Although the addition of free uploads of audio is nice, I believe the bad outweighs the good in this recent update.
Many games, assets, models, and whatnot rely on audios made by other people and put on sale, also some accounts cannot log back on to “unprivate” some of the assets. There is also the issue of finding audio and sound effects, as well as some people without Roblox premium membership not being able to upload anything more than 10 uploads, especially if groups or a person is working on a project while on a budget.
This also contradicts the idea of a Developer Marketplace it is supposed to have users share assets like decals, plugins, and especially models and audio, which make up a huge portion of the Roblox playing experience.
Lastly, for boombox/radio game passes I think that the people who spent Robux and maybe even their own money on this would feel cheated. What they paid for and expected to get is not a result of the developer’s fault but rather Roblox’s end. This would greatly injure the “metaverse” image Roblox is trying to achieve because audio is a big part of expressing oneself.
This will cause many games to go silent, and I can most certainly assure you that a majority of developers and maybe later players will find this update unsatisfactory.
The thing is they wont become silent. The only silenced thing will be sounds over 6 seconds, so that means MOSTLY music will be muted, not sound effects.
This update is a big double-edged sword. This give more devs opportunities for adding there own sounds, but the switching to private on all existing audio makes no sense, as this will screw up a lot of old and modern games. Here’s what should be done:
All existing audio should be left alone or set to private if the length is longer then what’s currently planed or The audio can be used if the user owns it or is available for sale.
Uploading new audio should have an option to set to private or not instead of automatically being set to private.
To preserve old games, they should not be affected if the game hasn’t been updated after a specific date.
But still, music enhances gameplay a lot and without it the game is plain and boring. Only music and long sfx (ex. a giant explosion sound) being affected does not make this a valid excuse whatssoever
Free audios is a step in the right direction but privating all audios longer than 6 seconds is the step in the wrong one.
Many games rely on free audios from the catalog, and many of the people who have uploaded these audios will have quit roblox or aren’t online anymore meaning they can’t set it to public. And it seems as if even if you own the audio, it will still be unusable to you which doesn’t make sense.
Overall I think if you do NEED to have a certain length for previous and forthcoming audios before they are automatically set to private, it should should be longer, like 3-4 minutes.
after doing a bit more research, apparently, this will break many more things than I initially thought. I thought it would just remove the music from a few games that don’t get updated, but apparently many more things are being affected.
Thanks Roblox, for screwing up our games. RIP all of the music games like Ro-Beats, it’s going to take weeks to fix all of the music games.
Roblox’s licensed music absolutely sucks and no one wants to use it. It’s also going to ruin heaps of classic Roblox games that don’t get updated. Thanks Roblox for making everyone’s job so much harder.
Roblox should have better systems for pretty much everything related to moderation. In this case, many old games with music probably will break and developers need to replace half of their audios unless they hired a sound designer. Nice job roblox
first step to make this update half good is to provide us good and commercial audio for games that rely on music
you got enough money to make a deal with big labels for some good music - but you won’t, and no, I’m not using your audio for anything more that classical music. because it straight up sucks - it’s terrible and no one ever wants to listen to that
games based on music produce a lot of money - kids are people and people like music, it’s no secret. I personally play and develop games based on sounds & this update is absolutely horrible for me - players won’t be able to listen to some boombox sounds with their friends → both me and you guys at ROBLOX lose money
Thank you, Universal Music, for trying to make Roblox worse because you threw a fit that children were playing copyrighted music in a lego game because it made you lose 0.00005% of your profits. Go bankrupt for us, please and thank you
I think Universal should honestly be ripped to shreds. I already can’t stand their scumbag business practices but this just crosses every line there is. Roblox should stand against them in the lawsuit instead of trying to preserve profits with this terrible update.
The thing I don’t get is; If the point of this update is to protect developer audios, Why is it that it wouldn’t be a better idea to have a new option that decides if an audio is private or not?
Going above and beyond, if the true undisclosed reason behind this is the copyright madness, wouldn’t this update only amplify it? People would start uploading their copyrighted songs (And yes, bypassed ones) in masses due to the free audios.
What does this update even fix for developers or Roblox?
To add.
Something I should had added is most small devs, don’t have the money to just hire music creators, which is why they use already existing music, or SFX.
I’ve done further research into this, and it looks like the real cause is Roblox having absolutely no legal backbone.
I read through this absolute joke of a court case, all accounts made by the plaintiffs are greatly over exaggerated and could easily be defended in court, but Roblox prefers to be as submissive as possible to these tyrannical music companies.
In the case I see multiple accounts of claims that wouldn’t even hold up in the current year, ranging from vague twitter comments, app store reviews from 2018, and referring to occurrences as old as a music contest in 2009.
The plaintiff has absolutely no proof of damages from the usage of boombox gamepasses (one of their main points throughout their claims), Roblox actively removes copyright infringing content, it’s nearly impossible to upload anything from popular artists nowadays even using tricks like distorting or slowing the audio.
The other main issue with all of this is that Roblox is a platform, not a publisher. Safe harbor laws should protect Roblox from this kind of large-scale legal harassment, considering that they take down content when given reasonable notice and commit to their best effort of moderating copyright infringing content upon uploading.
I really hope Roblox does something other than backing down immediately under legal pressure for once, they literally rebranded their entire platform from “games” to “experiences” because they got briefly mentioned in a court case between Apple and Epic Games.
As a game developer who uses almost entirely user - uploaded audio in my games, I do not support this change. This would cause all music and many sound effects to become unusable as of March 22 unless they are uploaded by the creator of the game in which they are being used. Although most of my games do not utilize music extensively, many of the sound effects that I currently use are longer than 6 seconds, and it is very likely that the users who uploaded these audio assets will not bother to manually set all of them to “public” after this update.
A relatively simple solution I would like to propose is not making previously uploaded audio assets private automatically.
