This is still something we want back/revised.
21 Likes
I support bringing back this feature.
18 Likes
Looking back on this post, there’s a couple of things I want to say, since it seems to still be relatively relevant and is still gaining likes.
This feature request is asking for the restoration of the genre sort because no prior warning was given necessarily. I ideally would like the genre sort to be restored until an appropriate solution to game searching can be found - a feature should not be removed until an alternate is found, if one is requested or needed. No reliable alternatives are available for our usage.
Yes, there is the fact that people don’t use the genre sort or misuse it to boost themselves somewhere; however that alone doesn’t mean the genre system has been entirely futile in its purpose. The front page is hardly a fine place to find suitable games to play if it’s cluttered with botted or low-effort games. The search bar has filtering on it and the results displayed are far from accurate - there’s so much you need to do to get a relevant result.
With the genre sort, this allowed developers to reach the front pages of a certain genre and get recognition without having to fight to get on either the Featured Sort or the front page of all games (which has been hogged by the same games for straight months/years now). This is also vital to the UX in terms of finding a game of a specific genre - I haven’t found a good horror game to play in a while now because they aren’t readily available for display to me and I’ve had to rely on friends, favorites and other tabs that are far too broad. Genre sort is also helpful for developers to gather information on what players like to see and play.
The genre sort undoubtedly needs work, given the games that are showing up now, that much is right. But to call it useless, I think is greatly untrue and is only based off of personal visions for what some developers do nowadays - those opinions aren’t necessarily representative of the past or every player’s preference. The reason I ask for it back is that it gives us more time to formulate ideas as to how to improve the system while not completely removing it during that time. People still use it and want to use it, evidently. No one wants a mass of games on a singular page and people want to see what they searched for, not irrelevant results.
26 Likes
There was absolutely no reason to remove it, it isn’t like the space was needed for something else. The fact is that the smarter players used it and found it useful in discovering fresh game concepts that don’t necessarily cater to a 7-12 year old demographic, therefore never having a chance of getting on the front page.
The majority of newer Roblox users now think that Roblox consists of Jailbreak, Bloxburg, MeepCity and a few others and may never ever find that special game in their favorite genre because there is no sure way to find it. Even if the developer pays boatloads of Robux to advertise their game (which is a huge expense that front page games don’t have to bear), its a spread shot that doesn’t necessarily target players that would be interested in the genre you are advertising.
26 Likes
Apologies for the necrobump, But this really is a problem. Personally the removal of genre sort cut off the constant supply of players into specific game communities, effectively drowning out roblox’s infamous quality games with…whatever is popular. In fact- the harder it is for audiences to find the game genres they are looking for, the more likely those audiences are just going to use a different platform to play those genres. it’s very much pushing down the quality games and starving those communities and cliques of new players,effectively killing their own original, dedicated community of players- who eventually turned into developers- in favor of appealing the new wave of kids taking prominence in the platform. If Roblox’s motto is “powering creativity”, shouldn’t they promote it?
19 Likes
Guess they want us to promote it with money now.
4 Likes
Totally rooting for this. Tagging systems would both improve the aged search feature as well as restore game sorting. You know what they say about killing two birds with one stone
2 Likes
I’d also like to add that I have always used this feature up till the point it was removed,
and highly favour it over weird “facebook-ish” things like ‘Because You Liked’ and ‘Popular Near You’.
My thoughts and opinions about the sorts as they are now:
- [Popular Near You]
Honestly, what the actual heck? I don’t see any purpose in a ‘Popular Near You’ sort.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the one sort people use the least. Why? Because it’s literally a collection of everything you see on the game page. Absolutely useless, and I will never use it. - [Because You Liked]
Yeah, okay. This one isn’t even useful. It’s suggesting me a list of games based on a game I liked more than a year back. It’s not relevant. I mean, most of you should recognize this game from back then.
(See IMG1 at the bottom of the post)
Don’t you just love how we have two recommendation sorts? Woo, more things to write. - [Recommended]
There’s nothing much to say about this sort.
Everything featured here is almost identical to the popular sort.
The thought behind this sort is also very similair to the featured sort, which is doing a way better job at whatever it’s supposed to do than the recommended sort.
casually noticing even more problems with the Games page as I’m writing this
- [Top Earning]
I’m running out of things to say. Most things I wanted to say about these pages, I have already said. Theres a few that just have too much in common and don’t deserve their own sort.
This one is identical to the Popular page. And honestly, I’m not even interested in what game is making the most profit, because I can already tell just by looking at the Popular sort and everything else that is thrown at me when I go to the Games page.
I’m sorry for the wall of text, but I really had to speak my mind and rant about this.
It’s honestly surprising me, and at this point really bothering me that we can’t sort by genre.
My advice?
Please rethink the entire Games page. I’m very sure we can all agree that it needs just that.
(and please get rid of the ‘Because You Liked’ and ‘Popular Near You’)
8 Likes
I don’t even really like that “Because You Liked” tab. I can’t select a game, one is randomly selected for me and I have to refresh or wait until the game I want shows up.
and i can’t reply in full because im in class and my internet is bad
2 Likes
Agreed - as a player, why would I want to know which game is earning the most money?
I think people want to play games that are fun to play - for them. That has nothing (at surface) to do with how much money the game makes, and the continuous movement of removing our ability to narrow the tons of games available to our preferences is greatly suffering to people who want to play games that aren’t necessarily the top popular sort.
There are a bunch of games of good quality that I cannot find because I don’t have the tools to find the games I like to play on the platform. 
3 Likes
I think the information team would really appreciate you going into this with full detail, seeing as this entire topic has been created almost a year ago and we still don’t have any improvement on the Games page whatsoever.
3 Likes
I intend to, I’m just in class right now and still am formulating the details. May even change the entire OP again.
2 Likes
Top Earning is not identical to the popular sort, that is a false claim. Backup claims like this with evidence. Example, one can collect data on the first 50 games on those 2 sorts, and create a percentage statistic of how many games are in both sorts.
No one is going to force you to be interested in what game is making the most, but if you delve deeper, you can see games that generally monetize better or worse than some average, and you can take-out or put in monetization tactics in your own games accordingly.
Top earning is invaluable to developers and hence, the progress of the platform, do not advocate that this sort does not deserve to be there without first understanding the ramifications.
4 Likes
I agree with everything you’ve said.
Although, I still can’t help but notice that this sort is similair, if not identical to Popular.
Sure, the games in top earning will be displayed in a different order, but in the end,
all we want to do is choose a game to play. And that does prove to be quite difficult when there’s multiple sorts that exist out of mostly the same games.
3 Likes
I recently saw a thread as I searched “top earning purpose” advocating for top earning and featured to switch places.
I am going to assume that top earning is second because it is a safe bet on Roblox’s end. However, for developers not in top earning, that sucks, yes. The entire distribution of games on Roblox is incredibly exponential. I only know this because top earning is a sort based on past week earnings and I can calculate it using my dev stats.
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/having-an-actual-game-studio-company-on-roblox/179062/12?u=theamazeman
There needs to be dialog between how much we argue for the hierarchy (because we know it works best for earnings since it is a free market) and for the little games (because we know it works best for hope, dreams, promise, potential)
3 Likes
Sorry for necroposting.
But restoring game genre is really important for small developers. It’s ok all children play Jailbreak, but some players want to play another genre, and cannot find at all.
The lack of game genre is a real push for developers to leave roblox and develop by their own, so lowering the overall game quality level …
5 Likes
Still don’t know why they haven’t brought it back. I have hardly played any roblox games since it wasn’t removed since all I can find are the boring games on the front page.
8 Likes
It’s time we solve this issue, once and for all.
One of the biggest controversies I have with my dev friends is whether or not genre filtering should no longer be deprecated. In the past, it was removed primarily because of the “low usage,” but also to avoid Robux scammers (as rumored by the community). However, genere filtering would be an amazing way for any developer (new or old) to get their game discovered.
Horror games, for example, have the hardest time getting discovered, due to the young audience of the front page. In turn, older audiences will try to sort for the horror and shooter games, helping raise older-player count.
With the re-addition of genre filtering, new developers with games that utilize features in a creative way can finally get discovered. In a post by @wravager, he argues that genre filtering is the only way to find games with players <1000 online. (https://devforum.roblox.com/t/genre-is-no-longer-on-games-page/58316/4?u=igottic)
In that same post, @RBX_Lua quotes:
I would also advocate for keeping the game genres. The front page of Roblox can be quite… generic… and some people have different tastes that can be more easily identified and satisfied using genres. I remember when I joined Roblox- none of the front page games interested me, but upon exploring the various genres I understood how truly diverse Roblox’s games were. I literally joined because of the variety that was presented with the genres.
(https://devforum.roblox.com/t/genre-is-no-longer-on-games-page/58316/8?u=igottic)
If the genre button can be seen and available for players to use, then both Roblox Staff and Game Developers will win with player count and increased revenue.
Some solutions to problems with genre filtering
- The scammer abuse problem: Scammers abuse young children not being mature enough to tell the difference between a scam and a real offer. A solution could be to make genre filtering to older ages only, due to the more mature and intelligent understandings of scams and spams.
- Some popular games losing players: If the solution above is executed, this wouldn’t be a problem. Popular games are played mostly by the younger audience, so genre filtering only helps older players.
I collected a few quotes from both this post and another. These stand out and accurately represent the developer's views on this.
From @colbert2677:
User-defined genre sorts for the games page - #25 by colbert2677
This feature request is asking for the restoration of the genre sort because no prior warning was given necessarily. I ideally would like the genre sort to be restored until an appropriate solution to game searching can be found - a feature should not be removed until an alternate is found, if one is requested or needed. No reliable alternatives are available for our usage.
Yes, there is the fact that people don’t use the genre sort or misuse it to boost themselves somewhere; however that alone doesn’t mean the genre system has been entirely futile in its purpose. The front page is hardly a fine place to find suitable games to play if it’s cluttered with botted or low-effort games. The search bar has filtering on it and the results displayed are far from accurate - there’s so much you need to do to get a relevant result.
With the genre sort, this allowed developers to reach the front pages of a certain genre and get recognition without having to fight to get on either the Featured Sort or the front page of all games (which has been hogged by the same games for straight months/years now). This is also vital to the UX in terms of finding a game of a specific genre - I haven’t found a good horror game to play in a while now because they aren’t readily available for display to me and I’ve had to rely on friends, favorites and other tabs that are far too broad. Genre sort is also helpful for developers to gather information on what players like to see and play.
The genre sort undoubtedly needs work, given the games that are showing up now, that much is right. But to call it useless, I think is greatly untrue and is only based off of personal visions for what some developers do nowadays - those opinions aren’t necessarily representative of the past or every player’s preference. The reason I ask for it back is that it gives us more time to formulate ideas as to how to improve the system while not completely removing it during that time. People still use it and want to use it, evidently. No one wants a mass of games on a singular page and people want to see what they searched for, not irrelevant results.
From @aaaaaaaaaaaaalice
User-defined genre sorts for the games page - #28 by a_lyve
Apologies for the necrobump, But this really is a problem. Personally the removal of genre sort cut off the constant supply of players into specific game communities, effectively drowning out roblox’s infamous quality games with…whatever is popular. In fact- the harder it is for audiences to find the game genres they are looking for, the more likely those audiences are just going to use a different platform to play those genres. it’s very much pushing down the quality games and starving those communities and cliques of new players,effectively killing their own original, dedicated community of players- who eventually turned into developers- in favor of appealing the new wave of kids taking prominence in the platform. If Roblox’s motto is “powering creativity”, shouldn’t they promote it?
From @wravager
User-defined genre sorts for the games page - #40 by wravager
Still don’t know why they haven’t brought it back. I have hardly played any roblox games since it wasn’t removed since all I can find are the boring games on the front page.
From @Jiskpirate
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/genre-is-no-longer-on-games-page/58316/26?u=igottic
I hope this is still an issue? I used the Naval genre a lot just like medieval. If you type in ‘castle’ you get games from 2008 or clickbait, not the beautiful showcases which are so hard to find now. The stupidest decision Roblox has ever made.
I could spend all day grabbing quotes. Developers and players alike despise the removal of this feature.
Quote credit links + a petition I found, further showing the importance of the request
11 Likes
Thanks for using a quote of mine. I still stand by what I’ve said. This is an issue that we have to address. The game-page is filled with clickbait games, not allowing new games to flourish. To discover games one types in a keyword, but it does not show anything at all that’s worth visiting, because the search-engine only works on relevance. E.g. beautiful showcases, transport or naval games are lost because there isn’t an active enough playerbase because of the genre or type of game. I myself am making a game set in the Netherlands during the 50s where one can drive locomotives and trains throughout a Dutch inspired map. The game is based on history, yet I know now that it might only have an active player-base of 50 people. Or say one starts playing a game that needs 4 people to commence. No one will be able to find that game on the game-page because it only shows games that are popular. All this can be improved if the genres are brought back to Roblox. It must, so smaller developers can give their game a chance, while players can seek a game that fits best to their interests.
I remember very fondly playing a wild west game almost daily, with people coming to role-play as gunslingers, cowboys, bartenders and sherrifs. It had an active playerbase of around 20 to 30 people. That was only sustainable thanks to the genres, because those people found their way back every time, with new people coming, all because they like the western genre.
9 Likes
I really want this back in the form of tags. I’d love to be able to have more specific “genres” that could span across multiple games, and tags are the perfect way to achieve that. Ideally, we’d be able to make new tags and use old ones other people have made.
I would personally use that for game discovery if it were a thing
11 Likes