User-defined genre sorts for the games page

[Cindy_Lennox]

Currently, the game discovery aspect on the site isn’t holding up well. Each tab such as “Popular”, “Popular Worldwide” and “Rthro” do not help players actually discover new games. Instead, they mostly consists of the same exact ones.
Let me show what I mean:

Only famous games like “Bloxburg”, “Royal High” and others are pasted in almost every tab. Even the tabs themselves sometimes do not make sense, “Popular” and “Popular worldwide” do not contradict each other and can easily belong in one group.
There are many times where I myself find it difficult to even search a game that is enjoyable. Many old users do not wake up and decide to play whats on the front page, some people feel like playing horror, action, RPG or roleplay on some days.
This is not only about the players, but the developers. Many developers had their game popular because of genre filtering, and it isn’t easy to have your game be put on the front page as well.

[ZeezyRed (UnwaveringResolve)]

Exactly! It’s impossible to find new games, and more so near impossible for new games to rise up and get leverage other than through advertisements. Even being able to just search by category would be a great change, for example Rolimon’s has their own game catalog that does this and it works great for finding new content to check out.

Re-adding this feature or something like it would help everyone, players finding new games and devs having another way to get exposure to the right playerbase faster.

[tyridge77]

Bumping this thread because I think this was one of the worst decisions roblox could have ever made.

It’s extremely saddening to me that roblox removed genres. I always have a desire to go scrolling through the depths of the games page for cool hidden gems(did so tonight), but without a genre sort, it’s all just cluttered and I can never find anything I’m looking for.

It’s a slap in the face to developers, it’s a slap in the face to people who have been here and supported roblox since its origins, it’s a slap in the face to players and compromises the idea behind this platform.

Roblox is all about playing together with your friends. Removing genres makes this much harder to do this and many memorable and potentially life changing experiences, and potential friendships, are being lost

When you’re hanging out with your best friend and you’re wanting to play a game together, you usually have a genre in mind. But nope, roblox for some reason thinks kids care about completely irrelevant sorts to them? Little Jimmy is going to hop on with his brother and say, “Wow these games are on top engaging! Jee willy I can’t wait to play!”? I don’t think so.

This gets a bit opinionative but I think most of the sorts are useless for players.

• “Recommended for you” is cool but genres would help me find what I’m looking for more than any algorithm can
• “Players love+popular” is cool but what if I don’t care about what other people love - most people on roblox love house building games does that mean it’s relevant to me at every given moment? no.

People looking for something specific are expected to scroll through pages of completely irrelevant material generated by some irrelevant algorithm, just to find what they’re looking for

Don’t get me wrong, the sorts there now are very useful for developers to see what kind of games are working out and what not. And I’m not suggesting they remove any of these because they still are valuable. But nothing replaces a genre sort and it seems almost disrespectful that this has gone on so long, as if roblox thinks these sorts serve as a valid substitute. They don’t

Removing the ability to search genres harms the platform in multiple ways:

• Directly makes it harder for friends to find new games that they want to play together

• Makes game discovery way harder for new and upcoming developers, in many cases I’m sure this completely demotivates them. How are people supposed to find their game naturally if they don’t get lucky enough to have an influencer, and no one knows where to find it?

• Over saturates the games page with a lot of the same type of content. The popular games should be on the front of the games page. Of course. But without the ability to specifically search for the content you’re looking for, it doesn’t really inspire people to go and do just that. Many will just see the same kind of games, get lost and bored scrolling through things completely unrelated to what they want, and they’ll give up.

There are so many potential experiences being lost because of this. This isn’t blind nostalgia speaking, every gaming platform out there - like steam - has genres. For good reason. Friends like to play together and they usually like to play the same kind of games!

Roblox is supposed to be a lot more than just a game engine, or an app store, or a game itself.

Roblox’s vision is to bring people together through play.

They want any kid or adult to come together and find a game on roblox to play together and have a blast. Just like that. Hardly any downloading, easy access, games in the hands of millions worldwide for anyone to enjoy.

An absolutely brilliant concept. But how can they sit on this and ignore this very serious issue for so long when it directly compromises that vision? People can’t be brought together if they can’t even find what games they want to play.

For a platform all about powering imagination, they’re really not setting a good example here.

[cloakedyoshi]

I couldn’t agree more. I make mainly adventure and obby games, and they’ll never appear in the games page sort for them. Why? The current automatic system is abused.

That’s fine if some games won’t show there, but there should be a way to easily search by genre.

I seriously think that genres should be restored and enhanced (new categories, tags, etc) in a way similar to Steam.

[loueque (paperbagger)]

Why hasn’t this been considered re-added to the platform? There are thousands and thousands of great and awesome games on the platform that use the Genre feature that is currently up and there is no way they can get some concurrent players and a fanbase.

A lot of users usually go for the games that are listed on the Games page or what their friends are playing, if they play more unique and fun games on the platform. I found it easy to navigate through the Genre sort in 2014 as a user and a ton of users did back then.

Consider adding this back, would help out users looking for a specific genre and for developers’ games to get some concurrent players instead of putting it out and letting it die out.

[CJ_Oyer]

Bumping again as I feel after 3 years we still haven’t gotten a satisfactory replacement for the original genre system. We have improved leaps and bounds in game discoverability, but when we lost the genre system we lost what little we had in the area of preference filtering.

I know Roblox has put in a ton of work improving searching and algorithms to find the right game for a player, but it will never be enough. So long as I can see a sports-car on the way home and want to try out more racing games, or watch a movie set in a zombie apoc making me want to try some zombie games, you can’t predict my behavior. You can’t anticipate every aspect of my life and how it may effect my taste in games. Current sorting seems to operate on the idea it can.

The current categories appeal to the broadest, most generic player. Recommended for you is nice, but my preferences are much more defined than what it offers. I want to have a hand in the sorting. I know for a fact I don’t want to play any simulators, tycoons, or anime fighting games - let me remove those from my list with a filter. If I could filter out ones I’ve played already that’d be nice, since I likely already have an opinion of those and don’t need to see them again. Say I want a game I can play with my family cross platform, it’d be nice if I could check which platforms to include and which don’t matter. Want VR to ever take off on Roblox? Give us a VR compatible filter. No matter how sophisticated the algorithm gets it won’t know what I want in that exact moment.

I went down this list of recommended game platforms and checked every platform. 6 out of the 7 listed allowed you to filter game results down to what you actually wanted.

There’s no shame in it. Google, one of the most powerful searching discoverability engines on the planet, recognizes the need for filtering - especially google images. Spotify allows for filtering, Youtube does, etc. The question is - why doesn’t Roblox?

Please add filtering, returning genres would be a nice start, but I think we can do so much more with the concept.

[sanjay2003 (Sanjay)]

I think that as a platform that hosts games it doesn’t have a way to search by genre is incredibly flawed. The entire point of a genre or a collection of genres is to organize games based on what theme it follows. If you put everything in cluttered sort (how it is now), you make the end user experience frustrating and a select few games are the ones shown the most which makes the playing field completely unfair.

This is what the game’s page looks as of now.

Out of the entire sort, this is basically what each do.

• Most Engaging is meh.

• Recommended for You is basically a sort of literal game ads. I don’t play Roblox games and somehow I am recommended genres that I’ve never had an interest in. Kinda sus.

• Up and Coming; I have no idea what defines an up & coming game. I thought traditionally this would be a game that has shown a steady increase of players or engagement when the games on here have maintained the same relative numbers. I’m not sure how that can be a distinction from another game in the same “level” and not shown in this sort.

• Popular; I always thought that popular meant a sort in linear fashion with the highest player count and the lowest player count in sequential order from greatest to least. Seems to be all over the place. If for some reason this measured engagement hours instead of player count, wouldn’t the Most Engaging sort be redundant? I really want to know what is actually being measured here.
  

  

• Top Rated; Also a bit misleading. Top rated gives me the impression that percentage of likes to dislikes would be ordered in a sequence but, the percents seems to be random. It could be due to the total number of players who actually voted but, wouldn’t that make the voting unfair since the weight per vote would be greater or lower solely based on the total sum of votes casted prior?
  

  

• Free VIP Servers; I’m also guessing that this is random which is practically free advertisement or is paid advertisement. Wouldn’t know since it’s not explained.
  

  

• Learn & Explore is cool I guess. I’m not sure where the learning comes from and the entire point of Roblox is to be powered by play so wouldn’t every category technically be “exploration” ? I’d like to point out that (no hate on any of these game; respected in their own right) most of the games on the actual sort have nothing to do with learning which is a bit misleading when the word “Learn” is the first one in the sort.
  

  

The rest of the sorts are basically psuedo-genres. Somehow “simulator” is treated as a genre. I would’ve much rather preferred an actual genre system akin to almost every other platform out there instead of no genre system and sorts that are basically forced. Seen as the games page is the first games-based page a new player looks at, the sorts look very disorganized, forced and confusing.

Don’t get me wrong. The genre sort was completely broken. However, it would’ve been more respectable if you fixed or implemented it to actual viable standards. I can’t think of another platform that doesn’t have the concept of genres nor a sort for them. If this was justification to be “unique”, it was plain dumb. Instead of attacking genres as a whole, the search on the games page should’ve been tweaked to yield actual results that are accurate and not searches that barely follow what is actually being search. For almost a decade, we have never had an accurate search. At the very least, break down each sort on a page and explain what each mean. Even as a veteran user here, it seems incredibly bloated & I barely know the metrics behind each sort. And as a developer, it makes it hard to find ways to market your game when your research is basically a cluttered mess.

If I were a player and I wanted to search for a genre that I really like and it’ll make me happy, I’ll become incredibly frustrated because instead of doing the easy and normal notion of a few buttons, I would literally have to search it manually across thousands of games. After about two or three, I’ve given up and now, you’ve lost me as a returning user simply because what should’ve been easy to find has now become cumbersome, frustrating and increasingly painful.

To this day, I don’t understand who in their right mind (not to be hostile; lack of words to say otherwise) would think that removing genres from a platform that publishes games was a great idea. Anyways, this is my two-cents on this. I like the feature request.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

UPDATE

Hello folks! I finally have a good reason to add a post here and make more noise. It’s been a while since I offered any words on my own feature request. I am still passionate about the restoration of genre sorts or a better user-driven setting to allow games more discoverability as has been suggested throughout the thread in forms like tags.

I’m posting to notify anyone tracking this thread as well as new viewers that I have made significant enough changes that warrant getting pointed out. The changes are intended to reflect how a feature request may/should be written today in the sense of focusing on the developer problem rather than my exact proposal. My perspective’s been subject to a lot of change as I think about genres and go over everyone’s experiences, complaints and contributions throughout this thread (thank you!).

Make no mistake, I am still relatively upset that we weren’t polled or asked before the move was made but we’re beyond the point where restoration of genres is an option given how much sorts have changed so it’s better to focus on future prospects. This is why I’ve changed the wording as best I can to sound like a real feature request and to be more neutral in my tone.

That being said, since this request is old it’s good to bring it back up sometimes so product is aware this is something a lot of people want (back). I don’t doubt Roblox has it ticketed somewhere for later while they have larger priorities but I still want to continue pushing for this change whenever I can.

The original content of the thread at the time of writing as well as the title are archived in a dropdown at the bottom of the feature request.

Thanks for reading my update and I hope you can continue supporting the push for better game discoverability! Feel free to leave more helpful comments about how genres would improve your experience developing on Roblox.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

This feature request will soon be coming up on its fifth year (in October 2022) and I’ve not been able to garner even a little bit of staff acknowledgement. It is abundantly clear that genre sorts significantly helped discovery and yet I am getting no signal on this. The Accelerator program also did not provide me a satisfactory response on discovery when I brought it up.

Roblox keeps trying to approach discovery with some fantasy-like view that has only been helpful to top developers pulling in high metrics but for the rest of us this discovery that they’re continuing to maintain and tweak is actively harmful. It pushes us to expend and strain our financial resources with no guarantee of successful returns, turn to third party means we may not be allowed to access (think of the young developers!) or likewise be hard to gain a platform on and compete for metrics that are completely irrelevant to us or ruin the spirit of who and what we’re working for.

Genre sorts gave all developers an equal opportunity to stand out. You may not have been grossing highly for a generic top sort but you may have been a top spot in a genre sort. Players could easily find a genre of experience they were looking for and developers could compete within certain niches instead of against literally every experience on Roblox.

Discovery is inanely absurd and disrespectful to non top-developers and it needs to be fixed sometime. I - we - need signal from staff here. It’s clear that many people support restoration of or improvement of the legacy genre sorts and yet I’ve yet to hear a single thing about that side of discovery and only the current staff-curated nonsense that doesn’t give everyone a fighting chance.

Please respect us as developers.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

I’m currently in the Building Leading Edge Experiences with Engine session for RDC 2022 but according to fellow attendees in the other session Growth and Acquisition on Roblox they covered Experience Discovery in which they have finally acknowledged the desire and demand for genres and are working on a solution for this. I’m incredibly thankful.

I won’t mark this feature request as resolved just yet but I want to make an update here for anyone still tracking this feature that genres were acknowledged and are on the roadmap. I still can’t agree with the rollout process and how genres were taken away from us without an alternative in place first but as long as we get them back and they’re either the same or stronger than before, that’s all I could ever ask for. It helps my intended audience find my experience better rather than need to compete against irrelevant themes and metrics just to have a little bit of discoverability.

[iiau]

Even then, we don’t even know when Roblox would roll out better game discovery; it could be months or years, and by that time, many smaller developers would just simply quit the platform because of how unfair the current situation is right now. We want the change ASAP.

It’s hurting so many developers to the point that, it could have been easy for us to make a living out of Roblox, it could have been easy for people to find high quality games to enjoy them, but horrible game discovery only just disincentives us from doing so. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone but half of the front page is simulator, low quality obby, or some kind of anime grinding game which is also just another glorified simulator, and most of them are aggressively monetized to squeeze every last cent out of their players without actually caring for user experience.

It’s unfair to see that some of us are working full time pouring hours and hours into experiences with a professional team. We need genres that isn’t just automated but actually checked by humans. We need humans that could actually go in the game and play them to see if they’re worthy of being front page. We need human curated content.

[Carrotoplia (Carrotopliani)]

Any update on this(30hamsterlimitwhy)

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Going to keep reviving this until Roblox takes discovery seriously.

[sorvik0 (sorvik)]

boosting this

char limit

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

Update from the recent creator AMA:

Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

The Discover page represents a very small percentage of impressions and playtime, and is an area that we plan to fully revamp in H1. One important thing to note is that the main landing page for recommendations and game discovery is Home, which contributes to the vast majority of impressions for experiences, discovery and playtime on Roblox. This is the area where we have made most of our product investments and are seeing good success with new experiences breaking out and being discovered by m…

Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Search and Discovery are areas of our product where we invest continuously to ensure we can match users with experiences that they’ll love and to give new experiences opportunities to be discovered. In 2024 we will continue to make improvements to these areas as you can see on our creator roadmap. Some examples: A continually scrollable Home feed - targeting first half of the year Labels like Friend presence in the experience on the Home page - targeting first half of the year Algorithmically-…

Almost entirely unsurprisingly, it seems as though Roblox is backpedalling on developer-curated sorts and still wants to push automatic algorithms. This is so dangerously unhelpful to non-top developers, especially those who are trying to have their experiences reach certain niches. Algorithms and developer curation should be able to exist in the same space. I want to find experiences based on a genre sort, tag or some other kind of information given by the developer.

[HooferBevelops (Hoofer)]

This is really disappointing to hear. I have found that the current existing categories (ex: Tycoon sort) for specific genres don’t pick up on my games, even though they fit the category, and the category name is specified in the game’s description.

I want to be able to define what my game is, rather than relying on some algorithm to do it for me, especially when it doesn’t even want to do it for me.

[index_self]

@Aelarix

There are also diverse opinions on how genres should be defined, and we also find that genres can be easily abused without the right safeguards. We are now thinking about how to build trusted sources of genre information: from creators, users and other expert sources, and how to do that at scale and in a way that can’t be abused.

They keep on arguing this point that genres are somehow an evil and easily exploitable feature that warranted removal, yet I cannot remember or fathom a single reason someone would purposefully misnomer their game’s genre. No one ever marks their horror game as a western if they want discovery. Just, no.

If people are using a too-general sort to try and “boost” their game, then that sort’s too general. Adventure is a common one because, yeah, all games pretty much have some adventure in them, but some don’t fit in any other genre, so that’s where they put it. Solving that problem should be the focus, not developing some fantasy GPT know-it-all algorithm further ripping away our control from us.

We’ve been screaming the solution for so long: Add sorting by genre back and allow developers to custom tag their game. Natural market forces will make sub-genres solidified, such as “Murder Mystery”, “Single-Player”, “Friend Obby” etc. We know we got this; we just wish Roblox shared the same sentiment.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

Entirely right, 1000% agree, couldn’t have said it better myself. Every feature has some level of abuse factor in them; that’s where moderation should step in to help enforce appropriate representation of the experience, much like they once did the ads marketplace prior to the Ads Manager superseding user ads (liable to moderation for misadvertising).

It’s in the name, discovery. Absolutely there is the potential for genres to be abused without the right safeguards, but safeguards should not include removing developer control or algorithmically sorting experiences based on some arbitrary criteria. No self-respecting developer would miscategorise their experience and hemorrhage a good market or, if there was real consequence for it, manual intervention via moderation or otherwise. Which, on the latter point, there never was, and it was used as a justification for its removal on the original announcement.

They said that new experiences have gained traction through discovery changes but I don’t want to rely on being lucky enough to get picked up by some automation. I want to know, deterministically, where my audience comes from and how I reach my target audience, and I want that factor to be properly consistent. I want to clearly search for a type of experience and limit results to that.

I’ve been fighting for this for over 6 years, and I don’t want to get complacent and stop fighting for them at any given moment because accepting the status quo is how change doesn’t get made, let alone even the potential to be heard. Though at this point, I would even be happy to settle for a larger genre sort that then breaks down experiences of that genre via the automatic algorithms or vice versa. Some way to funnel my results clearly as a player, and target my audience as a developer.

Roblox needs to stop pushing this disrespectful narrative and nonsense justification agaisnt its first class citizens to reason about how they curate their audience. This is a prominent issue across multiple tenets of the platform, even down to how we can work with the engine. There needs to be some level of developer control within discovery much like, for example, the Steam store.

Between Roblox and Steam, there is one page that gives me significantly less friction on searching for games and clearly has both developer/community control and algorithms in place, and the better search experience certainly is not Roblox.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

FWIW: for the years that this thread has existed and been passed around, I realise that I have not properly and clearly included deets about the genre sorting removal. I’ve attached a link to the thread and a picture for posterity so it’s more clearly visible rather than expecting readers to dig through the thread to stumble across a hyperlink on an offhand mention.

Hope it helps out with genre sorts discourse. I’m still a bit upset because I believe the thread getting locked pulled some of the steam off this discussion back when it was a fresh topic so it’s been left to rot for years until Roblox appears to be firm about not giving control back to developers; and the way the original thread was written was asking for a hasty revert rather than to better the existing sorts or to find a new solution that we could alternatively use instead of leaving us stranded.

[wravager]

Got pinged when my 2017 thread was linked. Anyways:

After reading the AMA, I am a bit disappointed in their approach for the Discover page, however…

If their focus is on the home page, I hope they expand the current sorts to feature more than just 8 shooter games (as an example of a home page genre) or at least let us select a genre to place on our home page.