Please, don't kill your Top Rated games

Roblox has either just launched or is currently A/B testing an update which removes the Top Rated games from the front page.

As a data-driven company, Roblox will no doubt analyze this website update by one key metric: user engagement. Are average sessions just a teeny bit longer without the Top Rated sort? Canceling your Top Rated games will stifle the discovery of new projects and have long-lasting effects on overall quality that your A/B test can’t quite pick up on.

  • Removing Top Rated disproportionally affects paid access games on Roblox, completely stunting any possibility for organic early growth of these games.

  • Top Rated games appeal to older users. Many of these genres are getting their early foothold on Roblox through this sort, allowing young adults to find their favorite genre when they discover Roblox.

  • Featured is human-curated and limited in its response time to new genres. This sort has lower ratings on average than any other sort on the front games, as players usually didn’t find what they were expecting.

The Featured sort helps expose some new games, but it fails to reach the vast majority of new games, and a human curator’s taste will never match every player out there. Imagine if YouTube required a human curator to select a new video before it could be recommended to anyone on the home page.

Please stop and reconsider the profound implications of removing the Top Rated sort. Think about the quality of the experiences you want to see on this platform and the audiences that you want to reach.

Thank you,
berezaa

103 Likes

I believe this to be a bug, Spookletsky in the dev forum discord and I noticed that top rated appears to flicker a bit while the page is loaded.

Here is a gif proving it flickers, it is most likely a bug, we should all calm down. I copied a frame of the gif the 3rd time

9 Likes

There’s no reason to remove this and it does more harm than good. Please don’t make this permanent. I don’t even know why things like this happen or why they’re even considered. There’s less of a point of having a rating feature without the top rated sort and it completely destroys the platform for which games that don’t hold high player counts despite being amazing stand on. I really hope this isn’t intentional and if it is then it has to be undone.

3 Likes

Most of what I make is short little “movie” games consisting of animations that are only a couple minutes long. They don’t hold a player base and aren’t really intended to, but they gain popularity by having a consistent stream of players playing the games and liking them, causing the games to hit the front of the Top Rated sort. Top Rated is my livelihood on Roblox, and by removing it Roblox is basically removing my main source of exposure to new players.

With that said I certainly do hope that this is a bug as Amazeman said, because removing this part of the games page is a ridiculous thing to do.

7 Likes

If this was intentional, this is nothing but bad news for newer games. If a game becomes very popular, and gets positive ratings by a lot of players, how is that game supposed to get exposure now? This category used to be a good way of getting exposure for highly rated games, now that’s impossible.

Please, UNDO this change.

3 Likes

Top Rated is also missing from Xbox. I’m not sure if this is a recent change or not.

10 Likes

It’s also not missing on phone and tablets, so until the app updates removing those, I’ll stay neutral. Even with some questionable things done lately by Roblox, I still don’t think they’re that dumb to remove top rated

2 Likes

I hope.

I guess it’s not completely out of the question considering they removed genres so people don’t get ‘lost’ in bad games, (Only a guess) so maybe they viewed showcases, movie games, meme games as spam and they don’t want it on the front page

Also, I think it’s a bug, because this morning, the top rated sort wasn’t loading properly for me, with only 1-4 random games actually appearing underneath the sort, later in the day it was removed. I’m hoping it’s a bug. Top Rated was a good sort.

1 Like

I just noticed the change also? It seems quite weird and the option still appears in the drop down menu, but is completely empty. I hope this is really just an bug and will be fixed promptly ): It is one of the reasons anyone had a point in making well thought and polished games that actually care about ratings! While I do have a bias as one of my games thrives on the list, it is for a good reason that this list exists.

Thanks for the report in regards to the disappearance of the Top Rated sort. This change is currently being investigated by engineering teams, we will follow up once we find out more info.

24 Likes

Top Rated is now back up, thank you to everyone who brought it to our attention. We appreciate it! :slight_smile:

16 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.