Here are my daily visits since January 1st. On March 1st I decided to try regular biweekly Friday updates. You can see how good that was for my playerbase. After the algorithm change, ~May 1st, I simply wasnt getting the players, and despite regular updates since, Im not getting players, even despite school being out.
Where is the bottom for my game? Is it just destined to get to zero? This game is a big chunk of what pays my bills.
It’s like ROBLOX is putting on a cap on total impression or something. The home discovery is climbing back to normal when I stop sponsoring, but yeah sponsoring 5k a day wasn’t worth it at all. There were more “search + friends + others” than discovery new players which were not supposed to be. The game was always having more discovery new users than the others combined.
Super demoralizing to keep working on my game when stuff like this is happening even when school is out. As a comparison, from last year’s summer to this year:
I am so grateful to have a game I made on my own reach these stats but I find it hard to be motivated to work on updates when it feels like my game is only dropping in players no matter what I do.
Whoever is struggling with the algo changes, you are not alone !! 
for all of u small devs, just stop making big projects and jump on trends, this is how the algorithm works now unfortunately and I don’t think It’s gonna change any time soon
ROBLOX’s response to this thread was just “skill issue get better”
I was thinking on starting to work on a big project recently but if this is how the algorithm is gonna stay then I’m just not gonna do anything
The simplest solution is to reintroduce the Friends Activity section. Almost all of these issues can be attributed to this once instance.
I give Roblox the benefit of the doubt because you guys have all the data to make these kinds of changes, but I can’t imagine this hurts the platform in any way.
A lot of small games depend on this, and it’s a fantastic way for players to find new games.
Our team recently ran a 28-day long, 100,000 Robux/day sponsor campaign, and here are the results:
How can this possibly be acceptable? Yes on some days the sponsors are more competitive & so the impressions get split between more games. But from June 10th (when we started the 28-day campaign) there is a clear and obvious gradual decline in impressions.
Why would the impressions from the same amount of spending on the same campaign be cut down in HALF over 3-4 weeks? This effect on impressions is of course directly translated into new users:
Sponsors are already hardly worth it and developers constantly complain about it. Now they are half of what they used to be for us, why would we possibly continue sponsoring?
To add on, I have made made a couple of other reports on discovery issues in the past:
These issues mentioned by 100s of developers, small and big, need to be taken way more seriously. Please Roblox.
We’re following the TOS by not scamming users with fake advertisements of Robux, yet WE are the ones being demoted compared to these games??
I’m sorry, but unless you are lying about what stats influence the algorithm there is no way these games should be beating us right now. We have over DOUBLE their playtime, yet they have DOUBLE the users then us? How does that even begin to make sense.
This is genuinely insulting and feels like we are being put down for creating a better game then our competitors, yet they get promoted even though they make less money and are activly breaking TOS by scamming and lying. That isn’t how it works in the real world, if someone makes a better product, their competitors die, why isn’t that happening here?
I’m pretty sure they’re trying to give a chance to smaller games but still i dont think those icons (the ones in the screenshot you attached) should be allowed
This algorithm change will effectively kill my game. A game that has been trucking along fine for 12 years until this May.
2 weeks before this change I had an average of 2116 new PC players. These past 2 weeks I got 737 new PC players per day, with the number still reducing.
The majority of my income comes from this game, and its being actively and quickly killed. Updates that would regularly bring up the playercount do next to nothing, all I can do is watch as my game and income withers away faster than I could have ever predicted.
A game cant survive if it doesn’t get new players.
What am I supposed to do now?
I’ve only come across this today and now just fully understood what caused our average player count to take a sudden deep dive starting from May, this had caused me struggles and tremendous stress for the past few months since our whole year plan has been completely ruined and had a lot of difficulties regularly paying our contractors due to our revenue being heavily affected by this new change, to tell you the truth it had decreased our revenue by 50% since May.
As a small niche game that has been regularly receiving updates since 2015, this new algorithm will definitely kill a lot of older well-established games, I hope ROBLOX considers change that will not hurt games like ours while still being able to help newer games receive their new visitors and recognition.
Here’s the data for our experience, Wings of Glory.
For anyone interested, we have since doubled our E2E and improved other metrics. Our new users shot up, which is great. We now have:
Despite this, our impressions fell to a new low yesterday.
This is what a new account sees:
On Desktop, we are 6 categories down. This placement really matters. We are effectively being punished for our genre.
On mobile, I scrolled the home page for a few minutes. I did not see Pet Sim X AT ALL. I had several people verify this. We we’re always the 2nd-3rd game recommended. Now we seem to be shadow banned?
During a call with a Roblox engineer about these algo changes, the #1 recommended game on our home page was a Pet Sim X clone. It was literally our game, stolen, with an identical icon. Pet Sim X wasn’t showing at all.
Hoping things get better.
I don’t think it’s fair to have the same game on every day for the entire existence of roblox…
One of the drawbacks of Roblox algorithms is that they initially promote someone’s game for the discovery page, but eventually ban it after several months/weeks…
That’s not the point, it’s the fact that Roblox made a change which consequently affected a large proportion of games, some which are well known and huge.
They propose that these games try to improve their metrics to fix this but despite doing so nothing comes out of it, so either Roblox is lying or they themselves do not have a handle on this.
Nobody is arguing whether a game should be promoted everyday just because it has been there to begin with.
The majority of developers present here are those whose games have enjoyed long-standing success or had a big boom in the number of players in a particular month… Since they are no longer earning significant revenue through DevEx as they did previously, they have chosen to express their grievances here. They wonder why their game from the period of 2018-2020 is not prominently featured on the front page, like Brookhaven or similar titles.
P.S: as it turns out some people don’t know how the game-matching algorithm works.
I disagree.
My game was seeing major success right before these changes.
The second these algorithm changes came through, my impressions dropped by 90% and my players, over a few months, dropped from 16k ccu to 500. Even though my stats (playtime & retention) are WAY higher now than they were during the peak. Monetization, obviously, is the only thing that has gone down.
Impressions are everything.
Do these factors have identical weight? Could you explain to us if one or two of these factors is actually quite a lot more important than the others?
If my game is on the upper benchmark of all these metrics except Retention, would it be discovered at the same rate as if it had all upper benchmark metrics except for, say, Relevance?
Once a game is in your ‘Continue’, I noticed that it tends to not show up in the other sorts on the home page. It’s possible that’s why you were not seeing Pet Sim X – not to justify the drop in impressions from Roblox, that’s algorithm garbage, but worth knowing !
It must also get hidden if it appears in Favorites, which is at the very bottom. I’ll test on a brand new account and see.
Really sad to see that. ROBLOX is doing drastic changes but its not making the community any happier…
Why is monetization included in this? Games that aren’t designed to be pay2win and only feature cosmetic gamepasses will naturally have lower monetization than paypig slop. Wasn’t the whole idea of Premium Payouts to allow people to design games they want without feeling pressured into implementing cash shop boosts? If so, why is a game’s visibility then tied to monetization? Does this metric factor in premium playtime as well?
