Upcoming Changes To The Game Sorts & Submit New Sort Ideas!

Something with most followed shouldn’t be bad. I think following games is more than liking games because it means you want to get notified about it.

1 Like

A relief! :smile: Thank you for the transparency and we all appreciate steps to healthy change. This is good and here is my input.

Search Genre Specific Games Feature
My near-exasperated request is to add a much-needed game genre filter when searching for games, being able to search specifically genre related games as an option I believe would be insanely helpful for everyone and professional for Roblox.

For example;

Genres

  • Roleplaying
  • First Person Shooter
  • Survival
  • Racing
  • Parkour
  • Medieval / Fantasy

And many more genres.

I understand that many developers may be drawn to check their games as each box despite not being related to the genre, I’m not entirely sure how to proactively prevent this without being suppressive such as limiting how many boxes you can check on your game. Input on this drawback would be appreciated!

Regardless of drawbacks, this is an incredibly potent feature, so much so that almost every game hosting site has it- or at least so I have seen, all except Roblox :confused: unless I’m simply unaware that it does in which case maybe it ought to be more obvious?

Missing Or Hard To See Search Filters
It’s possible that I am simply ignorant as to what happened to the game search filter but I can no longer search through filters such as;

  • My Recent
  • My Favorites (can be found, but they’re on the profile very far down and I had to do a lot of inconvenient searching to find them)

I found “My Recent” filter really important and convenient, with my last couple dozen games kept on a list in the event I forgot to favorite those games and/or forgot the names of them.

I also hope Roblox plans on elaborating on the “Because You Liked -insert game here-” maybe allowing an ability to refresh it or determine what game it suggests other relevant games to. :thinking:

I digress, that is my input for now though I will definitely answer any questions and will likely elaborate or add on the subject in the future.

4 Likes

I have a few suggestions in mind, bringing back the genre thing of course and maybe an improved search bar for the game sort? The current search bar for games on top uses a noticeable algorithm where its easily exploitable. All you would have to do to get near the top on the sort with the search bar is spamming the same exact name on the title. Although it would be hard to change the algorithm, I feel like it would be harder for players to exploit people from purchasing fake game passes to playing broken games that could change the player’s experience and how they think of roblox.

1 Like

@Nightgaladeld

  • Discover New Games
  • New Game Developers
  • Indie Games
  • Undiscovered Games

The above are category names that attempt to target games by small developers/studios. (EDIT1: I’m not suggesting to add all of them; I’m giving multiple ideas for the same category.) Suggested criteria might be games that meet the following:

  • Have fewer than 500K total visits, fewer than 1000 visits per day, or something along those lines
  • Haven’t been advertised with hundreds of thousands of Robux
  • Updated within the last 3 months (to avoid stale content)
    EDIT2: Adding two items to criteria
  • At least 50 or 60 percent rating
  • Perhaps the only criteria instead of the above can be: The game was not listed in this category before

When I started developing my game, the thought of getting it featured was a big motivator. Now, after months of work, I feel like I can only depend on advertising. Still thankful for the Roblox platform with its low barrier to entry, but hoping additional support will be given to small developers.

Other feedback:

“Because You Liked …” is a good idea, but it lists games that are nothing like the game. How is this list generated? For example, because I liked Welcome to Bloxburg, it shows The Floor is Lava, Hole in the Wall, Speed Run 4 Classic, etc. I don’t see the relationship, which makes this potentially useful category worthless. Also, why does it always seem to show Welcome to Bloxburg and not other games that I liked.

As others have mentioned, I don’t see the point of categories like the new Featured (now too similar to Popular), Rthro, or Popular Near You (games aren’t region specific). Genre and tags would be more helpful.

@superhudhayfa
If you learn fundamental programming skills, including data structures and algorithms, then you may be able to get a software development job in any field–not just game development. The job market isn’t always stable, so having alternatives is always good.

3 Likes

This seems like a great idea! However, I do hope the popular section will still be on. Also, just because you are shoving games in players faces doesn’t they will necessarily play them.:smile:

Bring back genre sorts!

I’ve missed them so much since they were disabled, especially when finding sport games. Here are some genre ideas:

  • first person shooter
  • third person shooter
  • fantasy
  • roleplay
  • sport
  • fashion
  • building
  • horror
  • 2D
  • obby
  • tycoon
  • minigame
    etc. etc.

It is beneficial to both the player and developer. Players can more easily find games they are interested in, and developers can have their game reach more directed audiences.

3 Likes

Goals That Are Difficult To Automate
Of the goals that Roblox is trying to achieve, some have proven very difficult to automate:

  • Enable players to discover new games.
  • Allow new developers to gain exposure to winder audiences.

Historically, this is a tough problem to solve with algorithms. What code is smart enough to pick out the best new games from the ever-growing list of thousands of games?

Learn From The Industry
Fortunately, this same problem is common and has been already addressed in the games industry. To find your solution, just look at what the other major companies have done: Steam, Google Play, App Store, Epic Game Store, and others.

All of these of course have paid placement in which the developers pay to get their games shown on the front page. Let’s omit that since not all Roblox developers have the money required to grow a game via paid placement or advertising.

So looking at how other companies do it, the most common solutions involve:

  • Featured games (human curated)
  • Recommended games (human curated and/or automated)
  • User reviews (human written reviews)
  • User curators (human curated)
  • Tags
  • Genres

It is pretty apparent that the industry relies heavily on human interaction to allow the best games to get noticed, and have a fair chance of success.

Maybe You Already Have The Best Solution
Maybe the featured sort program you had in place was already the best solution. Developers submitted their games to you, and your curators decided which games were the best to feature. The system worked well. Developers who made a good new game were able to get that new game featured on the home page.

Why The Change?
Why is it that you want to abandon your curated featured sort method, which has been well received by the developers, and which works well. You have not shared your reasoning with the community.

Recommendations

  • Take the best of what other companies have done to solve this problem and implement it in Roblox.
  • Do not abandon human curation which is an important factor in the industry. Instead embrace human curation as the rest of the industry already has.
  • Keep and improve your current curated featured sort, which was on the right track and working well.
7 Likes

I see a lot of people that want genres to come back, but in my opinion, if Roblox adds back the genre sort they should make a new genre system too. Maybe some games don’t fall in any category with the current genres available, or some games fall under 2 or more genres.
Bringing back the genre sort is cool and all but it would be next to worthless if it remains in the current state since most games will have “All genres” selected like they do at the moment.

4 Likes

Indeed, I spend months on a game and end up not even reaching an audience sometimes.

5 Likes

I would like to see a hot games section, for games that are newly popular, would definitely need a filter to stop spam games from getting on there though. The recommendations obviously need a huge revamp, and that section when fixed should be put on the top of the games page.

1 Like

Are the new sorts
“Players Love”, “Most Engaging”, “Roleplay”, “Adventure”, “Fighting”, “Obby”, “Tycoon”, “Simulator”, “Up and Coming”
stagnant or are they going to be like the new “Featured” sort where they are updated weekly? And were/are they hand-picked or by algorithm?

1 Like

The new sorts are algorithmic, and updated daily.

3 Likes

That is awesome, so glad they are algorithmic and update frequently
Definitely hits most of these on the head, great job!

  • A section where you can view games that are searched and clicked “Play” the most
  • A section where you can only view “Sponsored Games” (because when you run out of games to play and you’re bored)
3 Likes

These are some awesome changes, and some sorts I could get behind. I just would like to know how the algorithms work. It all just feels really random right now.

Roblox will definitely still be around in 5 years. Roblox has already outlived most big video games, it’s older than all the other popular ones today, and the fact that it’s a platform means that if one genre dies, something will replace it.

3 Likes

The popular sort is what killed the games page. It keeps the oldest and most popular games and gets them more and more popular, never showing new and/or original games.

2 Likes

I’m not in favor of genres coming back unless there is a tag system like previously mentioned, which could allow for multiple and more descriptive categorizations. Or else the same problems will occur with the previous genre categories. The biggest problem being that the standard set of genres you could pick out of in order to define your game was too little and allowed for poor categorization by players.

It is clear that this feature is highly wanted. By no means should the genre list be limited by a select few amount of categories.

11 Likes

Personally, I agree with your opinion however almost 90% of developers on new/upcoming games hardly even put a genre for the game’s title at all. Even with me, I just choose “All” as the genre because it allows my game to be categorized with each genre, however if a game was under a specific genre it would be easier to find if you individually searched for that genre. If the genres sort comes back I don’t think many developers will switch to a specific genre due to most thinking that it will only target a specific audience, giving their game less players.

Most players don’t even bother to look at genres, or search for them. A hefty amount of so called “genre-specific games” barely even include any aspect of that genre in it at all. An example would be a space-fighter game categorized as RPG. Overall, this whole “bring back genre searching” idea is a complete waste of effort, considering most games don’t even have a specific genre.

A tag system would work in place of this, however it would need to have limits. If you put “#wildwest” and “futuristic” for the same game then that’s going to be confusing for many players. A lot of creators would just put every genre category as a tag to get players from every genre, in my personal opinion. A game should only have around 2-3 tags, if any.

Following the prompt giving on this post, adding additional sort categorys would not do much good. The only sorts I scroll through are the featured and popular sections, as these are the only ones useful to me. “Top Rated” is how many players like a game, and “Recommended” is just a weird mix of games that the system put together that I’ve already played before.

1 Like

You just gave me an idea. Perhaps a solution to possible tag abuse would be a chain or nesting-type system, where you might end up with, for example:
A sci-fi shooter game, like Hex: #Sci-Fi > #Military > #SpaceShooter, along with other, general tags like #TeamGame, and #FPS.
Or, for a showcase: #Casual > #Nature > #Showcase.
Fresh idea, and it likely has some problems, but I just thought I’d throw it out there.

1 Like