Noticing this happening in real time on one of my games, it got picked up on the algorithm, was doing really well, had a steady stream of updates, then randomly fell out again.
(The blue is how much its being recommended on the home page, notice how its the only measure consistently changing.)
Not sure if it’ll pick back up yet, but having sudden drops like these just happen can seriously kill a game. I honestly thought this would of been fixed by now.
yeah I think the fact is now that the search bar is fubard. My game Candy Islands is fine when advertised, and even after the ads finish it’s easy to find by typing the name in - use case: on social media you can just put ‘on Roblox.com - search for Candy Islands’ - however, when the Hunt started Candy Islands has disappeared, even with the ‘exact search’. Another of my experiences, which I haven’t advertised in the last 6 months again can’t be found ‘Ghostboy World’ brings up no results for my game.
It does appear that advertising on the platform gets you boosted in all searches even after the ads finish, but it may be only for a short period?
Again, like others on here has stated, some sort of confirmation of how the search bar actually works for us indy developers would be useful, but I don’t feel that Roblox will be forthcoming.
Roblox’s algorithm is terrible, they’ll promote some bad low effort games that everyone in the community absolutely despises but they’ll leave out actual good games.
I’ve read the article here Discovery on Roblox: Past, Present, and Future Vision - #54 by Evercyan and can report for my game, these changes have not been implemented.
The game is continually updated, I’ve spent quite a bit on advertising, the game has had large spikes in users, retention, monetization, etc., and despite the title of the game FASHION FOCUS and the description of the game (see image) if I search any of the following it shows after hundreds of other games or simply not at all (not at all happening more recently)
Search terms: fashion show, sell clothes, dress up, fashion, mall, marketplace, fashion contest
Those are just some examples, the list is extensive. Seeing as I have Fashion in the title, and exact phrases in the long description like “dress up”, “sell clothes”, “mall” and “marketplace” as well as words that also describe these words like runway, clothes, outfits, shop, etc., I don’t understand why my game is not showing under any of these searches.
I understand the game is small in terms of player count and everything, but it has met the conditions for the new algorithm described in the article, but for search purposes the results are way down. How is this helping players find relevant games? How is showing a game about relaxing asmr slime when someone searches “dress up game” improving the user experience?
I wanted to add that the game got sorted as other relevant games now show on my game’s page. When this happened is when I stopped being able to search for my game by relevant keywords. That sounds backwards, but that’s what I experienced.
It’s now been almost a year since.
We had to scrap PSX. We went back to the drawing board. We released Pet Simulator 99 in December, which was our effort to create a better game than Pet Simulator X in every way. 400,000 CCU on release just from anticipation. Released with 98% like ratio. Some highlights of our analytics include a 90 minute average playtime (PC) and even better monetization conversion than PSX.
This is a new account I made a few days ago. I challenge you to find my game:
This matches up with our influx new users from home recommendations. All 10,000 of them on 4/4. The same day, PSX received double this. It’s actually even less than my buddies game which has 500 players. He scored 11,000. Let me put this in perspective - that is a game with 500 CCU getting more new users a day from the algo than a game with over 100,000. That’s absurd.
There’s only two possibilities:
Luckily I can test this hypothesis using: ads
We found that, yes, in fact - players that randomly click our ad, enjoy the game just as much.
There is no argument. Roblox as a platform has one job - pair us with the players that want to play our game. Roblox can push out endless blog articles about transparency on the algorithm but we are fighting for survival and our game excells at all of their criteria. Other platforms are more than happy to provide this service and don’t take an 80% cut. We should just have to worry about making the games. This is the risk you are taking making a game on this platform right now.
After almost two years since release my game does not appear if you search for the keyword (Mining) at all, instead games with way lower rating appear and some games that have nothing to do with the word at all.
It averages around 3-5 daily users and sometimes 0 with a peak of 50 on release two years ago after we advertised and hyped it up for months on TikTok and Twitter.
The game has around 17k total visits not counting the returning users, which is really low for a platform like Roblox and a game we’ve spent thousand of Robux to advertise
The reason your game doesn’t show when searching up “mining” is because there are thousands of games that also have the exact name and have more users, in order to get more users you need to make your game stand out and have more features.
I am experiencing the exact same, except I now receive a huge influx of home recommendation, 500-1000 ccu within a space of 10 minutes, then it drops back to giving me nothing for the rest of the day. Whatever algorithm changes have happened within the last year or two have ruined it. My dead, 3 year old tycoons, get higher home recommendation than my newer titles… 
I’m worried… no… scared, that my game, once ready for a stable release, isn’t going to get the stats we need to move forward due to Roblox’s money hungry system for games and their front page activity. They allow cash grabby games in the front to drive up Roblox’s revenue and leave us legitimate and hard working developers to dust.
Thanks Roblox, my developers may possibly go unpaid until further notice.
My experience with the algorithm recently:
Might share my experience here as well
Part 2!
With the new Creator Hub update Acquisition page I could see how my game is actually being found, the algorithm didn’t even pick up the game once, it was not even recommended once since the Acquisition page was released.
It only gained players when a Roblox Underrated Games gave us a shout-out on Twitter (Thank you so much) and users were inviting their friends to play together.
The latest wave of changes has fully killed off my game to the lowest numbers I’ve seen in years and i have noticed this has happened to many others aswell sadly.
Monetization should NEVER be a metric within an algorithm. Shows Roblox’s greed over passion for promoting smaller, high-quality games/developers. Promoting games that make the most money will push out smaller non-pay to win experiences which don’t just spam game-passes/products.
I’ve experienced the exact same algorithm issue in the past, It’s ridiculous and has been plaguing Roblox for YEARS (and continues to).
Update with my last post, did not resolve itself whatsoever. And after checking the daily users on a graph it literally spiked massively for like a week or two than imminently fell down again.
What is the point??? Why bother working on something for hours of my life if its entire lifespan is decided by what feels like a dice roll that can change its mind last second and stop promoting the game alltogether?
My game got updates for weeks and in a matter of like 6 days was instantly dropped from the algorithm at its peak resulting in a massive decline in players and activity.
I don’t even feel like updating the game if the deciding factor in getting players is LUCK.
(Also as the post above me says, Monetization should not be a statistic for the algorithm at all, and just promotes cash grab games that target children with hundreds of gamepasses and microtransactions.)
Coming back here once again to vent my frustration at these algorithm changes.
One of my recently released games had been supplied players at a steadily growing rate by the algorithm within the past 2 weeks or so, starting on around May 16 up until May 26.
By May 26 it had reached the peak daily active users and given my past experience with other games I was confident that it would begin to receive a much larger amount of players daily compared to previous weeks.
However, it seems as if the algorithm changed on Tuesday, May 28 and prematurely reversed the growing supply of players to my game, effectively killing it slowly over the week. Of course, if my game had been receiving a large amount of daily active players for a few weeks I would understand that eventually it would have to be reduced to make way for other games, but for it to happen this early in the game’s lifetime is astounding and disappointing.
By the end of the week, my home recommendations nearly halved, all the while my stats remained at mostly the same level that they were previously and even increased.
I am extremely annoyed and heartbroken that the game (which I fully believed had the potential to have thousands of players), has been prematurely kicked off the algorithm for no clear reason. I don’t expect it will be picked up again anytime within the near future, and I am considering abandoning the project due to the lack of growth.
Bad Business - the game originally mentioned by the OP - never shows up in my recommendations despite me playing FPS games frequently, including Bad Business itself. However, can you guess which game has been sitting at the top of my recommendations for weeks now? Their testing server.
From a user perspective this makes absolutely no sense. The algorithm is prioritizing a game that costs money, is less stable and has fewer players over an (almost) exact copy that is free-to-play, is more stable and has servers that reach full capacity.
I understand that there maybe be some ‘special’ factors in play potentially like what my friends are playing and maybe this testing server having better retention statistics or whatever, but from a user perspective this is just bad UX. A one-size-fits-all algorithm like we have now simply isn’t satisfying game creators nor players.
After some time working on games that had big bouts of success, the algorithm prioritizes games that have the following:
Obviously, this encourages developers to focus on game stats first, gameplay second, and usually results in low(er) quality games. There are a lot of cheap ways to increase these stats…
IMO, the best way to make your game “in the algorithm” is by adding elements of what I talked about above.
