Hello! I recently just released a game 10 days ago, called West Coast, FL and its been going good. However, recently, the dislikes are going down like crazy. I’m not sure why, because our revenue is doing great, but we have gotten sooo many dislikes on the game. We started up high, and its dropping around 2% everyday. Its currently sitting at 66%.
I’d really like to get these up, however I do not know what’s causing it. Here is some theory’s I had in mind:
Very big chunk of our player base is phone and tablet.
Players get overwhelmed during onboarding, and don’t know what to do, they think they are stuck with one crappy car.
Too laggy for them?
They overall don’t know how to play it
If anyone else has some ideas and could aid me to revering this dislike ratio to make it go up, please let me know. Thanks!
I think you answered your question in your post. If players, especially young ones, can’t figure out the game in the first minute, they will leave in a frustrated manner, which opens the door for dislikes.
Playing the game for myself on PC, there is a tutorial when I first click play, but it is just a bunch of text, so I skipped it. If this is your only way of informing the player on the game, then you have a problem. Don’t blame us for being impatient for not reading through six paragraphs of text–you need to make it shorter and/or include more images. On top of all this, once I skip through the tutorial, there is no more hand holding and I just spawn in a random part of the city. What is a kid on a phone or tablet supposed to do? “Man, this game sucks!” Disliked.
P.S. just because you’re making money doesn’t always mean your players are happy.
Adding onto this - I’ve made a mock mission center, where the players earn cash to do tutorials. It gives them a “hand holding” effect for the whole tutorial. It gives step by step instructions until they reach the end.
Hopefully this will be more clear to players, and they can learn while earning money. (and get a boost at the start)
I think contentproviderservice can fix that, since you have a lot of images, users are greeted with dozens of empty screens, I think it would be very helpful if you preload them ,Also, handling the gui operations on client side is very helpful too if you aren’t already doing that
I think some player’s don’t know how to drive to the car. I joined the game and saw a few players leave because they weren’t able to get their car moving
Usually you’d expect cars to be able to drive once you get inside (like most Roblox games), but in this game you have to shift gears.
Maybe a solution would be to teach players how to shift gears and/or set the default first gear to be ‘D’?
Another thing is the tutorial was a bit wordy, and I was NOT going to read allat.
Game took 30 seconds to load. I have a high end computer with good connection.
Players are immediately going to the big sign that says Purchase Vehicles when they spawn, expecting to be able to get a car, only to find that they 1.) cannot afford any of the cars and 2.) cannot spawn any of them.
Only after about ~2 minutes did I realize there is a separate (and un-labeled) spawner GUI
After getting into the car it doesn’t drive anywhere without putting it into gear. The controls were listed when the car was off, but like most players, I didn’t memorize them before turning the car on and having them disappear.
After another ~15 seconds of button mashing to find the change gear button, I put the car in drive. In the process of button mashing I turned on the parking brake, and I had to re-mash all the buttons to find a way to turn that off - another ~15 seconds.
I am now 5 minutes into the game before I can even start driving. That is as an adult with a PC and experience on Roblox - imagine how much harder it would be if I was a 9 year old on a tablet. A good-performing game has lost 50% of its new players by the 5 minute mark - with an onboarding sequence like this, I can only imagine your New User First Session Retention is well below 50% at 5 minutes.
How can you improve?
The single easiest improvement I would make is a pop-up that immediately points you to the Spawn Car menu, preferably with a bright flashing arrow. That would go so far. Then maybe a controls GUI that is displayed by default (if one exists, it was not immediately apparent).
On top of the new tutorial system we made, I made it to where you dont have to press any button to start, nor to shift gears. You simply get in, and press the gas and brake pedal.
Eventually, we plan on adding a setting where you can have an easy driving option where all you have to do is get in and drive, or a medium setting where you have to start the car, and shift gears.
