We’re always working to improve how users discover and engage with your experiences on Roblox.
Users don’t necessarily think in terms of “Recommended” and “Sponsored”, they are just looking for their next game to enjoy. We want to understand if a simpler home page results in them trying and enjoying new experiences, while also leading more players to games for all creators.
To validate this, we’re running an experiment where a small number of users will see Sponsored Experience ads within their Recommended for You sorts on Home. Sponsored Experience tiles will be marked clearly as “sponsored” (see below), and these users will not see a separate Sponsored Sort.
We’ll be running these tests over the coming weeks, with a small number of users. This should not meaningfully impact your ads or home stats. Any large scale or permanent changes that go beyond tests will be shared broadly through communications such as this one.
In the meantime, you can share any questions or feedback below.
Thanks!
FAQs
Is the home recommendation algorithm changing?
The rank order of experiences recommended to users continue to be personalized and based on 6 key signals of users acquired from Home recommendations. This series of tests have no impact on the way the home recommendation algorithm works
Will this have an impact on my ad delivery?
No, you will continue to be charged on a cost-per-play basis for ads, so your ad delivery should not be impacted.
as a player i hate this because ads in general are a cancer to the internet and do not deserve to continue being shoved everywhere they can, as a developer.. this is okay at best. not really something that needs to happen and unfortunately my stance as a user will never change
are we getting home ui redesign?
also, i think its an okay update to ads? honestly i’ve never cared about them, but good to know you’re aware of its current issues.
When are we getting an advanced discover page? We used to have one but has been replaced by a weird charts page. I feel a home page and a discover page should be two different pages.
Also I can never find my favorites game now on home page so….
How to find your favorite games quickly:
Click on your profile
Scroll down a little until you see you favorites
Isn’t it crazy how I can find my favorited games faster on a different page than the home page?
Homepage just turning into the Discover page now- Oh my bad. Sorry for the corperate execs who don’t understand. I meant the “Charts” Page! The one where we are supposed to discover said “Experiences” Now it’s being infiltrated into our Homepage!
If people want to search for games then they will be happy to go on a different page besides home page. You guys should stop making the home page have every purpose.
The home page is for
Connections
Your “continue last played” tab
Your favorited games tab
Make a different page for discovery please. It’s hard to use home page when it’s so messy now. From a developer and casual player standpoint.
Hmm I’m not too sure about this one, but I’m very interested in what the full scale goal is going to be. I think you guys should provide more context here, because it could backfire just as easily as it could end up being a good solution for game discovery.
Are you guys trying to make it so that once your game is sorted by the algorithm, it gets prioritized more toward that specific target demographic (aka sponsoring within the personalized recommendation)? Or is it still the same “show it to everyone” approach? If it’s the same thing, what’s stopping a few top devs or decently earning groups from collectively taking over the whole page since they’re pouring a lot of money into sponsors? And let’s say your solution is clamping the appearances or randomizing them. that would mean less traffic to the entire list of sponsored experiences, which are currently all grouped in one section.
But if the approach is to “boost” your game into the algorithm once it identifies your target demographic, that would actually be awesome to have. especially if your game is competent but just needs that extra artificial push to reach a full audience.
Overall, I don’t exactly know what the full vision is here, so I can’t really form a solid opinion on it. I just hope you guys are cooking something good.
Lets be serious on my comment on my take on this, I don’t want this. No one in the community want’s this. There is many other ways that I can suggested this being implemented:
On the Charts Page. Not our homepage. Advertisements on other games just means someone paid to forcibly have their game be placed and advertised to you. Does not fit the theme of a “Homepage”
I don’t like Games Adverts or among other things being “Recommended” on our Homepage, As the naming is defined it’s better to be resorting to our Games we Liked to play. And should be categorized accordingly:
Friends (Or “Connections” As the Corpo wants it)
Show Friends Actively Playing & Online
Friend Activity (Games)
A suggestion to addon below “Connections”
Shows a category of games your friend’s/Connection most likely are playing Together (Or through algorithmic nonsense, A recommendation you + Your own mutual would most likely enjoy together
As said in first bullet-point. This Category makes more sense as on a personal section of the homepage that is only personalized to your and mutual friends games.
Continue Catagory
Self explanatory, Nothing else needs to be said. From most recent to least recent games played.
Nothing needs to be altered! Other than making sure this category actually works correctly! (From Recently checking on Roblox the continue page is still bugged and jumbling my activity which is incorrect.)
Favorites
Self explanatory
Same system as Continue/Recently Played but based on your Recent Favorited Experiences.
What I listed, THESE should be unaltered and remain at the very top of your page. ALWAYS. No Advertisements, Nothing. Homepages should be treated as a personalized page for the User on their Activity/Discussions. Not for recommending or advertising outside experiences. Because the more and more you shove onto the homepage the more you are less inclined and put off to even try to use the Charts section at all on the Roblox pages. The main problem right now is Charting is not really… Good.. Roblox hasn’t been really improving on the Charts page which is now indirectly affecting our homepage. If this is the way to go. I don’t like it! That’s my whole spiel on it.
Not sure why people are upset about this, The entire point of Sponsoring is that it would cause games to show up in discovery sorts and when that got removed the value of sponsoring went down massively in how many players and views you could get from sponsoring your games.
Hopefully sponsored games can show up discovery sorts on the Charts page again so that the sponsoring feature is more worth putting money into.
Roblox, what are you doing? I believe this is a terrible idea, intergrading ads with a recommended section. Not to mention the the home page is already kinda bad, mixed with the terrible algorithm and search. The only way for people to get there games out their, is to pay. Witch is probably what your going for here.
The home page should be for things that are relevant to you, and I think it’s common sense why. That being said, I don’t understand why continue and favorites are no longer at the top by default? It’s feeling less like a “home” page as time goes by and these updates keep getting pushed out.
Also this. Charts should be the main area for discovery and where you go to discover new content, so I don’t understand why there are game recommendations on the home page to begin with. Not to mention 99% of the games recommended to me in the first place don’t even interest me.
It’s incredible how unusable the home page is without third-party plugins that let you block out all the filler. If I wanted to see lists of recommended games, I’d go to the god damn “charts” page. Why do I need to scroll to find the Continue and Favorites tabs. Why are they just haphazardly placed around the page now. What is the benefit of making the website actively harder to use
I think I usually see a lot less quality in random game advertisements compared to my recommended games, this is like sprinkling in random pieces of garbage into a 3-star buffet. I think it is better to have it be more organized so it is easier to tell when the sponsored games end and the recommendations begin, like having there be a chain of sponsored games at the top of the segment or something at least. I can’t speak for all players but it’s already quite overwhelming as is, having random sponsored games will make sifting through my recommended even less enticing.
I would agree with you, but also with Roblox’s new AI ads manager, it’s actually exactly that. An algorithm that shows the ad to players who are more likely to play it and enjoy it.
I think that now it’s more accurate to think of buying sponsors as an artificial home recommendation algorithm, where it shows a game to players who are more likely to enjoy it, but instead of being based on analytics, it’s based on how much you spent to advertise it.
Now I’m not entirely sure how good the ads manager can recommend games to the correct players and I highly doubt it’s as good as the normal home reccomendations since they still have to figure out who the right audience is. BUT the fact that the current cpp on ads is so much lower then it used to be shows that players are more willing to play the games which means roblox is doing something right.
If ads weren’t catered towards the right audience and they just randomly gave out ads to random players then as a player I would not like this update at all, but currently theres no major difference between games getting recommended to you by algo or by sponsors.
