Roblox Weekly Recap (28 May 2023)

Table of Contents

• Platform updates

• A Booming Game Genre

• Up And Coming Games

• News And Incidents

Platform updates

The updates this week weren’t very exciting. We received 3 platform updates and a creator roadmap update. This includes a new real time analytics tab in the creator hub, improvements to streaming and much more.

Real Time Analytics: Roblox has introduced a Performance page, which allows developers to monitor real-time data on parameters such as session time and server memory utilisation, among other data points. The Performance page is available to experiences with 1,000+ daily active users and displays real-time stats that may be filtered by date range, location, and percentile, among other parameters. Potential performance issues can also be found using the page's filters, which provide detailed descriptions as well as advice for resolving the problem.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/analytics-real-time-performance-monitoring-and-user-metrics/2391302 

Improvements To Streaming: Robloxwants to improve map streaming by allowing for better memory utilisation and speedier join times. The Model:GetPersistentPlayers functionality and enhanced model streaming behaviour are among the enhancements that are planned to go live this summer. Furthermore, they have already fixed few bug, including issues with Levels of Detail and a difficulty with JointsService mechanisms. They are also planning to introduce streaming to its Studio templates and are working on additional enhancements to the Engine API and guidelines.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/updates-to-streaming-enabled/2391960

Marketplace Improvements: Roblox revealed new features that will be available next week, as well as its long-term strategy for its Marketplace. They hope to build an economy in which anybody can create, sell, and make money. Furthermore, The economic system should reflect real-world economies in order to sustain growth and provide the best opportunity to earn and profit. They also added that they would be taking action against fraudulent or copied items and they have achieved results in reducing the quantity of reported copies of Roblox-created Limiteds.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/marketplace-our-vision-and-guiding-principles/2392973

Creator Roadmap: Roblox's Engineering and Product Leadership, have announced new solutions to improve creator productivity and support for third-party applications via OAuth2 and APIs. They will also enhance the Marketplace to make asset discovery easier. Creators will be given new tools for detecting and preventing cheaters in their material, as well as earning money through advertising. In a few weeks, the team will host a Q&A session to answer questions concerning the Creator Roadmap.
This will include updates to Roblox Cloud, Moderation and much more.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/creator-roadmap-pt-3-of-4-benefit-from-a-growing-creator-ecosystem/2391170

Auto Reconnect in Team Create: Developers can be detached from Studio in a variety of ways. For example, the network may go down temporarily, your machine may go to sleep, or you may relocate to a location with a different wifi. Previously, a dialogue box with an error message would appear whenever a user disconnected, but now users are instantly rejoined to the same session.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/auto-reconnect-to-team-create-when-disconnected-beta/2393213

Studio Presence: You can see the avatars of the users who are currently in your Team Create places and by hovering over the avatars, you can view the usernames of the users. Both List Mode and Grid View will display active collaborators. This will be a helpful update for teams with multiple developers to collaborate.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/presence-on-studio-start-page/2344498 

A Booming Game Genre

Combat games are thriving on the platform. At the time of writing this, 18 out of the top 50 games under the ‘Top Earning’ category are related to combat. This seems to be a promising category if you’re planning to make a game in the future and have the resources needed for it. In the united states, the terms ‘Fighting’ and ‘Shooting’ gets more hits on Google than the terms ‘Simulator’ or ‘Tycoon’.

Worldwide, All 4 become equivalent but it still shows how combat games are doing really well on the platform and it must be a genre considered by any developer than plans to create a game soon. As the platform continues to evolve, it is likely that combat games will remain a part of Roblox's success. We recently saw some combat-simulator games like ‘Punch Wall Simulator’ (Peaked at 60K CCU in early April) or ‘Yeet A Friend!’ (Peaked at 20K CCU last week). In conclusion, It might be a great idea to consider making a combat based game or involving some sort of combat mechanics like fighting or shooting in your games even if it’s a simulator or tycoon.

Up And Coming Games

Two games that did really well last week were ‘Animal Simulator’ by ‘ragnar9878’ and ‘Smoothie Factory Tycoon’ by ‘Blend Productions’. Both of them are on the ‘Up-and-Coming’ sort. While these games aren’t brand new, They have jumped from getting 5 or 6 figure visits a day to 7 figures of visits daily.
Two other small games that got picked up by the algorithm are ‘Decaying Winter’ by ‘EDEN-227’ and ‘Motorcycle Mayhem’ by ‘Breakneck Interactive’. They both have 1.2M visits (at the time of writing this) but their CCUs are in 3K-4K.

I also found a game called ‘Escape Prison Obby!’ by ‘Bill Bored Corp’. While this is a copy of ‘Barry’s Prison Run’ by ‘PlatinumFalls‘ and has a like to dislike ratio of 44%, It has 5.4K CCU, 5.3M visits and 630 Favorites but only 130 combined likes and dislikes (at the time of writing this) which seems too low for a game with so many visits. Websites like RoMonitorStats and Rolimons aren’t tracking it either despite the algorithm placing this game in the ‘Obby’ category. What do you think of this? Could the game be botted? Or are players being teleported either to or from it?

News And Incidents

Roblox wants to make the marketplace 100% community made which is why they’re planning to slow down pushing out limiteds and eventually stop making new limiteds completely. This has disappointed a lot of users due to the condition of the UGC limiteds market right now.