Summer is a busy time on ROBLOX. With school on hiatus for a large segment of our community, we see more gamers playing, more builders building, and more developers making games. The numbers don’t lie. Not only did we set a record for engagement time in July (with more than 65 million total hours logged), but in both June and July more than 12 individual games amassed one million+ play sessions. On top of that, players logged more than 130 million play sessions across all games in July.

Let’s take a look at the top-performing games of the summer (so far)!

The charts

Top 15 games of June by visits

Top 15 games of July by visits

Observations

The murder mystery is still unsolved

As you can see, there are several mainstays. The Mad Murderer, loleris’ biggest success to date, has collected a staggering 6.99 million play sessions in June and July alone (with a total of 12.5 million visits to date). His success is part business savvy, part content updates that revitalize the game just as soon as you think it’s going to slip, and largely a game that’s exciting and gratifying. You simply cannot deny the feeling of the knife-throw.

One of The Mad Murderer’s key differences is its cast of colorful characters.

Murder Mystery, The Mad Murderer’s primary competition, is also hanging tough – even moving up to third place in July – with a combined total of 3.6 million play sessions.

The perpetually popular role-playing game

Role-playing hangouts continue to make their presence known. Different Town of ROBLOXia, despite its own somewhat unassuming name, stayed firmly in second place in both June and July. Work at a Pizza Place continued its revival, while Boys Vs Girls Island Wars and Beach House Roleplay had strong showings.

Fresh blood

Guest Defense, ROBLOX’s Top Model, Reason 2 Die, 2 Player Gun Factory Tycoon, and Armored Patrol all found ways to make it to the summer top 15 lists. All of these games are worth noting because they feature similarly entertaining yet wildly different gameplay mechanics. From wave survival and fashion shows to military vehicle warfare and humans-versus-zombies, these games cover a huge range of gameplay – yet all of them have found legitimate success on ROBLOX. The gaming populous of ROBLOX has a wide variety of tastes, and just about any kind of multiplayer game can have a happy home in ROBLOXia.

Helicopters breathed new life into the class vehicle combat game Armored Patrol.

Engagement versus visits

There’s more to game rankings than sheer play sessions. With the advent of Developer Stats, game creators can now see a more telling measure of how engaging their game is. We selected six games from the top 15 summer charts, representing a large swath of genres, and dug into their average playtime on Saturday, August 2nd to see what types of games hold players’ attention the best.

The Mad Murderer may get the most visits and, because of the volume of players, the most total playtime, but it actually doesn’t have the highest average playtime of the bunch. On August 2nd, its average playtime was roughly 17 minutes per session. Contrast that with the role-playing games — Work at a Pizza Place pulled over 20 minutes per session and Beach House Roleplay almost 24 minutes — and you can see how different audiences of gamers spend their time playing.

Reason 2 Die pits player-controlled zombies against survivors.

In terms of hardcore games, both Reason 2 Die and Armored Patrol fared very well. Reason 2 Die kept players for an average of 23 minutes per play session, while Armored Patrol almost reached 25 minutes per session, which was, according to our small sample on August 2nd, the most engaging game of the bunch.

What you can extract from this information is that successful games command a lot of time from players, and there are many opportunities for developers to make it big — no single genre is a recipe for success or disaster. For more information on ROBLOX game development, make sure to check out the ROBLOX Wiki.

Those are the top summer games by the numbers. What games have you been spending your time playing?