User-defined genre sorts for the games page

I support bringing back a system like genres as there is no other way to find games of a specific vein. For example, if I want games with custom characters or with roleplaying, how am I supposed to find them?

Tags seem like an excellent way to do this, and I entirely agree with the idea of having a maximum number of tags to prevent users tag-clouding their games. Also perhaps having a large preset collection of tags instead of allowing players to type their own custom tags.

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I absolutely support a return of this. The last thing we need is more capabilities removed.

and don’t say that genres are too hard for new players to understand

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I hope it comes back, or they give us data on how it was doing. My game was near the top for every category of its genre. I wonder how much that was helping me. How would anyone find an RTS game on roblox without genre search? Those games are not the types to be at the top of alltime popular or earning.

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I’ve found looking for your ideal game is more reliable by searching through genre instead of typing the name of the game.

Issue:
Click bait is annoying though by removing the genre search, it’s been difficult on my part to identify games I either liked or haven’t seen before. Also forgetting removing this feature didn’t help with click bait as this issue can just continue on the search bar. By searching for something like ‘British houses, or by typing city.’ You find majority of the information (games) is irrelevant.

Interestingly, as someone else answered. They removed this feature because of the lack of use. Understandable. Yet, if this feature were to come back, it would need to be presented differently and not the same. This way there would be more use, as everyone else discussed in this topic. Having tags would be more assessable and accurate if this also contains the limitation to how many you can have.

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The genre feature has never been an important part of discovering games on the platform, partially due to the genres/categories not adapting to the type of games players were looking for. It was removed as the majority of players did not utilize it, which doesn’t surprise me as I have never used the sorts and have never set the genre of any project I’ve worked on, ever.

I think the removal of these sorts are only logical and instead of creating a feature request to bring back the sort, which doesn’t provide Roblox with much value regarding how to improve the feature and is just a duplicate of the previous topic, focusing on ways to improve the genre feature itself is the way to go.

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I honestly want them to re-add it.

If I think “Gee, I want to play a good scifi game”, how am I supposed to specifically search for scifi games?

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Hm - I wouldn’t say that it’s a super good idea to restore the genre sort.
But focusing more on the types of genres in a way that can more accurately match a game would help - and the ability to put tags (multiple!) to games.

Concept (using genre types that @glurbman came up with):
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Extra

Personally, I haven’t used genres a whole lot - not for discovering games, but also not setting my game as a specific genre just because none of the now discontinued genres matched the essence of my games.

Though, I do think that being able to see at glance what a game has to offer - such as only allowing 1st person view - would be helpful when looking out for games that fits what the player wants to see.

Besides the old one-genre search system, the ability to use multiple genre types could allow users to look for some genre types, but exclude other, making it much more powerful of a tool.

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Just a little thought - I don’t think ‘first person’ and ‘third person’ would be necessary tags but otherwise we REALLY need a categorization system exactly like this. Can we get a feature request post?

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i love this (:

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some ppl these days dont play and exclusively play a game if and or because it is in 3rd or first person … and some are already quite a lot

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Removing the genre filter was a really low blow. It deeply hurts every game that isn’t on the front page, and greatly helps the games that are on the front page stay there. This is like telling Americans the only places to get a hamburger are McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys because they are the biggest, so they must have the best hamburgers.

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The genre sort system helped games and their discovery. With it gone, the only options are to hunt the front page or use the search bar. Both are equally horrible.

The front page is infested with clickbait and low quality games that somehow manage to bury other games, the ones that developers spend so much time on. The search bar has filtering (can’t remove that) as well as producing results that are nowhere accurate to what was searched.

Speaking of searching, gotta make another Feature Request later.

29 Likes

Bumping this because it did leave a mark.

Other than using the first dropdown to reach my favorites or my recent, I used the genres dropdown often. Genres were an useful tool to find new games that weren’t on the front page - I would always check on the sci-fi tab to see if something fresh was coming, but now, I have to resort to the broken search system and the almost-always-the-same front page.

I think the main reason players didn’t bother use it was because the dropdown was left sort of in the background and nobody ever thought of exploring it, as well as it not being inviting or appealing. It was literally a white box with “Gender” written on it.

Lastly, I always set the genre on every new place or model I publish, because they do help quite a lot when searching in the library or in the catalog, be me, be others - a small relief from the inaccurate search bar.

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I support the bringing of this feature back. I also agree with @CodingLucas completely, as I did the same a lot.

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This is still something we want back/revised.

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I support bringing back this feature.

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Looking back on this post, there’s a couple of things I want to say, since it seems to still be relatively relevant and is still gaining likes.

This feature request is asking for the restoration of the genre sort because no prior warning was given necessarily. I ideally would like the genre sort to be restored until an appropriate solution to game searching can be found - a feature should not be removed until an alternate is found, if one is requested or needed. No reliable alternatives are available for our usage.

Yes, there is the fact that people don’t use the genre sort or misuse it to boost themselves somewhere; however that alone doesn’t mean the genre system has been entirely futile in its purpose. The front page is hardly a fine place to find suitable games to play if it’s cluttered with botted or low-effort games. The search bar has filtering on it and the results displayed are far from accurate - there’s so much you need to do to get a relevant result.

With the genre sort, this allowed developers to reach the front pages of a certain genre and get recognition without having to fight to get on either the Featured Sort or the front page of all games (which has been hogged by the same games for straight months/years now). This is also vital to the UX in terms of finding a game of a specific genre - I haven’t found a good horror game to play in a while now because they aren’t readily available for display to me and I’ve had to rely on friends, favorites and other tabs that are far too broad. Genre sort is also helpful for developers to gather information on what players like to see and play.

The genre sort undoubtedly needs work, given the games that are showing up now, that much is right. But to call it useless, I think is greatly untrue and is only based off of personal visions for what some developers do nowadays - those opinions aren’t necessarily representative of the past or every player’s preference. The reason I ask for it back is that it gives us more time to formulate ideas as to how to improve the system while not completely removing it during that time. People still use it and want to use it, evidently. No one wants a mass of games on a singular page and people want to see what they searched for, not irrelevant results.

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There was absolutely no reason to remove it, it isn’t like the space was needed for something else. The fact is that the smarter players used it and found it useful in discovering fresh game concepts that don’t necessarily cater to a 7-12 year old demographic, therefore never having a chance of getting on the front page.

The majority of newer Roblox users now think that Roblox consists of Jailbreak, Bloxburg, MeepCity and a few others and may never ever find that special game in their favorite genre because there is no sure way to find it. Even if the developer pays boatloads of Robux to advertise their game (which is a huge expense that front page games don’t have to bear), its a spread shot that doesn’t necessarily target players that would be interested in the genre you are advertising.

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Apologies for the necrobump, But this really is a problem. Personally the removal of genre sort cut off the constant supply of players into specific game communities, effectively drowning out roblox’s infamous quality games with…whatever is popular. In fact- the harder it is for audiences to find the game genres they are looking for, the more likely those audiences are just going to use a different platform to play those genres. it’s very much pushing down the quality games and starving those communities and cliques of new players,effectively killing their own original, dedicated community of players- who eventually turned into developers- in favor of appealing the new wave of kids taking prominence in the platform. If Roblox’s motto is “powering creativity”, shouldn’t they promote it?

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Guess they want us to promote it with money now.

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