TD Cowen Believes Roblox Algorithm Is Being Manipulated Heavily

When it comes to certain titles that have player creations within them, one of the most important aspects of gameplay is being able to find these other creations and see with your own eyes what other players have come up with. In the case of Roblox, that’s a multi-layered system. After all, players can design merch that can be sold both in-game and in the real world, and players can create entire games and worlds for others to participate in. That’s one of the key “selling points” of the universe, and the dev team has gone out of its way to claim that it’s made things like the “Discovery” feature balanced and fair so that players can “naturally” find new content and things that they may never have heard of before.

However, in a new report by Yahoo Finance, law firm TD Cowen is saying that this isn’t as balanced as the Roblox team would have you believe. The law firm states that the algorithm itself, the one that is behind the Discovery feature, is being “aggressively manipulated” by certain kinds of accounts. More specifically, there are a bunch of illegal accounts popping up in places like the Philippines and Indonesia, and it’s so large that the dev team should totally know about it, and yet haven’t acknowledged it or done anything about it.

This is where things get even more fascinating, for while it’s easy to claim that, they actually used a piece of recent news as a key piece of proof in their case. As we reported yesterday, the title “Grow A Garden” shattered past player records by having 5 million people on it at one time. That was basically double what the past record holder was. While we didn’t say it at the time, it was pretty odd that such a large jump would happen for a game that wasn’t even around a few months ago. TD Cowen notes that and feels that “unusual activity” was the key to its “success.” While they don’t come out and say it, it’s likely they believe that a bunch of fake accounts came in and “inflated the numbers” surrounding the title, which would cause the “Discovery” feature to make people think that the game is more popular than it actually is, and thus skew results.

If other games were to do that, then it would truly throw chaos into the mix and lead many to question what is “truly a popular game” and what ones are just being “puffed up” a bit.