What’s the point in having it then? As a player I don’t want to see the same game multiple times. If I’ve already seen it on the front page and decided not to play it, I’m not going to play it when I see it two slots down. The front page is for players to find games to play, and showing duplicate games is a direct detraction from that.
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Only reason there are so many already-popular games in this current selection is:
https://twitter.com/Roblox/status/823259199241158657
In general, I think they’ve been very good about featuring more up-and-coming games as opposed to games that are already popular. This current selection is just a special thing they’re doing for the Bloxy awards.
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They could have put these up-and-coming games at the front of the sort and put all the nominees behind. The purpose of featuring all the nominees is so that players could have one place they could see all of them. They could have done this without putting the nominees on the very front page. This is a continuous trend too. It didn’t just happen today. I haven’t been seeing many up-and-coming games on the sort since it first came out.
Also this doesn’t explain the low number of up-and-coming games on the whole sort. They could have added all the nominees to the sort without taking off any up-and-coming games.
100% agree. I think featuring games that are trending towards popular helps their discovery (because people clearly like it; it’s getting popular) rather than featuring unpopular games with a hope that people will enjoy it.
(Which is what I currently see the sort being used for)
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I don’t think that they should be using current popularity as the foremost measure determining which games end up on the sort. I think they should be active and play a lot of games and use some basic intuition about game design and what players on roblox tend towards to pick which games to feature. Of course a lot of unpopular games are hard for them to find. That’s what the recommendations category here is for IMO.
Featured rotates on a roughly-daily basis. From when I was on featured in the last set, the difference made by being in that front 8 vs being further back was often almost ~1,000 players.
I agree that this set of featured games is boringly similar to everything we see normally, but as @Cindering pointed out, they are for the Bloxy’s so it isn’t too bad.
Up and coming games should be the main type of game found on Featured, and in all honesty it usually is like that. The popular games don’t need much additional exposure and so placing them in Featured seems a bit pointless (I’m pretty sure most people don’t play these games for the first time by finding them on that sort)
Featured should be ordered such that a game that’s already somewhere on the page (e.g. in top rated or most popular) isn’t displayed in the first 8-10 spots in featured. It’s redundant.
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I don’t know of a single “great but not well known” game on Roblox
Then again it’s probably cause I just don’t know them. But usually the examples people point to aren’t all what they’re cracked up to be.
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That’s the thing about “not well known” games. You don’t know about them.
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I watched a video of a talk by the head designer of magic the gathering, where he shared the wisdom that “If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail”.
That is from the developers perspective, but from roblox’s perspective it means, that if you only have games that cater to a wide audience on the front page, you have a front page that doesnt really cater very well to anyone.
If there instead were a number of focused/niche games, every player can find something they truly love to play (and are willing to spend robux on…).
The fewer players the game tries to appeal to, the stronger that appeal is going to be (assuming equal quality). This is why it makes sense for roblox to have space for those 10% games, when the 50% games already have a home in the popular sort. More discovery, essentially. Thats where steam has been going with their platform, and Im sure they know what theyre doing.
The thing about being a dev is that it skews your perspective drastically from the average player
To you quality might be indicated by some sort of integrity in the building, the systems running the game (Like a DataStore player-matching round system), quality of GUIs and the animations on them-
But more so just stuff that seems like people put a lot of time into.
However the only thing players are concerned with is doing stuff they want to; having fun. If a free modeled piece of garbage will allow them to pretend roleplay that they have a gf and a baby, that’s what they are going to do. Sometimes they’ll simply make their own fun and skew your game to fit their needs. (exploiting glitches to become overpowered, roleplaying as specific characters, trying to take ownership of one focal point on a map)
This has already been disproven by the fact that some of those games have been up there for 2+ years. If they were really destined to fail they wouldn’t be growing every day for the last several years.
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True, I mean it would be even better to have both those widely liked games, and a good selection of games with a more focused audience. Which is obviously better than ‘only’ having the former (through redundant representation in multiple categories).
I feel the current systems with its many rigidly defined overlapping categories doenst necessarily serve the player best. IMO it would be better to have a single unified ‘smarter’ category (that take into account multiple factors) with built in randomization to support player discovery and offer exposure to the long tail of games that wouldnt reach the top places in any sort that is ‘stable’ (same games for all users at all times).
Like a single category where games are tagged with the reason theyre shown (popular, high earning, high rated, discovery… maybe filters too, all on the same page). Completely solved redundant representation problem and much more user friendly. Seems easier to tweak and improve for roblox as well.
I agree. When we talk about front page space, every repeat is an inefficiency. The goals of designing the front page should be to (a) minimize the number of repeats on the front page and (b) minimize the clickbait. It seems like Roblox went all in to accomplish (b) without caring about (a) at all when it changed up the front page.
If it were up to me to design the front page, I would have multiple rows of Popular, maybe 3, one row of Featured that meets the goals I outlined above, and one row of Recommended.
No matter what, Top Earning HAS TO GO. It’s the biggest waste of space on the front page.
The only games on Top Earning that aren’t on Popular are Assassin and Bloxburg. And Assassin is immediately behind RoCitizens atm. The most popular games are obviously going to make the most money. And why would any kids care about which games are making the most money?
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top earning’s existence as a category is simple, those are the games players are spending the most money on. roblox, being a company that enjoys earning money, is going to promote those games, so that more players continue to spend their money. what we are able to argue against this is the overall increased exposure a game gets from being in more than one spot on the front page. i don’t think a player is more likely to play a game if see more than once on the front page.
Um, no thanks. That significantly hurts my games page exposure, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I used to think similarly, but I was wrong. Top earning are the games players trust the most with their money. I wouldn’t mind if it swapped places with featured, but it’s definitely worth having on the page.
Right. The games on top earning are less likely to be scams. But how many scams are on Popular anyways?
Also that doesn’t address the fact that Top Earning is a near duplicate of Popular. Waste of space.
Temple of Memories was on the front page of the featured sort for most of December. Now it’s been on the last page for more than a month.
I have no idea how this works. Personally, I believe it should be more random to give every game on there more of a chance.
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