making these toggleable and making defaults set to false, just like how different properties in studio are default to true/false, that way those who want the display can use it, and those that don’t care don’t need to see it because the default is off.
This is good news. (if you are a developer) Surprised at how many people do not like this. It stops people from ignoring your game and assuming higher player count = better game. This benefits small creators, it gives your game a chance.
Except in actuality, rating isn’t as good of a metric as you think. Players don’t hit the like button nearly as often as them genuinely liking a game. However, they will hit the like button if the game tells them they have to in order to earn more rewards or updates.
Knowing the rating is gonna be the main metric people see means only more of this behavior from games. Roblox doesn’t incentivize players enough to actually use the rating system naturally.
I’d rather to see more updates like making light range bigger, custom grass instead of just triangles, improved render distance and have a chance to customize it with script. This is one of the most needed features in roblox studio and I hope sometimes it’s gonna be added.
Im genuinely fine with this change (and think that its def a positive one), now that the ui is getting updated only seeing ratings and “friends played” seems perfectly fine, expecially since youre one click away from seeing the player count in the detailed experience view.
I agree with this update because If I was sponsoring my game and player was looking with high Player Count and my game is new then the player just skip it because of the Player Count…
its not just unnecessary, its really annoying, because sometimes if I played my Roblox games on my alt, it displays this, and if I needed to check my CCU from the home page, it displays it, so that means I need to wait like 1 week or 2 to get it off.
The player count is staying but it’s a bit relegated, this way people won’t look over an experience just because it has 10 CCU. A more qualitative rating (like/dislike) will be used instead to encourage players to click based on opinion and not popularity.
Terrible change considering how easy it is to dislike-bot a game. If that is the only visible metric, there are a lot of high-quality games that I can imagine will increasingly decline in terms of player-base.
As some people pointed out, judging a game entirely by it’s like ratio is not even good…
never was, actually. games have been “forcefully” requesting their playerbase to like their games for update/reward, resulting in the highest rating (almost all the 94%+) ones being inaccurate.
plus, preferences aside… hiding the playercount is not exactly changing people’s choice, but more importantly: it changes Roblox itself, as the entire playerbase won’t really have roblox themselves showing off the grand scale of their “amount of players” currently playing Roblox. (which is usually one of the selling-point/reason why people gives Roblox a try at the game)
in short, that’ll be easier for people to claim Roblox has it’s up and down, like “roblox” dying as they say, and it makes the frontpage less impressive overall, the high CCU numbers is one of those side reasons people are investing their time on Roblox : “it’s still a large platform”, also it helps confirming its still a worldwide and commonly discussed game that people still share about.
As long as this is effecting just the recommendation tab I actually don’t mind this change at all, it sounds like it could genuinely help newer games grow a lot better. Not sure why a lot of people think this is a bad change.
EDIT
I think a lot of developers are thinking they’re removing it globally or something?? Which is not the case? I agree that just showing dislike to like ratio might have some downsides, but overall this really only serves to help small games get audiences better through the recommendations, and won’t effect other areas of the platform like game discovery.
I think what’s more likely is that a large subset of people don’t notice the low player count and join the experience regardless.
So I think this update will help free players to play anything that looks interesting to them, even if it’s not super popular yet.
Your objection to this update seems to rely on the premise that the player count is a decent predictor of if a game is worth joining. But that premise is incompatible with the discovery that engagement went up when experimenting with this update. That data is why the preference for high player count experiences is being called a bias.
EDIT: I may have misunderstood the engagement result from the experiment. I would tend to think that high CCU is not a reliable predictor of enjoyment for a given recommended game, but I don’t know if the metrics shared in the original post are direct evidence of that.
I second this. With game ratings manipulated by developers via update goal incentives, after the removal of player counts, there will be no indication as to what experiences are worth trying out. That’s why there’s an increase in “discovery”; players are shooting in the dark lol
Only thing which makes me select game which I want to try - is BOTH player count and like ratio. I can make decision to play 20% rated game which has 1-2k players, than 100% liked game with 2 players. But I’ll prefer out of this 2 balance, aka smth like 60% likes and 300 players.
I think you all understand why. Removing player count will show me only half of needed info. With how well my internet is, I’ll load game page for minute, = wasting my time. Thus, I just won’t want to search for new games, and rather play old ones, which I know, and which I know that I’ll enjoy.
Don't remove Player count. It's too usefull info to remove. IDK where you got metrics from, but from my experience such thing will stop me from searching for smth new.
