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:
Spoiler: it’s not there
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:
Either our game sucks and Roblox is doing an outstanding job pairing the perfect audience
Our game is great and Roblox is not feeding us any new players
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.
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.
This isn’t OK.
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:
Good D1 Retention. This is extremely important. Basically, you need to make it so that your game’s retention is within the target range (the 50th-90th percentile or higher), and that players come back to your game often. An easy way of this is daily rewards or daily spins. D7 retention, for some reason, even if it is well above the 50th-90th percentile benchmark, does not matter for the algorithm that much.
Good playtime. Once again, being within the 50th-90th percentile, if not higher, is great. You need to make sure your players stick around for a while - a lot of games struggle to get 5-10 minute average playtimes. Really you want to be getting 10-15, and that’s usually really good. A good way of doing this is timed rewards, e.g. every 5 minutes of playtime you give the player some reward.
Good monetization. An Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) that is consistently above 1, if not much higher, will give you good algorithm positioning. This is something that can be useful if your game’s D1 retention and playtime statistics are lacking.
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.
I had the same thing happen for a couple of games this year.
Really, ROBLOX’s algorithm seems to work as such:
It gives you a nice little boost if the stats look promising.
As the boost happens, more players play.
However, if at some point, any of the stats go down, e.g. D1 Retention, Playtime, Monetization, ROBLOX will spit it out of their algorithm pretty quickly. The only way to fix this is to try fixing your stats, spending a lot on ads, or using social media marketing
ROBLOX’s algorithm(s) encourage people to just poop out games due to this
The last month or two even the last year really has affected this. Home recommendation seem to have dropped on my game as well as the “todays picks” section simply only featuring the top games with billions of plays after Roblox promised it would “feature small games starting in April”. The today pick section that roblox promised us has not been very transparent at all. REMOVAL of user ads and loss of home recommendations is killing games!!!
it is clear that the incentive the algorithm drives is to not to slowly iterate and improve on a single game long term, it is to repeatedly upload multiple similar games with slight variations, milking the ‘new game’ honeymoon period of the algorithm for each.
99 is above 90th percentile D1 retention and growing, unmatched average playtime, and I believe one of the highest ARPDAU. Six months later and several internal conversions we are still not getting any players from the algo.
At this point, you’re just complaining about random things for no reason. If the game is in your continue, IT’S NOT GOING TO RECOMMEND YOU IT!!! It’s recommending the testing server because it is similar to what you’re playing.
