This needs to be escalated. This is evidently a pretty big problem if many of the platform’s top developers are complaining
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We are seeing so many people just like this that are hitting all the criteria Roblox claims will help with discoverability. Yet, you are forced out weeks later. This exact thing happened with our new game with our acquisition, one day out of nowhere. We hit around 2k concurrent now we sit around 500, while previously having great performance at our peak in almost every stat.
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If you are accomplishing the goals they are setting, why is it not enough for the algorithm?
Is discoverability affected if you’re not at the high end on every single stat compared to the top 500-1000 benchmarks? Being way above or in the middle doesn’t seem to even matter according to these stats. -
Is there a timer set as soon as you don’t meet a certain stat? How long do you have to fix the low stat?
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Why does it seem like every single new experience has a few weeks of being discovered and it’s cut to 1/4? While we may not know their stats, it seems like that doesn’t matter here anyways.
There are people who rely on you - you are hurting our careers.
This. Is. An. Issue.
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If there is one aspect of Roblox I can confidently say has regressed significantly over the years, it is the discoverability.
As a developer who has been on the platform since 2008, and over the years have made games that reached the very top of the games page multiple times, the process of getting there has become near impossible in modern day.
Of course, you can argue that there’s more competition, more games, more of an audience…
- But the discoverability makes zero sense.
- The discover page genres make no sense.
- The prioritization of certain genres while excluding others on the home page makes no sense.
- The algorithm (seems) to make no sense.
It truly feels like today’s chances of your game going ‘viral’ is based on the draw of a card.
- The discover page categories make no sense:
In prior eras of the discover page, the discover page categories made sense and worked as their title implied. The game that possessed the most amount of concurrent players at the time was at the top of the ‘Popular’ category, the second placed at number two, etc. etc. The current ‘Popular’ category does not do that.
For example, why is this game, “Livetopia”, which has over 40k+ concurrent users in this screenshot, behind countless games that have less than 10k+ concurrent? Some even as low as 1-4k? (note: had to zoom out just to get a picture of the top to bottom)
Why is this game, specifically, being punished with (poorer) discovery when it is outperforming majority of games that are placed in front of it? Is this not the Popular category? With 40k players, shouldn’t this be near the top? Popular category makes zero sense, and there is no longer an incentive to try and bring a lot of players into your game in hopes to make it onto ‘Popular’, because apparently even with 40k players, it guarantees nothing.
Now let’s look at the ‘Top Rated’ category, which is, based on the name, implied to be a sort of the top rated by game rating. So you should expect to see the top around 90%+, some 80%, maybe occasionally some 70%.
Why is a game with less than 60% rating even being algorithmically placed this high up on Top Rated? Why is it being given priority over games that have 90%+?!
If you scroll down further onto Top Rated, you will find tons of fairly high CCU games with 80-90%+ approval ratings that, for some reason, are punished placement wise. You will also see a plethora of games that do not fit the category ‘Top Rated’ that are prioritized higher than what is actually, well, top rated.
I could go on, but for the sake of post length, I’m going to address the other issues I see with discoverability. But to sum up point number 1, there is zero incentive for developers. There is no accurate placements of “Popular” or “Top Rated”. You have zero incentive to create a highly rated, quality game because you are going to be outplaced by games that have far lower ratings.
- The prioritization of certain genres while excluding others on the home page makes no sense:
Why are such niche genres consistently promoted on home pages? Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy for the developers who create games that fit niche genres, and I think they deserve to be promoted. The key term here is consistently promoted. There’s little to no cycling of genres on the home page. It’s always the same genres: “Platform Obby”, “Real-World Roleplay”, “Idle Games”. I 100% believe these should be promoted occasionally, but they are consistently promoted on the home page and other games are left in the dust. A much more optimal solution would be consistently cycling these genres, and bringing in others, maybe daily or even weekly.
Furthermore, the amount of games presented in these genres are unnecessarily lacking while the real supply is great, and rarely ever do new games get added to them.
For example: Why are there only four games under this category? Getting any of those two spaces would help out any developer. There are TONS of Real World Roleplay games. So why only four?
- Conclusion: The algorithm (seems) to make no sense.
To sum it up, if your game explodes out of nowhere, majority of developers will still never see the “Up-And-Coming” sort placement even if they make the requirements. If you worked very hard and delivered a top quality game that thousands of people love, giving you a 90%+ game rating, majority of developers will be punished and placed far below games that have far poorer reception. If your game is the most popular game on Roblox at a certain time, you’re not even guaranteed the top slot of the ‘Popular’ category.
As developers, we see these sorts and think of them as a ‘goal’. When you look at the ‘Popular’ category, you think, “Okay, if I can make my game popular, it can gain traction and move up the charts” (like the old discovery system). Instead, we are resorting to pouring millions of robux into sponsored ads that have been absolutely slaughtered in impact in recent times and paying content creators in hopes their coverage will make the Roblox algorithm pull us out of the bunch when majority of devs are far qualified yet unfairly treated. Big YouTube stars and content creators should compliment growth that had already occurred naturally, not be the only potential chance of going viral initially because the algorithm itself is so poorly performing and has unfeasible barriers of entry.
The discovery page has regressed significantly, there is no ‘pathway’ to the top anymore unless you’re lucky. It does not help when our options of marketing have been significantly impacted as well, almost worthless.
Edit: typo fix - and further comment: the original ‘Popular’ game discovery mechanic (from years ago) worked well because you were rewarded with a spike in players. Games would climb to the front page because as they boosted in player count, they were “moving up the charts” → more players find it, are intrigued, play → move up charts again → repeat. This whole ‘cycle/random assortment’ system for the “Popular” sort stagnates growth and discourages organic growth.
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Everyone on this thread has done enough talking that I don’t feel the need to explain more, but I completely agree with them.
Why are we being left in the dark on something we rely so heavily on?
2,000+ employees and a whole team “dedicated to helping us”, and not a single response here from Roblox.
My game just recently has been affected by search discoverability. Our game has been consistent for 3 years now and then recently we got sudden drop. Almost 1/2 the impressions from search as we originally received. I think one can assume that this leads to a drop in DAU, New Users, and MAU which will probably hurt us in your algorithm even more.
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They replied once. But the response isn’t enough. We need action.
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The algorithm change seems to be benefitting new games with high CTRs and hurting games with high playtimes. which means the actual change is probably just more focus on CTRs and less on playtime, because new games are going to have more first time players, which usually is going to mean lower playtimes. while its great were getting some new games and not the same stuff we’ve had for years (eg Pet Sim X) there are probably better ways of doing it. id actually say my recommendations have gotten better but then again I don’t play simulators and that’s exactly the sort of game a decrease in importance for playtime would effect
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ROBLOX’s algorithm is all over the place. Back in May, my game really blew up, hitting a high of 3,000 CCUs one day in May.
Then ROBLOX screwed us with this issue, and the effects of it (like the approval rating going down by at least 5%) have not been able to be reversed, and we have not hit the algorithm since…
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This has been my conclusion as well.
In Roblox’s response by @ivy_poisond, they did mention
- Relevance of the experience and its metadata (i.e. images, title, and descriptions) to the user (impressions to plays).
“Impressions to plays” implies CTR. That just means click-bait games will receive more promotion.
It appears this has more weight in the algorithm than Engagement.
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One of the things I hate about these algorithm changes is that Roblox is promoting awful games to the front page. It used to be normal and good games like, Adopt me, Bloxburg, and simulators. Now most of it is escape skibidi toilet, backrooms with granny and ban hammer, and other random meme games. I know Roblox probably won’t take much action to fix this, just based on what they usually do about problems, but I hope this situation gets better at some point.
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nothing has improved and after Feb 2023 my 4+ games got died and were silently forgotten…
Crazy. I think this image speaks for itself and all the developers out there that aren’t on Roblox to suck dry kids out of their parents money.
Source
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I’m not sure, but it depends on several factors. Is your game on trend, does it have a word that has been around the world, does it have a word that is on trend, and does it show up on search systems by certain words?
Our game, one of if not the most visited difficulty chart of all time has had its daily active users count cut literally in third. We used to average over 60,000 DAU and now we’re down to 20,000 for seemingly no reason starting about a week ago. We used to never dip below 200-300 ccu and now we often dip below 100. This is very worrisome when we rely on the game to generate a decent portion of our income. Yikes.
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I was fortunate enough to have a Youtuber play my game randomly, so I’ve doubled my DAU for the past week, but before that I was in the same situation.
We can’t let this thread be ignored.
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I just don’t get why Roblox has to promote the same old games on the front page all the time, like wouldn’t it make more sense to have some sort of cycle of games? Or maybe even make it so that a game can only appear on the front page once? That could probably increase monetization. That way Roblox could still rack in the big bucks while actually promoting good games.
I also don’t know why Roblox thought it was a good idea to base game promotion around CTR and not engagement. That practice resulted in a bunch of scam/“copy and paste” games on Roblox. Wouldn’t it be better to promote a game that has good CTR, but OUTSTANDING engagement? Doesn’t Roblox want the players to be in games longer so that they’d have a higher chance of buying something? This unfortunately can’t be the case because Roblox is like “I WANT MONEY NOW WAAAAH!!!” and doesn’t care about engagement at all. This is why clickbait, P2W or “putting every single dev product/gamepass in your face” games are getting all the promotion regardless of quality.
For now, we can all just hope for a better algorithm or resort to making trendy games, because hey, at least those types of games can get some more impressions, right?
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My game was doing alright for my standereds as a rather new developer, however after the game started to not appear on searches my MAU for this month is 52. Which is absolutly disgraceful! I really want this to be fixed.
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After reading this thread, I decided to create a game with a simple core loop that could get some attention. It was also kind of an experiment to see which statistics really matter. A few days after I tested the game on my phone (where I have a different account) to see if everything worked (and tested updates, so I joined multiple times), impressions blew up from 32 to around 2700! I really didn’t expect that, but at least it shows that CVR really matters because the Experience Detail CVR was at 100%
After a few days, the impressions died again, but interestingly, after more days, they blew up again for some reason to 4800!! It might be because the CVR was higher with a smaller amount of impressions, although nobody actually bought anything, so I really don’t know how much monetization matters.
I decided to make this experiment because these “improvements” killed my previous game.
And one more thing…
We can’t let this thread be ignored. This needs to be fixed.
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I think the search algorithms number 1 thing that makes games appear higher on the search list is games with higher spending rates per player. I think this is one of the main reason bad quality cash grab games are seen so often. If this is true then this proves that Roblox does not care for it’s developers.
Bumping this up
Since 2011 I have also seen game discovery plummet to the lowest of lows, it is simply unbelievable that Roblox refuses to respond or even acknowledge extreme issues that plague the platform directly. They receive tremendous outcry from developers and the public about the significance of the issue and all they do is ignore and wait for it all to slowly fade away. They did this with the audio update (I have not given up), and they will continue to do the same with this time. I’m getting really tired of it. It’s such a shame to see so many developers who make a living off Roblox, who generate income for the platform, and who built nearly all the playable content on the platform, to be consistently blindsided by the company. There is no way they do not yet know these issues exist, they seemingly choose to ignore it and wait for it to blow over.
Do not ignore this issue
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They do know this issue exist, and they are doing it on purpose aswell, you know why? It’s because it will force more people to advertise their games and Roblox gets more money.
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