Roblox ads are a money drain that can only be effectively used by cashgrabs

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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This sort of continues on many of my previous posts that led up to the position I am in currently. Growing a game on roblox is borderline impossible if you are not lucky. In fact, after working on a commission for 3 weeks and getting a notable amount for it and investing it into ads, I found out that being able to invest money into advertising a game still does not mean that you will have any success with connecting to your target audience.
Roblox ads have no age group targetting, despite all the ā€œā€ā€œā€ā€œAIā€ā€œā€ā€œā€ buzz that they are wrapped into. As a result, they produce users that are neither able to complete a tutorial, nor to figure out how to play the game on their own. At the disgusting cost of about 3-4 robux per user, it is unacceptable to have kids join, play for 50 seconds and leave, taking my money and giving me no return, turning my horrible ARPDAY of 0.3 into a ridiculous 0.03 (!) overnight. Prior to getting roblox ads, I would usually have 3-6 new users per day with about a 7-9% retention. As I get the retention stats from the ads, I am seeing a whopping 2.7% D1 retention.

Game link - Plane Havoc - Roblox

To fellow creators - learn on my mistakes. If you have a passion project that is made to be fun to play, not to milk money from 3 year olds, stay away from roblox ads. I do not intend on getting another campaign of roblox ads and I urge you to avoid them too.

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Gave your game a try and have to say that it gives off an impression of being unfinished due to its, letā€™s say informal look and nonchalance in terms of visuals. The tutorial drags on for a bit too long and I find the typewriting effect a bit unreadable because the text scales constantly in size. I play on low graphics and it was pretty confusing as to where the enemy team base is (I just flew forwards), even having dragged it onto a higher level and I was pretty lost. Iā€™m aware aerial combat is supposed to drag on for a long time, but itā€™s a Roblox game at the end of the day.

Even if you made nice visuals for the hangars, plane spawners and UI, the people (typically children) who click on sponsored game ads donā€™t have the patience for this. This even includes people like me who are over 18 but just lack patience when there is no clear objective/guidance.

Made a similar mistake when the new sponsor system released, and can double down on what youā€™re saying that itā€™s not worth it if youā€™re making a game that isnā€™t a tycoon or clicker simulator. That at least until they add age group targeting, but even then the success rate is extremely low. In the future I am hoping to see something where an algorithm looks at your most played games and takes their genre and/or subgenres in order to better suit sponsored ad impressions to every player.

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Sorry to break it to you, but your game gives old vibes that current players might not enjoy.

Im pretty sure i used to play such a game about 10 years ago when i signed up on the platform.
Is it a republished stolen game file?

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You might be thinking of Biplane Dogfight. I like that game and I got inspired by it, but no, I did not republish an uncopylocked game, and you can look through my post history, my youtube channel, my discord server and the other games by my group if you are sceptical about it.

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Sounds to me that you are targeting inefficiently. Are you advertising for all platforms, all countries, all ages and all genders? Try A/B testing which audience set works best for you, and you can also use the Audience tab in Creator Hub to see which players tend to stick the longest.

If you donā€™t want to advertise, there are still other methods to get your game in the picture. If you can make engaging content on social media, you can attract interested players there.

But still the most important metric to optimize is the Qualified Playthrough Rate. You can find this on Acquisition ā†’ Home Recommendations. Get engaging thumbnails, good titles and make your game page interesting enough to get people to press the Play button.

Itā€™s partially a game of luck, as you mentioned, but thatā€™s the case with any kind of marketing. Itā€™s also a game of strategy; keep trying different things to see what works best for you.

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I used the new ad manager which unfortunately has no targeting settings

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Played the game lol was fun, sorry to hear this, but have you considered your competition?

In my opinion these games are more polished right from the thumbnail and videos and even then they only have 100 active players. These players are probably dedicated however as there is not much plane games around on Roblox.

I will heed your advice which is why my passion project is made for me and my dev partner as a priority.

Also the map gen was confusing the base was like 5 tiles away while the map goes out 1000 in either direction, consider armored patrol and make it as small as possible in order to promote the fun part (shooting people)

In short itā€™s the complexity controls of simulator planes and not the fun ease control like naval warfare. I think your game 1000x suffers from lack of players as naval warfare will do as well.

In my opinion add mechs or something lol.

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Ah, I see, the new ad manager tries to figure out audience settings automatically.

Personally, I prefer being in control of these settings, especially when multiple audience sets are highly converting, and to carry out tests simultaneously.

You could try out the classic ad manager, but keep in mind that Roblox ads are overall the more expensive acquisition method. It helps attracting players, but youā€™ll likely end up with less profit than expenses.

Itā€™s best to invest in converting marketing materials first (thumbnails, icon) and build a strong core loop that maximizes playtime. If your genre allows for it, building a community around your game & emphasizing playing with friends also increases loyalty and word-of-mouth growth.

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I agree with you, if I ever do roblox ads again, I will use the classic ad manager. Thanks for the advice.

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I decided to add a top bar compass to show where the bases are so that the enemy base is easier to locate, especially since people who donā€™t have graphics on 10 donā€™t have the render distance to see the enemy base. Thanks for the feedback.

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Check your Analytics > Engagement > New user first session retention
you want 50%+ for 5 mins mark.

Implement onboarding funnel to have a more informed idea why and where (steps of tutorial) do they leave the game.

3-6 new users per day is too few of samples to draw conclusions from. and if you check their source, they might be coming from friends or search, which naturally have higher retention than the other sources such as ads or home recommendations.

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New user first session retention is at 30%. Didnā€™t change a lot, since previously users would join and leave when there was no one online.
I am using funnels, and there is a disturbing 90% churn at the step of starting the plane engine, which the game explicitly tells the player to do in the controls menu, in the tutorial and again last time when the player just enters the plane seat. The only conclusion that I am able to draw from this is that ads bring users that canā€™t read.

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I made a game too, released just less than a week ago.
Whenever the game meats a ā€œnormalā€ player, the player stays, actually enjoy and may even return, high chances for that actually.

But, when a player that seems like he is not a kid but just a not joinsā€¦ which is like 90% of these who come is crazy.
Most of the time, they finished loading and the tutorial, standing in one place, and then justā€¦ leaving.
Sometimes a miracle happens and they stay for a round, and when the round, itā€™s like the are searching for the fastest route to die, and I swear that they are exiting the second they die like itā€™s a bot waiting to be killed, and leave.

At the start it was horrible, with high CPP I really losed hope, after a while, like about 3 days the CPP started to drop which is nice, probably because it figured out which players are more likely to stay and play.
But they are still there, wasting the money, literally.

And by the way, the new ads system gave me about 1.5M for 110 ad credits, at the last time I did it was 160K for 4 ad credits, which is like more than 2.5x better.

I also have a CTR of 1.1% and a total play rate of 0.26%, which is really strange, my gameā€™s icons, thumbails and all of that are really well madeā€¦ so I really wonders why is that.

I really donā€™t know what is going on, but I hope it will change, and fastā€¦

Game link:

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Iā€™ve played it and I think itā€™s decent (besides the toddler art style, but I understand the circumstances). My guess is that it is rather similar to that one bomb survival game, but with ducks and building bridges which I found a cool feature. Perhaps one would find that game (which is/was very popular IIRC) more easy to understand: there is no tutorial needed for that and itā€™s already well-established, and upon realizing the similarities, they think ā€œhey Iā€™ll play Super Bomb Survival or whatever itā€™s called instead of this thing with 10 players in itā€.

One nitpick is also that itā€™s pretty easy to play, I didnā€™t look at the sky once and easily won, alongside the rest of the server. I did fall in the water a few times though, so I suggest having a three-strike system with falling off OR damaging the player for that. Otherwise, I can see a loophole where one endlessly falls in the water, rendering the platforms disappearing useless.

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First of all, thanks for playing :slight_smile:

And yes, I did took inspiration from Super Bomb Survival (or SBS), but I didnā€™t wanted it to be like ā€œuhh just a copy and maybe a cash grabā€ so I really put effort into this, a charm and a kind of characterā€¦
Also, most of the new players donā€™t really know about SBSā€¦ so I donā€™t think thatā€™s the problemā€¦

Now, about the water and swords (beams)ā€¦ until 2 wins you get teleported back to the nearest island after falling to the water, only after 2 wins you donā€™t get teleported, and while the swords arenā€™t really much of a threat - they are blocking your ways sometimes and all of that which makes the game harder, not annoying, just harder.

I really think the problem is with the players who join and really seem like bots (let alone their nicknames which are a really raising a flag for meā€¦)

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