Seems to be related to this: Some games are not appearing in "continue playing"
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The removal of friend activity from the home page paired with the algorithm’s agonizing rollercoaster-like high and low dips of player acquisition that seem to come in waves has been absolutely devastating to small games and big games alike.
With the home page friend activity removal it felt like we didn’t even get a heads up, let alone a choice.
This is absolutely frustrating - this experience is outright terrifying. Sponsorships and advertisements not being viable is like a cherry on top. Promising new games can’t get off the ground and previously predictable and sustainable games are suddenly put on an emotional rollercoaster.
All of these issues culminate to make it feel like Roblox is making changes on the platform based SOLELY on data-driven analytics and statistics - numbers on a dashboard.
“Am I just a percentile, a statistic?” – that’s how these changes make me feel. It feels like user feedback and UX is being ignored or is second priority.
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It still appears on the continue page
(Don’t mind those 2 other games LOL i was just checking them, free model garbage)
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Even so, we have significantly higher revenue statistics then other games in our genre (learned through talking to other developers), yet they are being promoted more then us for some unknown reason.
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No-Scope Arcade has also taken a massive hit. April 2nd marks the date in which our discovery impressions plummeted, meaning we just got removed from sorts and recommendations by a large part.
This has taken a massive hit to our (small) studio financially, which has made a complete turnaround in everything we do. Hell, my own finances were hit so bad I’ve suddenly had real-life financial struggles. This lack of transparency is just playing with real lives here and it’s not okay.
Yet, our average session time and retention are very similar. In fact, our stickiness is so much higher!
A fix to this is absolutely critical! No-Scope Arcade has gone from having a 2k-4k CCU to just barely holding a 300-600 CCU. You can imagine how this is significantly hurting us as individuals.
It is always my number one goal to provide real opportunities to real people, and yet, I can’t do that if it’s on a broken platform. Lack of transparency and playing with lives will only lose you the most valuable developers yet.
Before April 2nd I lived a normal life as a normal working individual. Now I’m struggling to pay for food and medical bills in a rough time of my life, on top of the fact that I’m still needing to pay others. I hate putting myself out there like this, but there has to be some way to communicate the emergency here.
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Saw this thread and got curious.
BIG Paintball had the lowest visit count in 3+ years last month (May):
The player drop is followed after a large spike on ~April 6th
Here’s another game, Giant Survival. Notice the spike.
Build & Survive:
My other games update frequently so hard to gauge an impact. I have noticed lower CCU than usual overall.
Edit: Pet Simulator X impressions:
(Our game has very high monetization analytics. So wouldn’t Roblox push us more? Why the opposite?)
And for what it’s worth, my discover page has been really awful. So awful I’ve found myself going off Roblox to play games. I did a poll on twitter (now deleted) and majority voted in agreeance with me.
Also interesting:
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I’m just really confused with this algorithm. I was told that the more money my game brings in the more players it will also bring in. So I made changes to my game over the course of a month to increase overall revenue. It seemed to work bringing my player counts from about 20 users to around 500 users with peaks of 900. Now days after seemingly “figuring out” what I needed to do my player counts are back down the gutter with averages of 100 users with no explanation for why.
All I want is to understand what I can do to appeal to this ever changing algorithm.
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Not actually, since what you posted isn’t an issue to begin with.
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Well, in all fairness, they should base it on data. That’s why it’s called an algorithm, as opposed to it being hand-picked.
That being said, the way the data is being used to calculate impressions is obviously doing something wrong. Roblox seems to make the requirements too mushy and changes everything around without informing the developers.
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I’ve had the same issue with one of my most recent games, car wash tycoon was holding around 1-2k active… but the first week of May, everything dropped, now we’re lucky if the game hits triple digits.
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I also experienced the spike in April and dip in May with Case Clicker, but it seems to have rebounded and is beginning to spike again in June.
In fact, I got a few notifications in my insights that I’m reaching 6 month peaks this month.
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It’s reassuring knowing that I’m not the only one who has experienced this
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While it’s not related to the main discovery algorithm, I think the points I raised in Roblox search is inaccurate for our game - #11 by LuaBearyGood this post recently are relevant to the topic.
From our data the search algorithm also got significantly worse around the same time
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I don’t know we should attack him for his statement, Yes you both are experiencing totally different situations but it doesn’t mean anyone is right or wrong.
I’m hoping Roblox can acknowledge these changes soon. I can update the game until I’m blue in the face but if a game gets next to zero new users, it’s destined to fail. Old players need to be replaced with new ones for a game to survive.
Look at this graph:
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Well…
If Roblox does end up rolling back anything, I hope it doesn’t push back the games like mine that have been positively affected by this algorithm change.
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Notice how your users are from home page click-throughs, discovery is the same.
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Hmm well I guess the players have to go somewhere if they don’t play the other games in this post…
Would you mind sharing what game these stats are for?
To add to this we experienced something similar with SharkBite 2.
Our player base was gradually rising until it wasn’t and took a substantial blow for seemingly no reason. It’s definitely concerning and suggests an algorithm change.
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Something to add on here, the algorithm is clearly strongly promoting new games. The problem is that it is promoting new games that are objectively worse in terms of metrics then existing games in the genre. New games should only be heavily promoted if their metrics are better or equal to existing games, not if they are worse.
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