I’ve been under the impression for ages that traditional banner advertisements are a useless, antiquated feature that’s effectively already been replaced by sponsors, but now there’s basically no way to promote your game through Roblox, and promoting it through social media is only an option if you already have an enormous audience.
Even before this update, I’ve been starting to doubt the value of sponsors. It was at the point where 1 Robux spent didn’t even translate to 1 click, much less 1 play, much less 1 Robux earned back through sales. I didn’t think it could get any worse, but I was wrong.
Investing Robux into sponsors felt risky before, but now it feels like I’m lighting real money on fire. I’m a large enough developer that I DevEx every now and then, but not large enough that it’s guaranteed that I will cash out every month. I need to be confident that there’s going to be some return on my investment when I spend thousands of Robux promoting my game, because failing to earn back what I spend on sponsors pushes back the date that I’ll be able to cash out.
Discoverability on Roblox has already been a serious problem in other areas for years now: it’s basically impossible to search for a group, it’s basically impossible to find shirts and pants on the catalog, sorting library results by anything other than “relevance” leads to completely irrelevant search results, etc. All of these problems have been neglected for years, and it would be devastating if this gets added to the list of discoverability issues that Roblox seems to have no intention of addressing. The last thing we need is to have one of the only features that developers and players could use to find new content be completely worthless.
I really hope this gets the attention of the Roblox staff at some point, preferably as soon as possible so we can get back to promoting our games.
A combination of sponsorships and ads appeared to work very well for us. For our recent sponsorships, our CPC/CPP was around ~1-1.5 robux, which is acceptable when paired with ads for me.
I recently sponsored a game with around 10k and got like .2 CTR. I was confused, since back when I did it before I got much more. Thanks for telling me that it doesn’t show up as much anymore.
Over 2 million impressions on a 5 day sponsor and less than 10,000 clicks. This is horrific compared to the CTR for past sponsorships I’ve run before these changes.
For real though, it’s been nearly a month, this is outrageous. I get that internally it might take some time to address these problems but at least be transparent about what’s going on. Overall this is kind of a shitty update that seemed to be done without consideration for the large majority of developers. Please, either revert the update or add sponsors back to the other sorts keeping the other changes.
At this point, I don’t know what I should do! I want to release a game but I don’t know if I should use ads! My question is are Roblox Staff trying to fix this?
I got extremely lucky with my game release and somehow Flamingo found it and made a video on it…
I guess this is the best alternative to sponsoring right now.
I do hope this changes in some way cause this is ridiculous… Just released my new game and wanted to test sponsoring ads to help gain players. All I got was 0-6 players for the last few days with almost 2 million impressions
I’ll post some of my stats here, while I posted earlier in this thread that there is an idea out there that Roblox can add an entire page for game advertising, that is not reality. You got to make it through this time somehow. You got to experiment and learn who your audience is and play to that strength. I know most of my game’s revenue comes from PC users, so I don’t bother advertising for any other platform at the moment. That right there keeps my impressions locked in to only PC. Next, I think young boys want to see a ton of action, and the data so far proves this. Is that to say my game is male only? Of course not. In advertising you want to stretch your buck as economically efficient as possible. I would not advise advertising a sponsored game for every single possible demographic you can advertise for all at once. Get some valuable data from different trial runs and stick to the best.
This sounds like the right choice than select every box and see what happens, cause I’m so use to it showing for everyone but now we have options to not do that. Going to test this out to see what the right audience would play my game.
Yeah, the inconsistency seems like a total oversight error.
The current sponsored ads and how they work:
Most Engaging (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Recommended for You (limited sort, different games for everyone) No sponsored ads
Up and Coming (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Popular (liquid sort, age filtering displays games semi differently, meritocracy) Sponsored ads
Top Rated (limited sort, one size fits all) *One of the largest gamepage blunders of 2020 that Roblox has not fixed top rated since the summer. Sponsored ads
Play Together (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Learn and Explore (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Featured (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Popular Among Premium (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Rthro (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Top Earning (liquid sort, meritocracy) Sponsored ads
Players Love (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Roleplay (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Adventure (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Fighting (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Obby (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Tycoon (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Simulator (limited sort, one size fits all) No sponsored ads
Popular World Wide (liquid sort, meritocracy) Sponsored ads
Sponsored ads show up on 4/19 game sorts
After checking this out, this is absolutely abysmal that it has gotten this bad.
Not only are most game sorts limited, and one size fits all, but they also bar out new games being sponsored by not allowing sponsored ads to show up.
Demand overflow, when too many users use an advertising method, its limited to how many users can see it.
Too many people use sponsored ads, so the amount of ad space is decreasing.
Can we please knock it off with the lame conspiracy theories about company politics. One of Roblox’s core drivers is respecting the community.
If you don’t have additional use cases or issues to report related to this topic – don’t post. I’m sure they’re tracking the feedback on this topic and will respond when they can. (it’s only a month old)
Luckily, my most recent game somehow got on a lot of players’ recommended sort and I am doing fairly well. However, that’s not guaranteed for my next games and I have no idea how I will get my game out there for touch devices if sponsors are this bad.
Do note that I am still a fairly small developer so I can’t always afford to have a huge budget allocated to advertisements. I hope this is fixed soon
There really need to be a fix, reversion of the system or at least an official announcement about this. One of my games is completely reliant on sponsors, and earned a solid profit after sponsoring a small amount every day, but since I no longer am able to do that it has simply died. Advertising is not longer really any beneficial either, as most people as far as I know are now using it instead of sponsors. That does not leave me with a whole lot of other options to get an influx of players. The fact that systems that I rely on to earn a living suddenly can plummet like this and not get fixed in over a month really scares me. At the current moment, I don’t even know if this is intentional or not (the games only appearing in select categories, not the Untitled Game bug).
