In game development, feedback is of paramount importance. It can take myriad forms: observing players as they interact with games, listening to written opinions and ideas, and crunching numbers to find out what features make players spend – both their time and money. Today, we launched a new feature that takes feedback to a new level: Developer Stats.

ROBLOX game developers have long been able to track the success of their games anecdotally by monitoring simple public stats, such as game visits and “favorites,” and the volume of monetary transactions. The recent HTTP Service feature also allows information to be sent from games to external websites and compiled for custom analytics. Now, Developer Stats bring important information to all ROBLOX games in a centralized location.

Battlefield by DeadzoneZackZak

Currently, Developer Stats consist of two charts: Traffic by Day and Traffic by Hour. These let you analyze the flow of traffic into your game over a rolling period that dates back about 12 days, and both charts include an average-play-time metric that indicates how long the average person is playing your game at a given date and time. Beneath each chart is a detailed breakdown of the data. Average play time is probably the most useful metric available thus far, as it indicates whether your game lives up to player expectations and, in broader terms, how fun it is.

To access your game’s Developer Stats, log into your account and go to your game’s page. Beneath the Play/Edit/Build buttons is a series of five “Options”. Click “Developer Stats” to start looking at the data.

Developer Stats for Darkness by loleris. You can see the game’s recent spike back to the front page and corresponding change in average play time. This sort of change is to be expected when you inject lots of new players into a game via advertising.

Developer Stats for Survival 303 by Davidii2. What’s interesting about this chart is how consistently the game keeps players going for a long time. 30 to 40 minutes is well above the average play time of other top games.

There will be additional charts — for example, game monetization — in the future.

Much of our development effort is being funneled into empowering ROBLOX developers to create better, more robust, and more fine-tuned games. Developer Stats might seem like a small feature when stacked up against behemoths like streaming, dynamic lighting and DevEx, but they are an incredibly powerful source of information – a concrete indicator of how what you develop and change resonates among your player base.