Questions about Basics of Game Visibility

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#1

For my game design team, WillyEdison Studios, I’m working on publicizing our main game, so more people can find and play our game.

In order to do so, I need to learn the basics of how games are shown on Roblox. Ads and sponsorships do exist, and sponsorships have proved effective in the short-term, but for real long-term visibility, I need to understand how Roblox picks and chooses games on its Home and Discover pages. Visibility for my game means success for me and increases the variety of games Roblox can promote.

To that end, I have a couple questions:

  • I notice every game has likes and dislikes. What do likes and dislikes do? What kind of purpose do they serve? Curiously, I’ve also observed that popular games like Death Ball offer incentives like an in-game currency boost if players like the game. Are likes that important?

  • What factors does Roblox’s discovery system consider when deciding to show a game? The system must have some way of deciding whether games should be shown in its game sorts or not. Otherwise, every game would appear in its sorts.

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#2

The algorithm is a black box. We don’t know what inputs it uses.

The primary goal of Roblox as a company is to make a profit. So we can assume the amount your game earns influences the algorithm.
It’s also important for players to enjoy a game (retention, likes, etc).

Lastly there might be some negative impacts, like how much it costs Roblox to run your game’s servers.

Keep in mind that this is just all speculation/educated guesses.

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#3

ironically i was just checking out the ad manager and came to the forums because of it, from my understanding it might vary, no matter how much you spend to advertise.
it seems like the more play time a user has in your game and if they spend robux in the game it might be seen more

As for advertising it may be better to try social media
I was under the impression that you could choose how much robux you put in but turns out its 285 for one ad credit what ever that is, which is unfortunate i was going to try to advertise some shirts and just do maybe 50 robux

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#4

In my research of the algorithm, I didn’t see anything from Roblox specifically about likes, at least Roblox-wide, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

From a UX standpoint, a higher like rating means more players are probably going to play it. If a game had a 32% like rating or lower, some might not play the game just seeing that. So, it might not be directly affecting the algorithm in a code way, but more a human interaction way.

Above I said “Roblox-wide” as previously a requirement to be in the Xbox Featured sort you needed a certain % like rating to be eligible to apply. On the subject, that sort/program is no longer a thing with the release of PlayStation. Before that though, the sort went through many changes. Here’s a quote about one of the old requirements:

This can be used as weak evidence to support what the Roblox-wide algorithm uses.

For the Learn and Explore Sort, which is still available today, your game must have “a ‘Like’ ratio above 50%, and maintain at least 15 concurrent users”. So, Roblox having a like requirement to get your game pushed platform-wide, and in other sorts that are not disclosed, isn’t an off-the-table idea in my mind.

However, these examples of like requirements are sorts that Roblox manually had/has to approve games for. It would make sense in that context more, but I digress.

This is something important to mention that I didn’t yet in the community resource I made about the algorithm:

“When updating your experience’s metadata, it may take up to 14 days for your experience to repopulate in discovery pages and search results.” Source: https://create.roblox.com/docs/production/promotion/discovery

I try to answer this question in the resources I linked above, but there are truly some things we can’t/don’t know about. It also seems like games can be “shadow banned” or have bugs with discovery in a way that the developer cannot check effectively.

Additionally, it seems staff members need to be the ones to ‘fix’ these discovery issues by in someway boosting rankings.

This transitions to a wider topic of Roblox artificially boosting games in discovery, which is looking more likely as a thing they can and have been doing. Roblox is most notably taking flack for doing this with branded ‘experiences’ on the platform. But, it also seems to be a thing when developers report their findings of players count drops.

Who’s to say my game doesn’t have an issue with discovery? It seems the only way to find out is to file a bug report, pulling info from various sources, and seeing if a staff member responds.

I’d like to add, even if not directly related to this thread, there’s been quite a lot of updates relating to Discovery by @KnightGaladeld. I’d go through the activity there to see a wider history of discovery on Roblox, a lot to sift through.

This is the most recent one, with great info, albeit from 2020:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/upcoming-changes-to-the-game-sorts-submit-new-sort-ideas/275775

The communication with regards to discovery has really gone down hill since then. I can link various feature requests, bug reports, and the roadmap that both give hope and annoyance about the systems at large. But, this post is already long enough, lol.

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#5

Thank you so much for your incredibly thorough reply! Your research post and reply are very helpful, they give a vast amount of information to consider in one place.

This is an excellent point, that players may look at whether a game has many likes to see what others think of the game. I’m guessing this also applies to the number of likes a game has. That if a game has a thousand likes, it has a better reputation than having a hundred likes.

This is good to know, that engagement hours and popularity are factors in at least the Featured sort. Sounds like a positive feedback loop: if your game is successful, it’s more discoverable. Which makes the game even more successful. Perhaps that’s why many small games have trouble with visibility and discovery: they can’t build momentum using this positive feedback loop.

From your research post, this in particular is incredibly useful information: that the algorithm is machine learning. This may very well explain a post I ran across, where some games that are recommended are just copying other games, and in a low-quality way: How does the recommended page work?

Thank you again for all the information, very helpful!

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#6

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