Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game

[Brian1KB]

Super well put together post man, it does a great job of showing the issues that I think a lot of small studios are having. I’ve experienced very similar behaviour new visitor wise with my own game, and I’ve included a new visitor chart just so you’ve got some more data to work with. My game has particularly started to experience an extreme dip as of changes made seemingly within the last couple of days.

We very much need to start seeing some announcements made in regards to algorithm changes, as at the moment it is very much infeasible to run a small business on the platform due to the sheer unpredictability of monthly revenue as a result of these sporadic, unexplained changes.

Game link if it’s any use to you: SkyWars 🔥 [BY VOXELS!] - Roblox

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Wanted to pitch in here and while currently I do not have a large enough game to be able to show graphs that show definite changes, I want to further add my input and opinions in this matter as both a passionate developer and player of Roblox.

First, the Roblox discover page is awful, and does a terrible job at surfacing small/ medium sized games. This attributes to games such as @ruddev_ethan’s Bad Business and countless others from surfacing to players who would enjoy.

Take a look at my recommended for you. Nothing about this is personal, I do not enjoy any of these games and these same games are recommended to almost everyone. Roblox’s continued efforts and claims of personalized recommendation are completely false.

Alright, you might say, but I’m sure Roblox has some amazing curated categories to alleviate this poor personalization.

You would be wrong.

Let’s look again at the discover page:

MANY OF THE SORTS CONTAIN THE SAME GAMES, THESE TWO SORTS ARE LITERALLY IDENTICAL.

Not only are these games already extremely successful, Roblox is literally wasting space when other games could be there. It still shocks me how bad this problem is.

Oh yes seeing what premium players is totally very useful.

Go check the discover yourself and see how many places the same games like Doors, BloxFruits, and Pet Simulator appear. Sometimes it can be more than 5.

All of this ranting to say, yes, there is a fundamental flaw in Roblox’s algorithm and game discovery systems. Roblox pushes the same big games and supresses those who are trying to work their way up.

Roblox Repeated Games for no Reason Bingo:
DOORS: 5
BLOX FRUITS: 7
Pet Sim X: 5

[CashyMone_y]

The above posts are pretty comprehensive, so I’ll just reiterate that I have the same problem as the people above, I went from around 1k ccu to barely holding 300 ccu in my game, Exploding Mayhem, as of a few weeks ago.

I also just wanted to say that Bad Business is a solid game, I hope things get sorted out for you!

[OmegaInvictissimus (OmegaInvictus)]

My game only has six million visits, but algorithm changes have massively reduced the amount of new players it receives. The amount of new players joining, which was sustained for about two years, has dropped by about seven times exclusively due to algorithm changes.

[apenzijncoolenleuk1 (Apenz1)]

Scary results indeed!

I’m wondering what games are shown instead. If it’s the smaller games, I would be tempted to say that’s a good thing! But only if every large game is affected equally by this.

If it’s the larger games that are shown, that’s just bad…

[realOmlet (Omlet)]

As someone who had only small games dependant on the discovery system my impressions dropped to… 10 whenever someone tries to even search for my places or my friend’s using the keywords they can search for hours just to never find any of them… not sure how exactly this now works but it results in displaying only the top earning/popular in practice. I think that bad business actually got hurt bcuz whilst it’s not a small game it’s not a top game anymore either so it just gets thrown in the dead games section just like everyone else. Roblox in general recently has only bias towards bigger creators by limiting the access to distribution to smaller devs, notifying bigger devs about downtimes on private social media groups exclusively, updating the search tool rn etc… I wonder how’s UGC doing lol since the marketplace is also messed up. Also this change is quite old but it looks like they keep on reverting and readding it with slight adjustments since ppl r reporting this for quite a while… just now this is too harsh
EDIT: NOT ROBLOX TRYING TO COVER THIS UP Introducing Exact Match Search for Experiences another edit: this change is still here and my visits count and playtime dropped by 100% last week…

[Alkan]

One of my games also started behaving differently almost overnight right around the start of May as well.
What was weird is I had started making biweekly Friday updates, and it was doing well for my game’s popularity. Then one update(nothing out of the ordinary or changing any fundamentals) just flops on May 5th.

[DevAndero]

I think the algorithm has been problematic for a while now, one of my games started rapidly dropping off around February last year despite key metrics being relatively stable. Went from around 5-10k concurrent to like 100 and at this point it’s getting 10 on a good day.

[clxr (Jason)]

I’m thankful that I’m not the only one with this issue. We launched a new game on April 21st. It boomed for 2 weeks, then around that first weekend of May it completely collapsed. What WAS averaging 5.5K players has collapsed and is barely averaging 2K.

I’m at a loss for words because I spent three years working on this game, sacrificed a lot and to see it falling flat because of an algorithm change discourages me from working on this platform anymore.

[Maxwell_Edison]

I’m looking at my game’s statistics and I’m (either fortunately or unfortunately, based on your perspective,) unable to tell if this is impacting me. My game had extremely bad metrics at the beginning of the year, but where as most people say April was fine and May started this issue for them, I had a pretty mediocre April and my home impressions started ramping back up to normal as May progressed, being slightly lacking now in June.

I think my game is simply very ‘Spiky’ when it comes to this sort of thing in general though, so I doubt I’m particularly relevant in this case. I’ll keep an eye on my home impressions either way.

edit: My metric graphs on the “New users per source” page. Unlike most posting here, my statistics for May recovered back to pretty much normal (March having higher stats for other reasons as pointed out already)

[ByGoalZ]

Same thing here. My Game has been doing pretty well for a while, growing daily.
Then it rapidly declined and kind of died within a few days.
I do understand that games can not be on their “peak” forever, but how in the world can the algorithm just drop games that quick without any changes to key metrics or changes to the game/designs? There is literally no reason.

This needs to be adressed in order to keep devs on this platform and make a living off it.

[2jammers]

I barely use the discover page, and play the same game which averages around 200 players. But I never knew it was this bad.

[Maxwell_Edison]

This is an incredibly valid observation. The fact Roblox arbitrarily decides what genres our games are outside of our control is bad enough - resulting in developers not even knowing which categories we have a chance of being in - But it has always been annoying that the most mainstream games are the only ones we’ll see on our front pages, even if we do not have any interest in those games, and even a basic personalization algorithm should know better than to recommend us the same 5-10 games over and over and over.

Roblox should simply not allow a game to show multiple times on this list - period. Choose the one that best fits a game, and put it in. I don’t need to see DOORS on literally every single game category on the front page just because it’s popular. If I see it once, anything more is redundant and not great for anybody, even the owners of these popular games, which do not benefit from extra impressions within the same page.

[2jammers]

There should be some button inside of the three dots on the game page, something like “Do not see this game again” and it will not show up in the discover page.

[Maxwell_Edison]

This is entirely beyond the point being presented, though. “Everyone should ignore the popular games” is not going to solve the issue of Roblox’s algorithms being somewhat un-optimized for actual discovery.

[samuelagent]

Can this not be attributed to the growing competitiveness of games in the roblox development sphere? As roblox grows, games will have to overcome the competition

[Noble_Draconian]

Nope. If you look at all the examples, games that were doing fine for a while (in my case, around a year) suddenly got hit at the same time. It’s 100% a problematic algorithm change.

[Maxocado_Avocado (Max)]

Experienced this myself with a new game I’ve launched recently + a few of my other projects as well. Released a new game, it was growing more and more every day and even reached 660 CCU - and then the next day it dropped to ~200 and it’s been decreasing in terms of visits, CCU and revenue ever since.

No complaints from players, we didn’t release any updates/do any changes either. The game’s fall seems to have happened at the same time as the touched events breaking but I’m not sure if that’s just a coincidence.

What I’ve noticed is that Roblox has been making these algorithm changes multiple times over the last year. One of my games randomly spiked from 80 CCU to 500 about 5 times already, it’s almost like it’s in “waves”???

[samuelagent]

I have not experienced this problem, all of my games have been at stable player counts or rising. I don’t think having a general downward trend over all of your games is indicative of an algorithmic problem, rather it could definitely be due to user-related changes recently

[ruddev_ethan (gamer961)]

I think I’ve provided enough evidence that there is something funky going on with the algorithm, especially in combination with others finding the exact same things are happening with their games in the same time periods. Competitiveness is not to blame for us suddenly being shown to millions less people after years of built up consistency.