It appears that I’m in the AB test group for the feature of a new games page. This new games page seems to ultimately hinder game discovery more than anything. Not only does it no longer show sponsors when someone first looks at the page. (Which was literally a huge problem a bit of go where sponsors would literally scam the playerbase)
Now instead of a nice 35+ games instantly viewable, you’re limited to 15 games. Game discovery was already very difficult on Roblox, but this is just taking it to the next level of difficulty.
I personally don’t like the obnoxious approach of the cover photos being shown, since it’s relatively pointless and removes real estate for more games being shown.
The current public games page is still a downgrade from the 2011 page - where the sorts were tabs.
There actually might be valid reasons behind them wanting to test this layout. One thing I can think of, less games may make it less overwhelming to navigate through (but the inclusion of the thumbnails may make it overwhelming too).
Anyways, I kind of like this layout since I can only show so much from my icon, but think it can still go either way in terms of which performs better, hence the AB test.
I now see 4 games instead of 20 in exactly the same screen space.
(2 sorts with 10 games each versus 1 sort with four games.)
Roblox just pushed out an update for some users- which really hurts in two ways:
Game discoverability as a developer. What used to be about ten games in a sort has been whittled down to four- and subsequent sorts below suffer the same issue, but worse. Players must scroll/click more to find the same amount of games- both within a sort and throughout the games page overall- reducing game discoverability.
Game discoverability as a player and UX. For the same reasons listed above, I now have to spend more times looking for the same amount of games- I see less games with every scroll/click. Even in “Recommended For You,” which changes over time more than any other sort, I see a smaller assortment of games. This is a bad user experience.
This new games page, while looking pretty, hurts developers and players for game discoverability and UX. Rather than showing many games, this new page shows few games, making sorts larger and more chunkier.
I actually like the new games page better than the old one. There were way too many game icons on one screen before in my opinion. Although, I do think that the games should be a bit smaller, maybe 5 or 6 in one row instead of 4.
But since a lot of people prefer the old games page, they should add a button in the top-right corner that lets you switch between the new and old layout.
Another good thing about this update is that you don’t have to put update information in the title anymore. A lot of times the game name gets cut off because of update info before it in the title, so you have to click on the game to see what its called. Now, you can just put it in the first picture and won’t have to change the game name.
Design-wise the new one is far better, however, Roblox will still need to address the many drawbacks such as no sponsored games and the VERY limited number of games shown to the large size of each of them. They could easily get away with sizing them down to fit 7 per row which would be a large improvement.
I made a similar post to this a few days ago showing a design of the game’s page I made just for fun, and it was taken down today as it was too similar to this post? I was told to just leave a like on this one, but I’ll just post the concepts that I made for a game’s page design that utilizes these new thumbnails here.
Essentially these are more compact, vertically speaking, and also still has the legacy designs.
