Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game

[AxisAngle (AxisAngles)]

From the Phantom Forces team, Thank you for looking into it. We’ve also seen a 60% decline in our player counts.

We’ve spent the past 3 years working on our next experience which targets an older audience. We really have committed to the idea of aging up the platform, and are about to release to Alpha, but we’re scared that the changes to the recommendation engine will be a large and unfair hurdle, as it seems that the experiences most effected by this change are ones with older / more competitive audiences.

Again thank you for hearing us out and for your future response.

[MetatableIndex]

It doesn’t make sense to use Player Conversion for the discovery algorithm, since although it can be somewhat useful under some circumstances, Player Conversion will inadvertedly be low in games that follow a free 2 play principle and don’t push products and passes in the players’ faces.

In SCP: Roleplay, the Conversion Rate is not as great of a value as Roblox advertises in the benchmark, but ARPPU and ARPDAU are consistently above the 90th percentile.

Why should our games be negatively ranked when they have great monetization? Encouraging players to purchase makes sense, but you can’t do it for everyone. There are artificial ways to increase this value, such as product popups, but those nearly always follow a bad reputation.
The way the algorithm is built right now seems to encourage the creation of low effort cash grab games instead of long standing quality production.

Discovery has been a non-stop battle for the past couple years, and some things really need some adjustment.

[Ryxku]

Since UGC Limited appeared, my roblox games got killed in same time. I went to 600 players to 100 then 10-50. It’s hopeless for Escape Running Head Eyes.

[vicy98 (Samarium_Helium)]

Same.

We’re in mid-alpha and haven’t advertised our game Beyond the Stars [Alpha] yet, but we still got 5-10 visits a day due to the name being not-too-similar to most titles (enough for a bit of premium payout, and some people use our donate item too), so it wasn’t covered up in the search results when people typed similar things like Beyond the Stars, a game by Imperator which used to be popular but ceased development, and which we are remaking (with permission from the original devs).

Now the search results are flooded with ‘Star Wars’ even if I type the exact name of the remake, only the original game appears and we now get 0 visits on most days ;-;.

At least people can now type “Beyond the Stars” with quotes and have the original and remake both come up.

[px_qz]

Literally. Same thing happened to 2 of my games. Went from average 5K CCU to about 300-500.

This actually happens every couple of months for me, and always seems to revive after a few weeks/months. It always happens randomly and I have no clue what could be causing this.

[OneEDM (EDM)]

“Coming weeks” at Roblox is slang for we’ll wait and hope you forget about this. cough audio privacy update cough Seems like this should be a top priority given people’s livelihoods are at stake.

[Crazyblox]

Can’t say I’ve been experiencing any issues in regards to the algorithm, but then again, look at the amount of new users via home; I’ve pretty much established my games community outside of roblox without having to rely on the algorithm.

I’ll share what I’ve been doing with my game in order to minimize impact from any roblox algorithm changes:

• Build a strong, dedicated and loyal community. Interact with them on the regular, share dev posts and open conversation on dev processes.
• Create a regular presence on social media. Our twitter page releases many tweets a week to drive engagement and keep memory of the game fresh in our players minds. On our discord is where we are most active and we announce to everyone when we release a new update.

Using all of the above…

• RELEASE REGULAR, RELIABLE CONTENT UPDATES.

As much as I am one to hate chasing the system, I’ve got various things driving traffic on the weekend. Double XP, and have spread the word that I am releasing weekly updates on my game at a SET time, in which I always achieve the goal. I was even at Animecon UK today and took my laptop with me to set the update for release at the correct time.

Flood Escape 2 will be 6 years old this September, and I’m thankful for every moment I get to keep this game chugging along.

EDIT: Also it’s important to consider that infinite growth is simply impossible and you will hit your audience cap at some point. Flood Escape 2 hit its peak in 2018 and I will most likely never hit those numbers again in terms of players, revenue etc., but that’s okay. It’s par for the course with any game that lives this long. I’m just happy to keep these sustained numbers over the months this year when I resumed regular updates to the game starting in Jan/Feb.

[qChronos]

@qChronos

So yea I’m pretty sure that the cause of these bad statistics is the removal of the tab or its just people preparing for exams

Hey good news everyone, the friend activity tab is back

[focasds]

I saw this post the day it was posted but decided not to participate on it until now…

My game has suffered these changes three times in a row, I am honestly tired of it. How can I tell if my game is performing good or not with this sort of changes. This also shows the algorithm has a lot of control in a game’s popularity even though we deny it.

• Around May of 2021 my game started increasing in players and died out.
• Around March of 2022 my game started increasing in players again with a peak of 5k players on April and died out.
• Around May of 2023 my game started increasing in players and is kind of dying out again.

Does this mean that everyone just decided to play my game during those months? In my opinion is not, is the algorithm making sudden changes that heavily affect many games. Is this some sort of rotation to give the opportunity to other games to shine for a few days and when the algorithm doesn’t like it dumps it out?

Every time I receive that survey asking about my experience in Roblox and that if as a developer I am satisfied with what I earn; I always say a huge fat no. Is impossible to even have the mindset of saying “I will make a game on Roblox to get some players and then…”, because the algorithm changes faster than what you will earn.

---

I understand Roblox is just business and cares for sure more about the game that makes the most (I assume as this is what is being speculated). BUT, am I developing for the algorithm to pick me or for players to enjoy my game.

I released a wanted update in my game and what I see is less impressions, is just depressing to look at those stats when Roblox literally tells you:

But wait!

What does this tell me?

It says that I should ignore the stats as they are basically useless, and these insights being a summary of the day which basically does not reflect if my game will improve or not. Do you want me to spend the hard-working money I have made with my game in advertisements that perform horribly and that there are even testimonies of people claiming to spend a thousand of USD to just get barely anything back.

Anyways here are my acquisitions:

I hope something is done about this I am honestly tired at this point.

[Synision]

I’ve experienced this with my game, although it is not as big a game as some of the previous posters, though it’s pulled 50-100 concurrents and good monetisation for several years. It does seem that a common theme is that long-standing games (non front-page) which pull a decent and consistent player count have been punished by this recent algorithm change. Similar to other posters it’s clear to see where home acquisitions saw a massive hit:

It is very demotivating when I’m trying to push out regular content updates but seeing the algorithm knock my update before.

It would be very helpful if there was any consistency or explanation as to what swings the algorithm. My game also sees a significant portion of users come from search but these can half at random moments when Roblox decides to knock it down the search results. I never know why this is.

[Synision]

Something I forgot to mention in my previous reply is that many of the problems with falling acquisition I’m facing started following Roblox’s decision to stop sponsoring games to under 13s, as this removed the main avenue for (non front page) games to reach the under 13 audience, my target demographic.

Roblox has not replaced the avenue of discoverability that sponsored games provided and further algorithm changes have compounded this impact, meaning my game is seeing a steady decline.

[POOPENGUIN]

I can attest to this. Ive been working on The Flappy Men for 3 years now. I’ve worked hard to bring it to over 20 concurrent players for an entire year before the algorithm noticed it, boosting it up to 50-200 concurrent players depending on the time of year. However, in line with this post, the algorithm seemingly stopped promoting the game, as you can see a massive decline in new players from search.

Most other metrics show average results with nothing really changing until the may period as well.

It sucks to have to see it die off despite putting more and more effort into each update. I hope this is just a phase and am looking forward to roblox’s status update.

[LuaBearyGood]

Is there any update on this yet? I’m sure you can appreciate the summer holidays is one of the most important points in the year for developers, and it’s important it goes well.

I obviously don’t know anything about Roblox’s internal processes, but I feel things like the reversal of the changes to search (which in genre searching, e.g. ‘Obby’, is yielding objectively worse games (engagement, retention, monetisation) which change their icons 20+ times a day to maintain CTR) would be relatively trivial to do.

[BrandonKardashianx (Qrande)]

I’ve included a new visitor chart just so you’ve got some more data to work with. My game has particularly started to experience an extreme dip as of changes made seemingly within the last couple of days.

We very much need to start seeing some announcements made in regards to algorithm changes, as at the moment it is very much infeasible to run a small business on the platform due to the sheer unpredictability of monthly revenue as a result of these sporadic, unexplained changes.

[albiedanoob (albie)]

Just replying to mention that I’ve experienced the EXACT SAME THING on the same months.

My game averaging 1k-3k (peaked at 16k one weekend when Roblox heavily pushed it) players went from that to <1k, to <500 in about 2 weeks, despite the game having higher stats that ever in every single category. Discovery is abysmal recently.

[filiptibell]

Just wanted to give an update on how the game is going - it has been growing, and quite literally everything roblox is telling us in the new “Insights” panel is that the game is doing great, and that our metrics are top of the line. We keep getting stars, hearts, top 3% 4% 5% in many categories…

But once again, discovery on Roblox’s end looks terrible and seems to have had nothing to do with our growth. We have had substantial increases in the Home, Friends and Other categories, while discovery from search (which includes the Discover pages according to official creator docs) has somehow decreased by about 20% during the same time period.

As far as I’ve seen, the game does not show up in any sorts / categories yet either.

[LuaBearyGood]

That game is new and didn’t exist before the changes this post is referring to. Given your metrics you should also be getting a lot more than the algorithm is currently giving you.

[music_man1996]

Hey everyone, so sorry about the trouble. This seems much more serious/detailed than a bug report. I’ve made sure we’re aware of this internally, and we are. Not much more I can do on my end. Godspeed.

[wravager]

Starting in March almost every single one of my games went down like 90% of my usual concurrent… I’m cashing out 10% of what I used to every month for THREE YEARS. Please fix this

[FilteredScript (Filtered)]

I released a game towards the end of April, and had good success within the algorithm. Within a matter of days we were climbing very nicely, however right at the end of April we saw a sharp decline. Our stats (retention, ctr, playtime) barely changed when we blew up, and some improved, however we saw a rapid decline in impressions the following days without any reasons behind it.

We have started to grow slowly again, and have noticed that this growth aligns with some of our monetization metrics. However, given these high metrics (well above any benchmarks), the algorithm should be giving us many more impressions than it is right now.

(Take a look at the graphs below for our recent impressions)

I have released similar games in the past with worse stats, and had more success. What was the motivation behind these new changes? In my opinion, the previous algorithm was effective at what it needed to do, and distributed players well across top experiences.

As @BuildIntoGames mentioned previously, Pet Simulator X, with what I assume has good monetization analytics has seen a decline in impressions recently. I would be interested to hear if that has correlated directly with your ARPPU and ARPDAU or any other analytics.

Our game primarily relies on D7/30 retention/stickiness for it’s survival, but given our stats we should be seeing a lot more new users than we currently are.

Take a look at our past 60 days of Impressions/New Users:

We’re currently relying on natural growth, and constant updates (more frequent than we had planned) to keep the game alive. I’m not sure who made the decision for this change, and what motivated it, however as many others have already mentioned, this could cost top experiences millions of dollars as we head into Summer.

There is clear evidence of this change having a bad impact on the platform.
Any ETA on a change/update to the algorithm and discovery or at least some information on what influences it now?