Well in regards to your game I think you’ve just answered your own question. Your new game isn’t in search results yet, which is one of the greatest factors in initial growth. Older games also seem to retain an advantage. look at any of those garbage children’s games like Color Block and floor is lava. They’re outclasses in quality, statistics, and every regard, but they stay on top, why? Because they monopolized those keyword searches and have been in the algorithm for longer
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The changes they made to the algorithm are what caused the game to perform worse that expected, the game had been holding over 1k ccu for a while and overnight there was a huge drop-off to around 300 ccu. This was attributed to a reduced number of impressions as a result of changes that Roblox made.
So, although what you say is true, your comments are irrelevant in regard to the drop-off that the creators on here are experiencing. We all have the same problem of having a large audience as of a few weeks ago, but due to changes to the algorithm losing a large portion of our audiences overnight.
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I think my game Zombie Rush has also been heavily affected by algorithm changes over the past year, searching Zombie shows unrelated free model games before mine now. I noticed a tiny pickup in the amount of Home impressions recently but nowhere near old numbers. It’d be nice to know more about changes that will heavily affect our games.
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Idk dawg, I tend not to even look at the Discover page anymore since it’s just flooded with the same puzzlingly popular games for a long while. I thought this was already well known. I do however love the improvements that have been made to the home page in catering to more diversified and personalized interests. I’m actually finding some nice lil hidden gems through there. This image might not be helping with my point much, but notice how a lot of these games don’t even break 1k active users.
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The algorithm has never made any sense to me, almost all of my games have above average metrics vs the benchmark except for users which are below where they should be.
Don’t even get me started on what the algorithm is doing to one of my games, it clearly has some kind of bug and even if it doesn’t Roblox needs to explain in detail how it works to push games to users.
I personally have not seen any large decline specifically in May. Perhaps many of the falls mentioned in this thread are typical of this time of year with players studying for and taking exams before summer begins.
What I have seen over the past year or two are very annoying boom and bust cycles where my games will touch 1k CCU for a week then drop down, only to repeat this process again a few weeks/months later. It’s completely nonsensical and makes developing on Roblox akin to playing the lottery.
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Thanks, but I don’t need it - My game is successful and not impacted by this problem so far.
Truly, we should all be wishing luck for those who are having this issue - though, I’m sure that’s what you meant by that, so in that case: I second that. Good luck, developers!
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Ethan, you’ve done a great drop at outlining the data and lack of correlation between engagement metrics and impressions to new players.
@Spathi and I discussed some strange concurrent player declines a few weeks after RDC 2022. We both noticed drops in our respective games, Arcade Island and Super Skyward Towers, without any substantial changes in engagement. While Arcade Island has made a fairly strong bounce back with further updates and upwards trends of related games, I have concern for myself and my peers in the long run.
RDC speakers had announced “huge investments” in discovery, through “tweaking and tuning” of the algorithm. If I recall correctly, Baszucki mentioned something along the lines of monetization influenced changes.
My biggest concerns are the suppressing of smaller games, even if they have strong engagement metrics, and rather recommending the most substantial top earners on the platform. A fair disclaimer this would require greater investigation of data to produce insight over the validity of this claim - this is simply a concern of what could happen as these trends continue (or may already have). These top earners, say Pet Sim X, Doors, Brookhaven, etc, give Roblox the opportunity to break platform records and improve their revenue reports for their shareholders. These games are making tens of millions, if not more, per year, and have a huge influence on the overall metric success of the Roblox platform.
Don’t want to go pointing fingers that Roblox doesn’t care about its developers because that simply isn’t the case. But the goal at the end of the day is to generate the most profit for a businesses’ stakeholders and the most enormously successful income generating games do the best job at that. It doesn’t mean Bad Business, Arcade Island, Super Skyward Towers, or any other middle sized Roblox game do a bad job at engagement/monetization - it just isn’t in the top 1-2% of games that enormously reward the platform with metric success and huge influence. As you have stated, these changes leave a lasting impact on the “taking the long view” vision with the Roblox developer community, and it is important for leadership to consider and keep all stakeholders informed.
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I believe part of this may because Roblox does not show accurate search results for games. Scroll down far enough and you see popular games, despite them being completely unrelated to the search term.
Here’s a quick search result for “Doors floor 2”
Excepting about 15 games, none of these results are related to Doors at all, let alone floor 2. Combined, this is about 50% “actual” results and 50% fake results
EDIT: I’d also like to point out that I did check these games for random tags in the description (e.g., the descriptions that are like “tags: doors rainbow friends skibidi toilet evade gmod nextbots”) and this still showed up.
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Very bad for developers and also the player themselves.
Devs that don’t have huge games are cut out.
And player never have anything new to play so they have to stick to the same games that have been on the page for ages without any good new additions since all of them are stuck at very low player counts.
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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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