We are now 4 days in, almost 4300 posts and no response from roblox.
I’m afraid that a lot of the actual feedback is lost in this post with these types of replies, so here’s my effort to lay out as many of the pros and cons I can find.
If you want to reply to me, please read most of this, since I’m trying to level with both sides. Don’t get mad because I said one thing was good.
– Pros –
- Audio uploads are now free!
This is the biggest upside to the update, as it means small developers with original or licensed music, not already uploaded to roblox, finally have a way to upload it without having to spend robux of their own.
- More stock music and sound effects.
We don’t know if roblox is actually going to do this, but according to the post they’re going to upload thousands more assets for us developers to use. Assuming that they are from APM, they aren’t going to cover all genres, but helpful nonetheless.
- The private setting for audios is actually helpful.
It ensures that developers with original music or sound effects are the only ones that can use the assets they upload, which stop people from ripping it from games (using the dev console, even while off-sale) and using it in their own.
– Cons –
- The update includes the audio discovery tool, which is useful, but…
It’s quite flawed and misses a lot of things it was designed to do. Sound effects get rounded up, meaning that audios over 5.5s in length mistakenly get marked as unusable even though they’re perfectly fine. Also, it misses out on a lot of sounds actually used in the game, What if I’m using a table of ids to determine what to play? If I wanted to replace the sounds in this table that were unusable, it would be a lot of extra unneeded effort for me.
- Every current audio asset above 6 seconds in length gets automatically privated.
This is the big one, the one that just about the majority of this thread is mad about. Sure, I can agree that a lot of the audio currently uploaded to the platform is used without proper rights, but in doing this to every audio leaves a lot of crossfire.
What about audio creators who have specifically said that their work is allowed to be used in commercial works with credit?
What about royalty free music which is uploaded to the platform and reasonably used?
What about free-to-use sound effects that go over the length of 6s?
These are just a few examples of things that get unfairly taken down because of the whole thing. It would be much smarter to simply make it a new option and call it a day.
- The private setting is flawed, actually.
Despite the private setting being quite helpful, it’s definitely pretty flawed in execution. Namely the way the engine figures out what audios can be used or not. Private audios can only be used in the uploaders experiences, which means that even if the uploader owns a group, they can’t use it on their group games. The same thing goes for team create, ideally all of the collaborators would be able to use their own audios in the place, since it’s not like the owner is just stealing their assets to use in the game.
Granted the whole team create thing opens up a lot of problems, like having people as collaborators simply because they have a lot of audio uploaded, but it’s just confusing.
- The audio limit is also flawed.
Free audios are cool, but here’s the drawback; you can only upload 10 of them (if you’re unverified). This is a huge drawback to a lot of unverified devs, especially sound designers or developers who need to upload a lot of sounds. Let’s say I’m creating an FPS with realistic weapons, at the bare minimum, I need sounds for: Firing the weapon, Reloading the weapon. That’s two sounds for one weapon, It might not seem a lot but that means i can only create 5 weapons in the span of a month, which isn’t enough.
You might say “Why don’t you just use the same firing and reloading sound for every weapon?” And sure, you’d be right, but not every weapon is the same. What if I were making a conventional bolt action firearm, and then a sci-fi raygun? I couldn’t use the same sounds for that.
The way the website appears to determine which user gets what limit seems to be very random at the moment. I’ve seen from polls and this post that although most unverified users have 10 audios, I’ve seen many with 2000. I’ve asked as much of the people with 2000 if they are verified, devex eligible, have devexed before and the common answer was no.
Alongside this, the audio limit is a hard limit, unlike badges. This means that as soon as you hit this limit, there is nothing you can do to increase it (other then verifying). With badges, you can at least continue paying if you hit your 5 a day limit.
Although I understand why roblox has decided to put the higher limit behind ID verification a lot of users miss out on higher limits because of this. This is a completely separate discussion but I’ll touch on it for a moment: People don’t like verifying on roblox because of privacy.
- Developers may have to replace thousands of audios within weeks.
I think the limits and the small timeframe severely underestimate the amount of audios developers have in games, original or not. I’ve seen hundreds of developers with games that would take them years to replace all of the audio in them. It would be great if the timeframe for this update wasn’t so thin, especially considering that the audio limit is per month, not per day.
Developers typically have more then one complete experience, and typically they contain at least 100 audios (this is being generous, more of then then not the average is 300) and it would take this type of unverified developer 10 months to replace all of the audio they need to keep their game audible.
Of course, this considers that all audios are original, licensed, royalty free or otherwise unreplaceable.
- Making audios public again being locked for an undisclosed amount of time
It’s mentioned numerous times in the post above that the option to make audios public again will be disabled until they can figure out a better solution. This obviously isn’t a great way to take on the situation but I’ll ignore that for now.
The problem with this is it adds on to my crossfire problem from earlier. Audios that users have purposefully put on-sale and free to use can’t simply be put on sale on march the 22nd, which leaves developers to be the sole responsible person to fix the problem. It’s not too great because royalty free music, (Let’s just say for example, Kevin Macleod’s songs) which is perfectly fine to be used for experiences, is locked to the majority of players who depend on it.
Of course if it’s royalty free, why not just reupload it yourself? I agree that this is a simple solution but what if every player did this? Let’s say 10k developers need kevin macleod audios for their game and they all used it from a copyable asset that is now being privated. Lets say each of these developers need ~25 different kevin macleod songs and they all reupload them.
(This is an example, these audios could be from any other royalty free artist, kevin was just the first one i could think of.)
That means that there’s now 250,000 duplicate assets on roblox’s servers. This wouldn’t have happened if someone simply reuploaded the audios and made them public immediately after the update came out, but they can’t do that.
- Free audios easily exploitable after audios become public again
There are no barriers to uploading free audio right? Then that means, after audios can be made public again, some bot developer could create a program that simply makes an account, uploads 10 audios, makes them all public, and then repeats. It’s a rather simple thing but what I’m trying to say is that turning back on the ability to make audios public simply brings the problem back really quickly and the private setting was all for nothing.
It’s purely hypothetical, I’m not saying that this exactly is going to happen but I can definitely see it happening, now that the main barrier for uploading audios (pay to upload) is removed.
Like I said earlier, this update affects a lot of audio that the uploader didn’t make, but perfectly has permission to use. How will developers be able to prove that they have permission or the license to use the audio, commercially, in their games? I’ve seen many developers share their experience even before this update to show that the current process for if your licensed audio gets removed for copyright to be very tedious and confusing. Posts like This one, by NowDoTheHarlemShake, in this thread, which shows this process being incredibly annoying to deal with and even may do nothing to fix the problem afterwards.
It’d be great if there was a specific way to show to the system that the uploader has the rights to use an audio. I don’t know how it could be done, but it would make this a whole lot better in my opinion.
– Others –
Here’s one other thing that I couldn’t fit anywhere else:
- This Update presumably gets roblox out of legal woes.
Which is the reason why they’re doing all of this, but in my personal opinion I feel it could’ve been executed so much more efficiently and less destructively. It sucks to know that they’re pretty much forced to do this, but there were absolutely better ways.
– Footnote –
If you carefully looked at this post, you’ll realise that most of the problems are either from rushed oversights, or from more prominently, not enough transparency. A lot of the problems appear to be of confusion or just outright not explaining how something works.
I hope this post finds the roblox team well.
TL:DR; The cons of this update severely outweigh the pros, despite the update mostly being forced by legal woes. Most of the cons are caused by confusion, lack of transparency, or just being rushed.
