I see a lot of people who worked really hard on a game only get a couple people playing at once, it annoys me because the games are good. May I see what you guys (would do/did) when your game doesn’t get as famous on release. I don’t want this to happen to me after months of work.
Edit: moved it to game design support btw
One simple word. Advertise.
I am no expert here and someone will most likely have a different opinion than me but my honest suggestion would be to put out some ads and get people to know your game is out there and maybe also figure out why your game isn’t getting many players…is it due to bugs? do people not like the game its self? But remember, I am no expert.
I understand that, but what would you do if advertising isnt working/you spent the robux poorly to advertise
There are two problems that can be occuring that makes a game bad:
Advertise to communitys, friends, friends of your friends. These types of advertisements don’t require robux and have a good chance of working.
IF you have robux:
Advertise a ton and tell all the people you know (who won’t criticize you for building ‘dumb lego games’) about your game.
If you DON’T have robux:
We’ve all been there. Either try to advertise by word of mouth, but it’ll most likely end up like 99.999% of the good games on Roblox: empty.
If you want your game to get lots of players on release you need to advertise or sponsor for large amounts of robux, don’t expect to get tons of players right away if you didn’t do anything to make that happen.
a lot of people don’t have robux to advertise, and if you had an adder on your team you wouldn’t even be able to pay him because once again no robux. using any thrid party program to give another roblox player money i think is bannable. short answer to his program: use a game like game tracker. that can get you about 20,000k+ visits without ads. you can also get your friends to play the game. they will tell more friends about it.
(as said in my post replying to VeinTweek).
a good $50 worth of advertising should do the trick
Edit: polished up & published this response as a medium article 
I actually have a system I go through to help me with my own games. Seeing a game flop can be frustrating, but it’s almost always remediable if you have the patience.
Not Reasons Your Game Flopped
Before I get into what I think you can do to fix your games, I want to dispose of what in my opinion very rarely if ever is the problem, despite many people assuming it to be the case. I’ve heard each of these multiple times from multiple frustrated devs - me included. But looking back I have yet to find a situation where these are actually valid.
1. “The problem is nobody plays my game”: I hear this one a surprising amount as in my opinion it is so obviously a symptom of a problem. People not playing your game sucks - I swear I know it sucks, it’s happened to me many times. But there is a reason people don’t play it - and that reason can be found almost like a detective finding a murderer through following the evidence.
2. “Not enough assets”: So this one is a bit complicated, you can ruin a game with a bad map, but making more bad maps is not the fix. Rather than continuing to pump out flawed assets, focus on improving the ones you have. The only games that really need content to stay afloat are very expensive, and typically have horrible retention rates.
You want to invest in systemic gameplay, using game mechanics to get as much fun as possible from the assets you have. If Chess can be fun after 1400 years with only a board & 6 unique pieces, your game can be fun with a single map / sword asset / skin / etc. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean never add new assets - but rather pumping new assets into a flawed game won’t fix it.
3. “Someone stole my idea / A competitor popped up and everyone likes them”: Now this is typically a bad thing for you, but it is also inevitable. Think about Mad City vs Jailbreak - they’re clearly occupying the same space, and they likely cost each other money and players, but neither of them is out of business.
That’s because the competition doesn’t make your game suck, if players are choosing their game it’s because it’s better. You can make your game better and bring them right back, so at the end of the day, if you make a good game and keep on updating it you won’t really have to worry too much about nobody playing. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to come up with unique ways to set your game apart - definitely do that, but there will always be competitors, and you can definitely overcome that. It won’t be the reason your game flops.
4. “I don’t have enough money to advertise”: I have yet to witness this as the case. Despite hearing it often, this has yet to be the reason a game has flopped on Roblox. Now, this is not to say advertising isn’t important — players need to know your games exists after all. But in my opinion, you don’t need too many Robux to get a fun game going. I made this tool a while back — it’s called the Player Acquisition Calculator. Feel free to mess around with it, but basically, it allows you to predict how certain advertising attempts will impact your game.
From a business perspective, it’s simple math. If you spend more on advertisements than is gained by players in-game, you will lose money. If you spend less on advertising than your game earns from the new players, you gain money. If you re-invest the money you gain back into advertising you continuously grow your game. Sure, you will start to see diminishing returns with increased advertising — but if you’ve got a decent game this doesn’t really happen until you’re spending tens of thousands of Robux on marketing a day.
So, you don’t really need much money to get a game going. What you need is a quality game which earns more than an advertisement costs.
Resuscitating a Flopped Game
So, if those aren’t why your game flopped, what was?
It’s a 3 step process, and so far it has never failed me in figuring out why a game is flopping. I recommend going from left to right, as the earlier parts are more vital to a successful game. In my opinion, a game’s success is almost entirely the result of succeeding in these 3 things. Be warned, each category is much more massive than it may appear - but we’ll get into that later on in this post.
You’ll notice between each step is a blue step called “Verify” - this isn’t meant to be something you do easily. You can’t just say “I have fun”, or “I was able to find everything fine”, or “I could play this everday” - I want you to prove it.
I’ve composed a handy diagram below to help you figure out how you’d like to prove it. I prefer more analytics heavy stuff personally, as numbers to me are more reliable than human perception, however not every problem can be fully solved with numbers so playtesting can be very important.
As a rule of thumb, have your playtests / analytics stick to a certain format, so that as you improve and change your game you can track changes in metrics & player feedback. If players rate the game 3.2/5 stars on average for update 1, and go up to 3.8/5 stars for update 2, you can prove your update had an impact on the experience. Just be sure to keep the Law of Large Numbers in mind when considering results.
In terms of custom analytics software I recommend getting into the Roblox Playfab program, however, if you can’t currently do that I’ve worked with GameAnalytics and Google Analytics and they both can be used to solve most problems, albeit not as efficiently as Playfab from my experience.
So now that you know how to verify, let’s break down the three major things to check.
Is the Core Loop Compelling?
A core loop, to those who may not know, is the core actions & tasks a player flows through for the majority of the game. For instance the core loop of Minecraft Survival mode is notoriously easy to understand: Mine + Craft + Survive. These core tasks drive most of the gameplay, and have to be fun for the game to succeed. If there was no joy in finding diamond, if there was no fun in building something, if there was no thrill in running from zombies, minecraft would be boring. But it isn’t boring, because each part of the core loop is quite compelling.
It’s also important to note that even with content-driven games, the core loop is always systemic - though I have noticed content-heavy story games usually have lame core loops. For instance with Detroit: Become Human, the core loop was typically: watch cutscenes + choose dialogue options + walk, with a core loop like that it’s no surprise nobody really plays it anymore.
So, figure out your core loop. Then verify that players have fun with that core loop. If the core of your game is boring then that’s a major problem. You may find you need to start over entirely - this is why it’s highly recommended you playtest your core loop as early as possible. I’d also recommend looking into the field of player motivation that I gave a whole talk on, as it can help a ton with fixing boring core loops. You may find some of your mechanics act against the goal player motivation, and as the core loop is so important even a minor miscalculation can cost you thousands of potential players.
At the end of the day though, it is very rare for a game with a bad core loop to succeed, with only AAA games with million-dollar advertising budgets and next-gen graphics usually ever able to get away with it.
Are New Players Accessing the Entire Core Loop?
So, let’s say you’ve proven your core loop is fun - what if players aren’t playing it correctly? The previous section assumed players understood the game perfectly, but that’s never going to be the case with a new player. So is your game still fun to new players? Games that fail this step often have a dedicated fanbase, but fail to ever hit the mainstream audience due to new players having trouble finding the fun.
For example, in the early Dark Souls games, they provided a shield early on to help new players, but that changed their playstyle to be cowering behind a shield - the most boring way to play. This meant that players were being trained to play the least compelling version possible, leading to a huge drop-off of initial players.
A much more common cause of poor core loop access is simple onboarding problems. Players don’t realize there is more to the game. Maybe they never leave the original town, never spawn a vehicle, never equip their weapon, etc. We all know overbearing tutorials can scare off new players, but to onboard a player without one is a difficult task, and if your game is unique in any way there’s a risk players will not understand how to interact with it.
So verify that players are smoothly flowing through your core loop in the proportions you expect. Make sure they aren’t getting stuck in one part, and make sure that another part doesn’t lead to them quitting 80% of the time. These are signs that they aren’t capable of moving to the next part of the core loop.
Is there more fun to be had for returning players?
So, once they’ve played your game why will they come back? Sure if they enjoyed their first time in, they might play once or twice more - kind of like popping in your favorite movie once a month. But usually, what gets them back is new experiences. This can be done through either new content / updates, or through systemic progression loops. I much prefer progression loops.
Remember the core loops from earlier? Typically you’ll want to nest a core loop in a progression loop, allowing for each area to evolve through gameplay. For instance with Minecraft, mining gets more interesting as you get better tools, go deeper, visit the nether, etc. Crafting becomes more interesting as you unlock new production stations like brewing, find new ingredients to make new things, etc. Survival becomes more interesting as you get better weapons, armor, and meet new types of monsters, come across dungeons, nether, stakes are raised when you have more valuables on you / are farther from base, etc. If you only learned Game Design from Minecraft you wouldn’t be in a horrible position.
Once again, I also want to take this as a time to hype systemic gameplay. Natural Disaster Survival is an excellent example, using only a handful of maps and coded disasters for the ~100 players to interact with you can get exponential extra fun from new assets and mechanics. The game has barely changed at all in the last near-decade of its existence, but because it’s so compelling people just keep on playing it. The massive amount of content provided by systemic mechanics can lead to a game with almost no progression loop staying strong years later. I can speak to that - my game Super Hero Life II is honestly just a superhero suit customization mechanic with a map and superpowers thrown in, yet despite barely getting an update in the last 3 years it still gets almost 2M players a month.
Conclusion
Game development can be quite stressful, with players telling you different things, the envy of watching other games succeed despite their flaws, the frustration of having to redo mechanics - it can be a real slog sometimes. But through consciously designing and improving a game you can save yourself a ton of pain, and if you’re lucky like me you may come to find you enjoy the designing problem-solving aspects the most.
Best of luck to you and your game!
Interesting, I’ve learned a few things…
Edit: Just realised who you are, I watched roblox’s video on you and Zoe Basil
Just go to a development discord, and hire a investor: which means robux, sucessful game, and paying your debt
Lmao 2 years late.
UPDATE: This will no longer work ever since the advertising restriction update unless you want to poor money into a black hole and see even less return then you could back in 2021/2020(The good dev years) Roblox has made so many bad updates this year: the audio update, redoing all studio icons, and ruining advertising essentially dooming all small games.
wait a little bit… then advertise (maybe)
Gotta disagree with the bad looking game no matter how much you advertise part. starts scrolling through 100 among us fart obby free admin obby easy obby
