One question, why? Developers spend a lot of time making a good icon for their game, and now its going to be tossed aside and replaced by a random snapshot? I’m aware that developers will be able to change these to whatever they want but currently thumbnails are often used to showcase updates or gameplay, while an icon serves a completely different role.
What if you want to have a video? Being forced to push it back will just result in less players seeing it, which only makes it harder to show what the game is like. This would also be especially annoying for browser users, as the video automatically plays itself when the thumbnail switches.
And also steals that attention from others. Developers will have to work twice as hard to make an interesting thumbnail due to games taking up much more space. I also want to point out that with this increased size, the amount of games displayed on a users continue playing page will drop from six individual games, to three! That is far too small a number for anyone who plays more then two games regularly.
Wasn’t this always a feature? I can clearly remember seeing pictures of my friends appearing under games they play. What makes this any different?
What? How are we supposed to know its popular if we can’t even see how many people are playing? This change just makes it even harder to know if a game is popular, and seeing at how roblox is a multiplayer game, I would argue that seeing how many people are actually playing before joining a server is extremely important, especially with several multiplayer games requiring more then one user to play properly. It’s like if fortnite or apex decided to hide their players, so you join a server and nobody is there, you just end up leaving because it’s pointless to wait around. And lets not forget that the popular page is literally sorted by active players, which just makes this change make even less sense in the first place. I’m extremely curious who prompted this change, since this is the first online game I’ve seen that intentionally wants to hide player counts.
Have you forgetten the backlash recieved from hiding players in the last update? You should be focusing on improving features like this, not outright removing them. I can’t think of a single person that would want this. Who would even benefit from this? It’s definitely not the developers and not a single player would want this.
Does removing CCU mean changes to the algorithm or is it just hidden to the users?
P.S. to other devs: they say you can still see it when hovering over, so it shouldn’t be a big deal for us devs who want to check CCU quickly. (Perhaps a bit more annoying though)
Currently the visual journey for a player is as follows:
See a unique icon
See a unique thumbnail
Now in both of these stages they will see just one image, and won’t be able to get more context immediately until the thumbnails cycle. we should be able to set the preview thumbnail to one that ISN’T the first in the queue.
For example, Car Dealership Tycoon has a unique icon style, and a unique thumbnail style. With this system we will not be able to continue with this and our marketing strategies/aesthetic will be impossible.
Please, ensure we can SELECT what players see on the preview, and that we can show them something different immediately after they click!
Can you guys provide a mock-up of how this will look with game thumbnails? I appreciate the transparency but I cannot help but be confused, will it look like this?
For some of us it will also be a bit hard to translate the same feel 4:3 images give (that games outside of Roblox usually use) to a 16:9 image.
Use my game thumbnail for example:
How would you translate the same feel this image gives to a 16:9 image? I guess that comes down to an image design issue, but it’s still a bit odd to want to get rid of icons entirely.
I would personally suggest adding some sort of thumbnail pre-view instead, with the icon being close. Like how it works on the mobile app!
So odd they didn’t include it in the original post, thank you very much!
In my opinion I think we should still keep icons, but to each their own I suppose. We will all get used to this in the end hahahah!
I’m a fan of hiding CCUs, but the 16:9 ratio sounds like a downgrade for discoverability. Fewer games can fit on a screen at once using this, meaning fewer games can be featured at a time which brings back the problem of only top games being featured. Unless updates improving discoverability in other ways are added at the same time, it seems like a poor choice that is only being implemented because it looks a bit nicer.
I would really like to see a system where new games of high quality can sign up to be featured on release, the same way new games get featured on the steam store page. Additionally, especially now that the player base is getting older, a way to search games based on specific tags and genres would be great.
Hey, I’ve got an idea - why not keep the thumbnails square but make them larger and integrate the game’s name into the thumbnail? (overlay the name on top of the thumbnail if it doesn’t have the name on it - toggleable by developers)
First off, this is NOT a good way for extra real estate. Allowing for bigger thumbnails to take the place of icons will make the list larger. Furthermore, most players won’t want to scroll past the first few. In return burying smaller developers down the list especially on platforms with limited space as it is like Mobile.
All of this sounds good until you realize you’re just adding more and more to an already crowded area. I believe the friend thing could be cool. But Roblox is just looking past the whole concept of less is more. This will become very apparent if the feature comes out I almost guarantee it. Please stop with this sensory overload way of adding features.
To summarize my thoughts I believe this isn’t good. It gets rid of the opportunity for artists to be commissioned with more work reducing the amount they make especially seeing as icons are easier to make than thumbnails. Secondly, Developers now have to spend more on thumbnails which usually from an experienced artist are 50-75% more. Thirdly you’re just going to push developers out of view with scaling and over stimulate children and even some adults. I know I will be.
Please consider my feedback because I hate to see more and more non-broken features be revamped just to turn out worse…
Remember when we were promised genres would return. That post was over a year ago. Nothing has happened over 1 year later. Even the entry on the roadmap is on hold.
What’s going on? We deserve some transparency regarding why it’s taking so long and what’s going on behind the scenes.
