Noticed a HUGE Drop off in impressions on October 15th.
This is the same day we had ours in island gods.
I feel like mine is a good case study too as it experiences the boom-and-bust cycle more than any game I’ve ever seen. Maddening
In about 60 days, I noticed a huge drop of about 60-70% in impressions. My retention has been pretty stable through it all. Murder Mystery Duo - Roblox
Game had 8k CCU all time peak in September 2023 and after ~1.5 months of weekly updates we have around 300 CCU.
You can see the game lost 55% of it’s DAU from Saturday to Monday (14 Oct - 16 Oct). Same time period shown in:
Alkan Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game - #257 by Alkan
Beacon Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game - #265 by Beac_n
thunder1222 Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game - #269 by thunder1222
Very similar experiences to ours (old and new) still have 1-5k CCU, which was our case until mid October. Since release our only metric below the benchmark was monetization as our original goals was to make a RP game with a lot of free stuff. Due to declining players we changed our monetization strategy, increased our figures and were able to hit the benchmarks and player count/recommendations still declined steadily.
You can see the majority of the problems just magically started happening on October 15th for my game, with October 13th and 14th seeing slightly reduce home numbers from the previous days before it when it was pretty much the same all the time.
The main problem as you can see below is that the amount of players being recommended Home impressions reduced massively in the space of 1-3 days and has remained the same ever since.
Along with this, sponsored ad spends (the metric in purple) became more and more ineffective at the same time even though I was spending the same amount of money as usual with the same thumbnails. I have since just stopped using sponsored ads all together as to how bad the CTR has become.
In short, advertising has become to expensive to maintain compared to October 13th and back. Sponsored Advertising is practically worthless and Immersive Ads (the new portal ads) are to expensive to do a daily run of to maintain player counts. (it costs around $250 USD for 1,100 new players)
As we can see from basic statistics, my game runs relatively stable (a stable income - a functional business) with the exception of a few staple points where a YouTuber, Streamer or mass-advertising influx will occur. Now with the problems, the game is becoming increasingly unsustainable - I feel like alot of people here are in the same boat and it’s only a matter of time for some of the smaller indie devs until they can’t fight this battle anymore.
Even before Playstation release, console impressions were insanely high and clearly something weird was happening there, but it was a source of cheap ( < 1 CPP) plays. After Playstation/UI changes CPP went up quite a bit and, in my experience, evened out with mobile. But impressions are still high and is one of the worst metrics to compared sponsored ads by.
On other note, how on earth did you get 860 CPC, 160 CPP and 10x higher post-impression plays… Those results look like a glitch.
@Iron_Legion Do you know why my game took such an acquisition hit starting October 14th?
Overnight my new player acquisition dropped about 75%. That level of new player acquisition is unsustainable. It feels like there’s nothing I can do to fix that. A small hit I could understand and maybe feel like I could do something about, but a 75% hit overnight feels completely hopeless.
It also does not line up with my Impressions. I had a reduction in impressions, but not that extreme and it completely doesn’t line up with my acquisition numbers. Something isn’t adding up.
I had more players Home every single day before this change than I currently get every 10 days combined. That’s insane.
Game link: [ WWII ] The Conquerors 3 - Roblox
Any updates on this? My game continues to lose impressions week-on-week with no sign of recovery.
Please fix this! My game’s player count is dropping week over week, and there’s no way for me to regain lost players since discoverability is so bad right now. Sponsors are not a viable option either. Spending 1.7K usd for a few hundred players is not worth it.