There’s a number of reasons why this was done, which I can possibly predict:
Eliminate audios that could possibly be copyrighted and are generally shared among the community.
Essentially prevent bypassed audios that are uploaded from alt accounts to be reused by players.
Roblox will probably keep adding a ton more audios either that’s ambient sounds or licensed music. However, I will be very sad to see games with Music game passes like Murder Mystery to be stuck with Roblox audios.
As I said, if you upload free audio from an alt account, the sound will only be limited for use in the alt account, thus forcing you to adhere to the limit that’s currently in place. But, I would not like to see this change expand to other asset types in the Marketplace (models, etc.) as this would truly be disastrous. On the bright side, now Roblox is truly free, as badge and audio creation fees are essentially eliminated.
I mean… You get free audio uploads, this update brings value to Composers and Sound Engineers while letting them get proper control of the assets they provide people. You can now revoke access if people don’t pay you.
And you’re right, once they make a more permanent solution for asset privacy settings you’ll be able to distribute your audio in the marketplace once again. So what’s the issue? The people who no longer use Roblox and won’t be able to distribute their audio again? You can literally just get a Composer or Sound Engineer to produce the audio for you.
I can defend this change because this is a valued update.
Again, neither of these are fixed by this change! These audios can just be set to public again, with no consequence to the people doing these things. It’s a temporary bandaid with permanent impacts to the platform. And again, alt accounts don’t relate to this. This is an extremely damaging change, one that is inherently not easy to reverse once it is put in place.
But, this is temporary, and offers no real solutions. What Roblox has done has again, permanent consequences for a completely temporary fix.
The mesh paragraph is a really important thing to note that they really should’ve made clearer. It’s going to have a detrimental effect on many games let alone asset sales groups which could encounter major issues at least initially.
My currently unreleased game features a large variety of trees from the workshop and those will all likely be broken leading to a lot of work having to replace all those trees for what will likely lead to lower variety and a lot of development time wasted due to the change. The least they could do it make it not apply to older assets imo
What does this mean for those who have paid money for uploads? Are we not going to get our Robux refunded back to us? This seems like a scam on ROBLOX’s part for those who have spent loads of Robux on audio.
I find it a bit frustrating that ROBLOX gloats about uploading “100,000 professionally-produced SFX” but doesn’t improve their search engine to find anything. For example, I currently use a fire crackle sound effect uploaded by another user which will no longer function after March 22nd. Fair enough, but if I search for “fire” in the Creator Marketplace, there is nothing to replace that with. So now I am left with the third and final option, which is to upload my own; And while it is free, there is a caveat— I can only upload 10 per month, and if the audio I upload happens to be taken down for copyright (which I have seen people mention their sound effects were taken down) I still end up with 9 audios left instead of the original 10.
As many users have probably mentioned already, this is not just going to impact smaller games, but all games, especially ones which relied heavily on audios uploaded by other users who are not guaranteed to come back and list their audios as public.
Couldn’t there have been a better way to go about this? Why not let the audios currently available stay open to the public, if they had to be put “for sale” by the creator in the first place? What benefit is it to developers, especially those who do not have a government ID currently, to restrict them of resources that were otherwise fine to begin with?
There are definitely some up-sides to this, such as being able to upload audio for free, as well as stopping audio from being used where it’s not meant to be used.
That being said, there’s a glaring issue that has been mentioned countless times already. Making all the already existing audio private by default is a big, big mistake.
Game- ahem, ‘experiences’ that are no longer being worked on are going to be without sound or just outright broken.
Experiences that are being worked on are going to have developers scrambling to get it fixed because you’ve given us two weeks to change the audio used in our games. Not only do we have a short timeframe, but most of us can upload 10 sounds and then no more. By the time that these developers are able to upload their next 10 sounds, the update will have been live for quite some time.
This massive issue could be fixed if you just… didn’t private existing audio. That’s all that has to change and then one of the biggest problems with this is solved.
If people want to private their audio, then they should be the ones to toggle a button. We can deal with replacing a few sounds, but not every single one, and definitely not in two weeks.
Give us more time to prepare, increase the number of sounds we can upload (make us pay past 10 if you must) and let old audio stick around.
Another Disadvantage, alt users will upload the loud audio when Upload audio is free which is making user with using boombox, this is against Roblox Term of Service!
Again, these are not dependent on wiping half the platform of its audio! Of course I am not opposed to these positive things, but I am absolutely opposed to the permanent destruction of vast amounts of games on Roblox, when it’s completely unnecessary to throw these together.
This isn’t the problem. The problem, is that there are thousands upon thousands of games no longer being developed, games on the front page, and games which I play regularly. These games will undoubtedly be impacted to some extent. The problem is that for all of the millions of audio assets, most of them have numerous games linking to them, some of them have hundreds of games linking back to them.
What this change does has direct consequences on the entire platform. It is an unnecessary decision, which creates an unnecessary amount of work for developers, and it does not solve the underlying problem. The problem is, again, not in new audios. It’s not in new games. It’s about old ones, recent ones, and therefore the integrity of Roblox as a whole.
It is well within Roblox’s power to provide a solution which does not destroy what people consider to be Roblox. It is well within their power to come to a reasonable and non destructive solution.
I would have no problem if Roblox outright stated they were disabling all third party audio for a temporary time period. But the decision that has been made will have consequences for years, and years.
This update does have upsides to what’s being added, but then again this is a back and forth argument that pertains to many downsides at the same time. From that I can deter, this is likely going to not only really annoy a majority of developers, but most likely also a lot of the general community who use audios uploaded freely to Roblox as an incentive to play music in games for those that supply a Radio, some game developers (Like myself) Has a very heavily reliant system on pre-existant audios that were uploaded by others on a free base as we developed a highly realistic Radio system. Now likely to be blacklisted, that ruins one of the true functional assets of the games files.
Seconded to this, Audio being locked to be available to the public seems like the worst thing that occurs here. The majority of sound designers, or uploaders have deliberately made their audios able to be gotten and put into a users inventory, as they were open-sourced for music. You have sound designers who don’t even use their audios, for them to be used in other games. This especially is not good in my case, where some commissioned music is now going to be restricted and unable to use for me for a period of time, completely ruining the integrity of the audio system in-play.
Now to my second argument, while force privating audios is unbelievably a terrible thing to me, all you’re doing is just hurting smaller game designers, and likely deterring them. Large companies on roblox aren’t going to be effected who reach the popular pages, but for those who complete games on a small scale aren’t going to be able to hire someone to remaster their audios. And while 100,000 roblox-created audios sounds ‘good’, you’re stating like it’d be easy to find something that exactly fits your game, environment, and also for someone like me who has developed and are using 50+ songs, will be able to find similar songs that match the environment that can be used across the different radio stations in our game.
This is also supposedly something terrible to me. It seems like a heavily abusable backdoor for bypassed music to be uploaded, and instead of finding accounts that are genuinely being supplied with robux, making their deletion at punishment, this means those who upload audios in a problematic form can upload them freely, without punishment.
Overall, I doubt the Developer team in-charge of this update will read this comment, but for the off-chance that it could occur, this definitely won’t be taken too happily by the community, and really does hurt small completed experiences with no ability in SFX. I think the general concept could have been good, but forcing a lot of this onto us seems a bit forced, and many developers likely won’t be happy with the subjected changes. I say many as in the Majority; as this punishes the Majority. A big game developer is able to shrug this off aren’t they? because they have a company, funds, they can hire anybody they want to give them specific audio, while we now have to fish and continuously search through 100,000+ audios to match our games, and also suffer a new wave of bypassed audio as these people likely don’t get punished.
cool, they’re all gonna be useless 10 second music loops.
seriously, the main thing that’s been bothering me about finding right audio for games was searching for hours on end because the official ROBLOX account just has a ton of garbage uploaded. Now you’re telling me that everything i found until now is going to get locked and im straight out of luck? nice move.
This change is great for protecting the assets of a small number of creators. However, it severely hinders the creativity of nearly every developer on the platform. Take, for example, 99% of games on the platform with vehicles or guns. A vast majority of the sounds used in guns or cars are taken from the roblox library. Uploading sounds for every asset is not only impractical, but it is extremely time consuming for developers. Nearly every game I’ve ever made, or have been a part in making, uses sounds from the roblox library. Giving developers a 12 day notice on a change that will inevitably break nearly every game on the platform and it does not allow for us to fix our games in time. To put it bluntly, this is an awful idea. Roblox has frequently ignored the opinions of the majority of developers on their platform, so expanding further would be a waste of time.
