Once a game is in your ‘Continue’, I noticed that it tends to not show up in the other sorts on the home page. It’s possible that’s why you were not seeing Pet Sim X – not to justify the drop in impressions from Roblox, that’s algorithm garbage, but worth knowing !
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It must also get hidden if it appears in Favorites, which is at the very bottom. I’ll test on a brand new account and see.
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Really sad to see that. ROBLOX is doing drastic changes but its not making the community any happier…
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Why is monetization included in this? Games that aren’t designed to be pay2win and only feature cosmetic gamepasses will naturally have lower monetization than paypig slop. Wasn’t the whole idea of Premium Payouts to allow people to design games they want without feeling pressured into implementing cash shop boosts? If so, why is a game’s visibility then tied to monetization? Does this metric factor in premium playtime as well?
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My game Spelunker - Mining Game has not really had any increase in players in almost a year. The game does not really have any Pay to Win aspect of Monetization so it does not do really well in that category, most of our earnings are skins which the players can select and buy without relying on an RNG box opening system and another way for us is donations from players.
If monetization and earnings is a deciding factor for my game to be seen by other players then I believe that’s a really bad decision on Roblox’s Recommendation Engine, many enjoyable games will not be seen at all.
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From a business POV, monetization needs to be included. It’s the sad reality.
I can’t say I fully agree with it, but I support it.
Using ARPDAU is a pretty good metric for success.
This doesn’t take away from the fact that the discoverability for a new game is horrible, and that even if your game has incredible stats, it can be completely ignored by the algorithm.
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I would like to bring to your attention that I am facing some difficulties with the visibility of my game, “Bum Showdown (Debate Game),” on Roblox’s discovery feature. Despite reuploading the game to the group, it does not appear in the search results. Furthermore, I have encountered another issue where the search bar displays irrelevant results when searching for random words. For instance, when searching for “sus,” Blox Fruits is shown instead. Similarly, searching for “priv” inexplicably leads to a game titled “[FREE ADMIN].”
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My game has been having the exact same problem, my game has playtime nearly in the top 10k games despite being dwarfed by them in other metrics such as the amount of players. It peaked at about 18k impressions but has been steadily declining since this update. My peak performance happened to be on the 9th, the day after this post was made showing that it’s more of a gradual decrease being applied to games. Insane and irrelevant results have been popping up left and right. My game is a kingdom, but when you search kingdom for some reason tycoon games with thumbnails stolen from Minecraft Youtubers get recommended above mine? It’s a huge problem, we need to stop promoting these irrelevant and clickbait games, it’s stealing players from legitimate developers.
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Basing it entirely on monetization would be bad enough, but I have a game which someone incredibly generous donated over 20k robux and that seemed to have no effect on my game’s recommendations. Instead, game recommendations slowly decrease regardless of how successful your game is because of scammers making these botted tycoon games with stolen Minecraft Youtuber thumbnails. I’ve noticed they consistently rank higher than my game despite being completely irrelevant in my category. All the work of legitimate developers is being negated by clickbait and bots. This could be a moderation update rather than an algorithm one.
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Sorry for so many replies but now I randomly have zero search impressions down from over 10k? How is this even possible?
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Unfortunately, Roblox recently tried to improve the algorithm and this made it even worse than it was. The best was the algorithm that was a year ago and before, it got worse around November last year and after the last changes it’s even worse. I’m not a game developer, but I suspect it’s all correlated. I started 2 threads in which I described how senseless the sorting algorithm works and how much the algorithm got worse after recent changes that were supposed to improve search results.
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My game Bloxy Kart, my only source of revenue for my next game is no longer searchable… It used to be the first result that popped up.
I mean… HOW IS SPIDER MAN OBBY RELATED TO MY RACING GAME!
Also, a fake Bloxy Awards place is coming up here too…
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Unfortunately, the problem concerns the entire sorting algorithm in Roblox and the same thing happened when searching for clothes in the catalog, probably also UGC items, but I haven’t tested this yet. My group, which received the Verified Badge due to popularity and volume of sales, is now literally ruined by the changes in the algorithms introduced since the end of last year, and the last change almost completely killed the sales. Unfortunately, I’m starting to give up on this issue, I reported the problems almost a year ago, I spent a lot of time to present the problem in screenshots and to describe it as accurately as possible, unfortunately nothing has changed. I feel that Roblox has clipped my wings and killed the enthusiasm I had. The algorithm that was used a year ago and before, had a motivating effect, I watched as what I created gradually climbed higher and higher rows in the search results and it gave me the feeling that the work I put into something translated into results and it was very motivating! Now everything seems to be a matter of chance and luck, my clothes that used to reach the first row or even the first place in the search results (even after typing only one word in the search box) are now below tens or hundreds of unpopular (often unrelated to the words entered in the search box), often stolen assets or even they are not displayed in the search results at all. The level of sales fell 300-400 times! I had lots of plans - learning Lua to make games, learning Blender to make UGC items, but as I mentioned my wings got clipped when I look at what’s going on and realize it’s getting worse. Now a dress with 42K likes is displayed in row 79 on a 27" screen and above (even in the first row) there are dozens of copies uploaded by asset thieves, copies with few likes. I don’t know how this mystical algorithm works. I reported the problem almost a year ago and nothing has changed, and the last change (which was like killing a dying person) is supposedly not a bug but a feature! It is very discouraging when everything is random and successes no longer depend on the amount of work and effort put into something.
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Yeah it’s really demotivating.
My game has the highest stats it’s ever had - EXCEPT player count.
Impressions are down 90%.
Why?
It feels like Roblox is deliberately pushing me for having better stats than before lol.
When my game was peaking at 8k-16k ccu, the stats were horrendous.
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Figured I’d reply to this thread and keep it alive since my last reply while Roblox twiddles its fingers ignoring us. Since the change in early May, my game’s CCU has dropped from ~5.5K to struggling to hit 1,500.
Player retention and stickiness has been at or above the sports category averages.
Our revenue is consistently close to the top 200 experiences even though it only averages 1400 CCU’s.
Yet since that, our impressions have dropped 99% from peaking at 125M+ to barely averaging 800K.
It’s amazing to me how Roblox in the last 9 months has been on a speed-run of trying to shoot itself in the foot, killing off their main earners, big name titles, all the while advertising low-quality, inconsistent, and copycat games. Is this Roblox trying to meet some kind of metric about new experiences to brag about to investors? What’s the deal on this?
This is incredibly discouraging and once again begs the question, is this platform sustainable for developers who can just be dropped off at the change of a whim? For a platform that advertises itself as being full of opportunities for making content, they sure forgot to mention the part where your work is disposable at their pleasure.
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Doing my duty of keeping this thread alive
…
This issue is massive, and it’s obvious hundreds of talented developers might be driven off the platform because of this algorithm change.
Not to mention how impossible it is to get your game off the ground without spending literal millions of robux on sponsors. Doing outside marketing is nearly impossible as well, I had a Youtuber I won’t name quote me 100k USD, minimum, for two videos. Yes you read that correctly, 100k USD! Feels like you have to spin the wheel of fate and luck and go viral with a video of your game to get even 100 players.
Bring back Friend Activity tab in the home page. 90% impressions (at least mine) were there. Those are all gone.
Make it clearer what the algorithm favors. Why is it choosing poorer quality games(metrics wise), at times even scam games, over other games in the search and in the discover page, when those poor quality games are performing significantly worse in metrics? (see above threads)
This discussion should not be ignored. We developers are seeking answers.
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Is it just me or does this just reek of greed:
If your game doesn’t make as much money as another game, we might not show it to the players as much!
What about games that aren’t made for monetary gains, geesh.
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it appears ROBLOX is trying everything they can to increase the benchmark average, which may affect some experiences such as ours. I was affected too but I had to sacrifice some of the game image to keep the game alive with more aggressive monetization.
Obviously, a game could not survive without its players, but it can still thrive in a monetary way. My suggestion right now would be do what you can to survive even when it costs something valuable.
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It’s not just affecting other discoveries, it also affects advertisements.
It’s weird how we get 15M impressions and only get 7K attributed visits? Home can possibly gets us to 50K-200K new players with that amount of impressions so if we reduce the average amount by 80%; that would still be 25K new players. My speculations may still be VERY inaccurate though but these are surely 80% less lower clicks and attributed visits compared to 1 year ago.
While it shows in the acquisition page that we’ve only managed to get an impression of 669,795 on sponsored ads; which seems to be reasonable as it only managed to get us 2K new players for sponsored ads.
Other similar genres are obtaining a new player of 20K+ new players while my game is only obtaining 9K new players every day. Despite the updates that increased the analytics data like D1 retention, session time, ARPU and such… We seemed to have less and less new players and impressions? I understand that the data increase may just be recent and it’ll take a while for ROBLOX to reward us based off our recent changes but just wanted to share these and wanted to know what could be going on.
Similar genres that are having 20K+ new players daily: (estimation only; this may not be accurate and many more…)
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