Yeap, you pretty much have to invest heavily into your social media marketing, it seems that’s how all the top games stay popular even with bad user experiences.
4th time now in under 4 months
1 Like
My game does not show up at all when I search for it. I will scroll past literally thousands of roblox games and none will be mine. It used to get a few players every week, but now it is getting zero. Also, my game used to show up in the search. Now all of a sudden it doesn’t. I feel like my game got shadowbanned or something.
3 Likes
Same here 
search isnt doing me much of a favor either
1 Like
Same here
It appeared in search about a year ago, now, not at all, unless you use exact search
Also, about the Home Recommendations Conversion Rate
Yay, my stats are so good
Small games don’t even have a chance unless you spend a bunch of robux on ads or somehow get social media advertising to work…
1 Like
Ok, I just figured out how to use exact search. Good thing exact search works at least. Still searching normally does not show my game. For those who don’t know how to use exact search, type the game’s name in quotes. Ex: “Name of Game”
And it’s getting worse. I’ve seen lots of good games released recently, all of them getting around 30-80 players daily despite being of high quality, not only visually but in gameplay as well. I feel there is a bit of player inequality, with the majority of players concentrated in just a handful of games that are getting an insane amount of players compared to others. It might seem like I’m simply “jealous,” but I’m not. It’s just my concern that there are some sketchy algorithm changes benefiting only a selected few. However, that’s just my conspiracy; more likely, it’s some Roblox profit maximization ideology being implemented that sadly only benefits already established games, not new ones. Hopefully, everything will get fixed, and we are in some weird phase that might soon end, because recently Roblox seems to be less corporate in my observations, and more attentive to the community’s input.
4 Likes
It’s hurting small developers. Had 30-40 joins per day as the game was discoverable in search results for “airport.” Apparently after a week or so the game’s placement in search results dipped down to the 50-55th search row of experiences. Must I resort exclusively to advertising/marketing now? Zero transparency on how the algorithm presents games, and no confirmation if theres’ any association between likes/dislikes, favourites or visits and placement in results.
3 Likes
I don’t mean to be flippant, but I have to ask the question: “Is that how you search on Google?”
I would expect no. I would expect that no “normal” user does that either. It is only from the insane response on here that we know you have to enclose a search term in quotes.
3 Likes
People either search for a specific game or types of games. The specific search is good for a specific game. The regular search shows all games that could be related. Unfortunately, the regular search can completely block out some games from showing. And you are right; most people do not use the specific search, so many people will lose players for their games if they are unknown. I wish roblox would also add filters to the search. Filter by game genre, recently created, most favorites, most likes, highest like/dislike ratio, most active players, most visits, recently updated, etc.
2 Likes
Now when I use the specific search, my game does not show up at all! There is currently no way to find my game even when looking up the exact title in the specific search. It says no results found. Like what is going on?! Can I fix this somehow?
2 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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?
4 Likes
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.
1 Like
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:
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.
26 Likes
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
2 Likes
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.