Roblox is under-utilizing all their diverse games, the need for a new game sort

TheAmazeman · February 28, 2019, 7:21pm

The front page as it stands today, has the following sorts

Popular
Top Rated
Featured
Rthro
Popular Near You
Recommended
Because You Liked ___
Top Earning

This feature request is to add a new sort in either the 4th or 5th row, leaving everything else the same.

The new sort could be named “Have You Tried” and the purpose is to showcase the many hundreds of games outside of the top ~50 most popular to keep the games page fresh for players hungry for more content.

How it could work is every hour (or fixed amount of time), cycle through the popular sort at that time up to about 250 (or more as Roblox grows), and put every game into a grouped queue. Cycle through each of these queues which are holding about 10 games, and showcase the games in a random order for each player clicking the games page at that time. This maximizes each game’s chance to be shown first on the game sort for “Have You Tried”. The sort should not show more than 10 games at a time so that every game has nearly a maximized chance to show up on the front page for everybody clicking the games page at that time.

The purpose is to better reward games that are not at the top of the popular sort, while not taking away anything that those top games have achieved. This would provide spikes of incoming players to games which would otherwise be overlooked due to the front page (popular, top rated, etc) not changing very often. This new game sort would bring in new value by getting players to find games that are potentially having marketing trouble (as they are not at the very top) but are otherwise good retention games (hence still being in the top few hundred). Overall, there exists a huge plethora of games on Roblox, and while we are in a place where more games are getting more plays than ever before, we can do better.

This could cause a shift in the popularity / game earnings distribution, for example

Notice where it would bottom out and probably be almost equal past whatever amount of games are chosen for this sort. The cool thing would be, running an advertisement could get you into this top 250 or 300 of popular, and put you in this sort for the day as well. Even more encouragement for developers to be running advertisements, upping the competition even further.

This sort would be highly beneficial to the most amount of developers in the middle where making it or breaking it is a constant struggle, as well as being beneficial to players through showcasing a more diverse set of games to choose to play directly seen on the front page.

Space_Baa · February 28, 2019, 7:23pm

I’m a big fan of this idea, it would be beneficial from everyone from the company itself all the way down to the players

berezaa · March 6, 2019, 1:35am

Rather than the games being selected at random, I imagine Roblox will eventually start using neural nets to create a recommendations sort that shows something other than “what game can get stuck in the new user retention feedback loop”

TheAmazeman · March 6, 2019, 1:44am

That would be great for Roblox to redo the recommended games algorithm, but this feature is an entirely new sort to promote “middle class” games that are not already top but are filling up a sizable portion of the longtail, which could be further improved

Intended_Pun · March 6, 2019, 6:39pm

Do the top 250 games even change that much?

asmanwoks · March 12, 2019, 6:58pm

Sorry, this is late, but I figured as much I’d dump my 10 cents also.
Being a middle popularity guy myself (With a game I like to say to myself is ‘Polished to a teeth’) It is maddeningly hard to even appear in sorts in the current algorithm. And the current way the front page works makes it nearly impossible for new games to appear (besides the darker side of how people get on the front).
A cycle sort would be absolutely amazing, which lead me to check out the semi similar attempt at that, the “Because You Liked” Tab.
Looking at that, I actually am extremely weirded out by the game options it presents to me, a lot of those games are repeats of top games, and the rest…well, are just random player’s default places.
I THINK alongside a cyclic sort, and bouncing off of berezaa’s thought, why not make a tagging system such as that on Steam? I’d imagine it could apply to all of these fields and keep the overall workload to a minimum, using the benefit of the community. Because frankly, there’s actually very little control to tell the system “Hey, this is what my game is about” Other than tagging it with like…Sports, or All?

Intended_Pun · March 12, 2019, 7:51pm

The reason there is no tagging system is because nobody will actually tag their game the genre it’s supposed to be. Instead, they’ll tag it as the most (or least because there’s less competition) popular genre for more exposure.

This is why Roblox has (seemingly temporarily) removed game genres. They were being abused.

ruddev_ethan · March 12, 2019, 8:04pm

have tags be voted on by the community then, a la Steam

Intended_Pun · March 12, 2019, 8:18pm

That would be a good idea, but then you have to deal with bots. Oof

asmanwoks · March 13, 2019, 11:53pm

Yes, tagging such as what Steam uses, uses the community as the main basis to add tags or upvote said tags, I guess I should of specified that. That is how their recommended games actually pertain to the game currently in question.
As for the bot issue, well…that is just something anyone has to deal with at this point. And it is something I’m sure the team is trying to fight well (as we are in our games). This is a long-going issue that should never get in the way of innovation and improvement…
I won’t go into that side of Roblox, but it is a different and just as important issue that plagues a lot of stuff both on the Front page and elsewhere.

TheAmazeman · March 16, 2019, 9:33pm

There are a few posts about the idea behind tags being voted by the community

Shedletsky · March 19, 2019, 6:31pm

Would love to see more dynamism on the front page.

Adding more mechanisms for under-rated games to get the success they deserve makes Roblox better for both players and devs.