Hey there, it looks like there has been some changes to the discover storefront.
Sandbox has been reordered to most recent first ( a good thing ).
But now sandbox games don't seem to show up in the Genres categories.
That is ok, but what about the games that started at the back of the sandbox, made it halfway, and now are going to start moving backwards again? ( Rogue AI is mine for instance, it got pushed from 28th to 42nd today )
Anyone else seeing the same thing? Or read an article I missed somewhere?
Thanks!
RogueAI
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I have the exact same problem : my first game,"Night Riders" was released before this change, and was gaining places in the ranking. Now that the Sandbox is ordered by release date, my game is going in the opposite direction... The sad thing is that it never had a good exposure in the store, was never featured and with this change it will never it seems.
The Sandbox games are not visible in the categories, so my game will have 0 visibility very soon. I don't have enough "likes" to go out of the Sandbox (currently 29), and my game is not visible even if it is classed about 200th in the O-Rank.
I think the least that the OUYA team have to do is to enable categories for all the games, ordered by O-Rank, even if it is still in the Sandbox. Or maybe shuffle the Sandbox randomly so that every game will have the same exposure.
Not happy!
I think the problem is OUYA looked at the Apple app store and Google Play and the like and based their solutions for discoverability on those. The problem being that those stores, the problem is sheer volume, while on OUYA, it's something altogether different
My suggestion to OUYA would be to forget trying to find the "best game" and display it to everyone, and instead try and match "the right game with the right person"
For example, there may be some great pixel art platformers out there, but that's just not my cup of tea, so it should probably not be featured for me. Equally, some people may not have a bunch of "towerfall friends/bros" that they can play local multiplayer games with
The other trick I think is to start cycling content, because the store is starting to look a little old. The same small number of games are dominating the featured sections. Perhaps that's because they really are the best games on the store.
And that means they should be the ones displayed to people who have just got the console, or not played the console for a while. But for those playing regularly, it should be fairly easy for the store to detect when the "engagement" of the user across all games starts to go down, and use that as the cue to start cycling in some new titles to the front of Discover for that particular individual
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Maybe they remove it after you've bought it or a button to say "I know about this, hide it"
Of course, then they have to program additional "featured" games that may not actually get featured, so it could get hairy.
An email they just sent out to us sounds like they've got some solutions underway. Kudos to Ouya for attempting fixes instead of just ignoring problems!