TBH this has been going on for a while. You saw this start in the early days of the pandemic.
You saw a huge influx of players on ROBLOX, which increased demand for new games. You saw A LOT of people of all different tiers of developing get into it. Hell, I was pretty active developing games like this one in the mid-2010’s, but by the time I was in college (late-2010’s), ROBLOX wasn’t in my interest as much anymore. When C*VID hit, I was bored, had a lot of free time, and needed some extra cash, so guess who got back into developing?
As C*VID winded down, so did the player counts. It now seems like the only games that do well are either super over-the-top games that push out ridiculous amounts of content (think pets etc.) and gameplay, or are games that are incredibly low-quality. If you’re somewhere in the middle, it seems like you’re at a disadvantage. ROBLOX definitely seems to prioritize success for games that are high(er) quality or games that are of low(er) quality.
There is no way all this is relative to specifically Covid.
Roblox is hitting CCUs lower than it was back in April and that is very reflective of the overall experience of users on the platform.
SCP: Roleplay, a game in the top 100 by earnings on the platform, which I have referenced in this topic already, is currently at the best statistics that it has had since release. And yet, it now faces a loss of over 30% in new users and revenue. There is no way we’re at fault for this, considering the massive improvements in the metrics. There is a very clear date where this started happening (Monday September 4).
This is, by the way, a game that had previously been able to maintain its players for over half a year without updates, and is now suddenly struggling to even hit 3k CCU, when 4k CCU was the average throughout the day before.
I hate to say this, but @MasterDaniel is right in claiming this could cause a lot of developers to abandon the platform. We’ve been relying on our games to make a living and remain sustainable, and this is now being taken away without notice or care. At this rate, staying on Roblox will not be affordable and we will have to move to alternatives.
Its nothing short of baffling that this has not been directly addressed. It’s extremely disrespectful to us developers and is the equivalent of getting flipped off by roblox. Discovery is at an all time low and it’s going to be a daunting task releasing the multiple games I have invested upwards of a thousands of dollars on.
Agreed. Our game hit the algorithm in early September and was performing extremely well, monetization playtime, and retention was much higher than the benchmarks (and still is above benchmarks today despite our game being completely dropped from the algorithm and essentially starved of new users and impressions.) Our game went from almost 20 million impressions per day to a measly 2.8 million per day in a matter of 2 weeks, all the while our playtime, retention, and monetization stats were still way above the benchmark. It is beyond frustrating that developers are being punished for having well performing games. Does ROBLOX not want to make money??
No you’re wrong, I was checking sus games, 90% of them was never advertised, but Roblox for no reason boosted them with current players starting from 40 ending with 2k
My Game BlockWars went from 50ccu to over 1kccu in just one week out of the blue! Roblox pushed the game like crazy… And one week later its back at around 150 ccu. The Algorithm picked the game up and pushed it for a week and then dropped it again. Truly bizarre. Would be interesting if Roblox changed the algorithm with the release of Roblox on the Playstation as the game started dropping again right after that Update. My Game isn’t Playstation compatible so the algorithm might favor Console-Optimized games right now to make the investors happy. Additional context is that I din’t do any marketing during the last 2 weeks all that happened so the player count fully reflects how much the algorithm pushed my game and game-stats have actually been increased during the last week so it isn’t due to bad updates.
This weekend the algorithm changed again and judging by my feed I am not the only person who has had declining numbers since.
The real question for Roblox is this; are these manual changes and tweaks to the algorithm being made by some busybody who keeps unwittingly rocking the boat (developer livelihoods) or is the algorithm fundamentally flawed creating volatile and chaotic promotion of games that just so happens to be updated on a weekly basis.
Fundamentally: if my game has metrics strong enough to get to 1k ccu one week, why does it struggle to hit 300 the next week?
I’d love an answer on this but I won’t hold my breath.
Just an update on this, yesterday our game dropped to its lowest number of impressions ever, a shockingly low 1.4 million. Our game is still in the top 200 earning games on the platform with great engagement and retention, and we are still being starved of impressions.
island gods also had a similar thing happen, it hit its all time peak about 10 days ago and now appears to be dipping down to roughly the level it was at before the increase started
it’s impossible to know, when these sorts of things happen, whether it is caused by changes you actually made to your game or just changes to abstract portions of the algorithm.
this makes for an incredibly frustrating developer experience, where you never know what is driving the fall-off or the gains.
i would really appreciate more transparency in how my game is being weighted. i can look at my metrics all i want, but if i’m above the 50-90 percentile range in every category, why is this happening? how the hell does it work?
This is deadass making me pissed off. How is anyone supposed to develop on roblox if your game can be popping one week, and dead the next. It genuinely makes no sense how a thread with multiple of the sites largest developers complaining can be promptly disregarded/ignored.
Ya, my game lost like 40% new users around the same time. My game used to hit 7k-8k CCU on week days and now it’s been cut in half to a small 4.6K peak on week day. My new visits are also cut in half.
