Experiences using Marketplace Items - Policy update

[BravenwolfTFS (Braven)]

@Roblox

Historically, our Marketplace was primarily populated with Roblox-created items. As we are about to open up creation to a larger portion of the creator community, we have to better ensure fairness to those creators.

Stupid change. It should be a given that once something is on the catalog, people will use it in games. This should be the problem of the UGC creator, not us. It’s their choice to publish it to the marketplace. It’s clear that they’re being given priority because they’re making Roblox so much money.

@Roblox

Prevent items that are not available to purchase from being used in the experience (i.e., zero quantity, only for resale, or off-sale items) with our CatalogSearchParams tools.

This isn’t even remotely fair. This is going to destroy a number of legacy games whose creators, and for the love of god, I keep having to say this EVERY TIME you make a stupid, uninformed, retroactive update, ARE NO LONGER ON THE PLATFORM.

I’m not about to bother going through my games from 2015 - 2020 just because you made yet ANOTHER horrendous decision, because your new UGC plan (which, by the way, is going to absolutely HAMMER you with copyright claims!) is coming up.

What about games that have museums using avatars from people who own those items? What about games that use them in creative or transformative ways? What about games that are old, and haven’t been updated in years? How about games that just placed models of generic characters using said accessories?

@Roblox

At Roblox, the importance of treating creators with mutual respect, providing equal opportunities for monetizing their creations, and protecting intellectual property (IP) is crucial to our platform.

If you REALLY cared about “Intellectual property”, the UGC catalog would not be positively BOMBARDED with low-quality items that were stolen from other creators or are blatantly using IPs that the creators don’t have permission to use.

The entire reason the UGC catalog is so bad is because Roblox is purposefully abusing the negligence of the IP-holders to milk the items for as much money as possible until some major case gets filed against Roblox, causing an absolute purge of items, just like with the audio update. Roblox is FULLY aware of the issue and only chooses to let it slide until it absolutely can’t anymore, all for the sake of lining their own pockets.

So, with all due respect, don’t even open your mouth on this topic. You are in NO position to talk IP until you actually crack down on copyright violation, not just when it suits your billionaire corporation crusade.

@Roblox

Please note that an unaffiliated avatar Marketplace item is one that the Experience creator did not create themselves or have a direct agreement with the item’s Creator to distribute or incorporate in the Experience.

This is also ridiculous. Games like Catalog Avatar Creator are going to be borderline unusable because of this change, and that’s a problem, because it’s way better than Roblox’s crummy, barely-functional avatar editor. That game has so many QOL features that I would absolutely furious to go without, especially considering how terrible Roblox’s actual avatar editor is.

Additionally, 2D faces should be exempt from this. Nobody wants to use Dynamic faces except for your stockholders, this has been made abundantly clear by the majority of the community. I wouldn’t be surprised if 2D faces going off-sale was conveniently planned in tandem with this update for the sole purpose of trying to pressure your users into wearing the Dynamic faces.

Take a look at your post’s like count. Now look at the first comment’s. Take the L, revert the change, and for the love of god, consult your community next time. It seems like every time we get one good update, we get three bad ones in return, and all of them stem from the same exact problem; A lack of communication with your developers BEFORE introducing god awful changes that nobody has ever asked for.

@Roblox

As a next step, we will thoroughly consider all your use cases and feedback, and refine the policy as appropriate while respecting creators’ rights. Once we finalize the policy, we will provide ample time to meet its requirements. We promise to keep you updated with any new information in the coming days.

Good! Glad to see the feedback being taken into account. I would highly advise you to be very careful with the updated policy, because you are treading a very fine line. This refined policy better not be anything like the wet fart of an excuse Unity put out.

[Webmotion]

Hi,

This update will completely prevent me from receiving my monthly DevEx.

Will you be issuing a refund for each member of my games community due to the fact they will no longer be able to use items they have purchased?

Please stop this change

[ccz (Dev)]

So… now just any old experience that doesn’t receive updates will be executed due to off sale faces simply because Roblox doesn’t want to support the non-animated faces anymore. Rest in peace all my old favorites.

[BushMessiah (HWBUSH)]

Wow, roblox biggest L of the year, terrible terrible change, this is worst than R6 depreciation and classic faces going offsale. Ive been working on my game for months now and it’s not even out yet and this policy will pretty much ruin it cause it contains many roblox classic gear tools items and roblox offsales items and faces, as i am currently working on an avatar editor.

This is outrageous and i have no clue why would anyone at the corporation think that this would be a good idea. Please, for god sake, do not make that change, listen to the community for once and do not make these policies changes, they are ruining years and months of hard work game development and does not provide any good side benefit to creators.

[Send_Scripts (Scripty)]

Giving people 1 week to fix their games with a policy change this big is insulting

[PeZsmistic]

If you are capable of delaying this, there is clearly no pressing legal precedent. What on earth happened that you felt it was acceptable to give the developer community one week to react to a game-ending policy change??

All levels of the company need to be brought up to the same standards on rigor and respect around public communication and announcement auditing as well as simply understanding the platform holistically before making decisions. This is embarrassing.

I’m sure you had feedback for this change coming from at least somewhere, and it was clearly outright ignored. What were the people responsible for this even thinking?

[JxstKilo]

Gotta stay on topic I guess

Well I think this update really just kills most games and the update really just sucks.

[oliwieer4 (Mathew)]

I wish I could just simply become some random moderator on this platform and just casually scroll down on UGC assets and take the ones that simply are plain rip-off from other games like tf2 heavy’s head or somethin

[Revelted]

I have come to realize that there is actually an entire genre of game that will be affected by this update?

like what happends to these guys?

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

Since all of my previous replies were removed, I will reconsolidate everything into one post:

1. Assets and content uploaded by “Roblox” should be allowed in experiences without requiring purchase prompts or permission.

2. This policy change should instead be enforced by tools given to UGC creators.

3. UGC creators should be able to decide who has access to their content, similar to how audio works.

4. This policy should only enforce punishment on those who try to bypass these systems in some way (such as reuploading assets without permission).

  5. It would be preferred if this policy update not be applied to games already using these assets,
    similar to the use of “Ro” or “Blox” in experience titles.

5. Experiences that haven’t updated/published after the given deadline should not be punished or have the assets in questioned removed. When that developer(s) attempt to update/publish their game, they should be prompted with a warning with a list of assets that will be removed or fail to load properly in their experience, if they continue with said update/publish attempt.

    Updated to better reflect @Blafert’s improved correction.

[zweleothiha (Luki)]

I’ll be surprised if roblox does something to this sudden uproar. First audios now this.

[xChris046x]

I feel like ROBLOX doesn’t understand, its not about “Refining” the policy. Its about not implementing it at all. Its not like they have a music company threatening to sue them. They own the platform and everything uploaded to it.

They could easily say, “All uploaded items to the catalog can have the mesh freely used in game as long as they are not selling the accessory itself for personal profit.” or just LITERALLY keep it as it is.

[Cantii]

Since my reply was moved to the other topic, I’d like to restate this.

Roblox shouldn’t be focused on trying to stifle the creativity of people - for example, MANY games use customization scripts that freely allow anyone to insert a hat from the marketplace (My game has this) without needed to pay. I personally believe this is fine as if they enjoy the item that much they’ll simply buy it from the site, circumventing any Robux gain we’d get from offering them to buy it ingame (you get a small cut of a sale of purchases made in your game for marketplace items last I remember).

What they should be adding to the ToS is that you cannot include UGC items in gamepasses for customization (i.e. directly monetizing the items without permission/without the creator getting profits from it). Some games out there will offer customization “packs” for characters that use UGC items - it’s in that case where the UGC creator would be actively losing out on profits and having their IP used to generate profit.

And instead of all of this, why can’t Roblox help by offering better security and control of assets to the creators? The audio update was a step in the right direction for safeguarding your assets, but why not extend this to games, models, meshes, and decals? People can easily steal games via exploiting clients and the developers have no way to defend themselves against this - from what I can find, there’s no way to outright DMCA someone on Roblox without jumping through a plethora of hoops.

Not to mention how many issues this brings up with the current moderation of Roblox - I understand the platform is big, but why target people for something so mundane and why add it to the ToS? There are multiple games that fly under Roblox’s radar that have adult content in them and they go unbanned for ages - why pile more work onto the site’s moderation in a way that directly stifles creativity for the players?

There are much better ways to tackle this situation but I feel as if there’s many, many other issues that Roblox should tackle before trying to do something like this especially with how detrimental this is to nearly every game on the site.

[colmidy]

why is roblox making seemingly useless updates?
it seems like no one is benefiting from this x-x ur not allowing your own players to use your own assets in your own game

[BitsTrigger]

I don’t see how this could be a good update whatsoever…

[thisdudeisrealbruh (ahaha)]

Will this affect games with StarterCharacters? For example, if your game had a StarterCharacter with marketplace hair, would the player have to own that hair?
Edit: I forgot to add, but this is quite possibly the worst idea Roblox has ever had, and that’s an accomplishment. This and making everything limited are horrible ideas, as was the 17+ game filter. Roblox is going into a downward spiral and I hate it. I’d switch to Unity game development but, well… I’ll let their recent Roblox-like choices speak for themself.

[AlteFore (IllIlIIllIIIlllI)]

This is a terrible, terrible policy and you know it. You need to completely can this and find a better way to do it, because this will KILL roblox. ROBLOX stock took a massive loss this week and it’s no mystery why.

[Minecrafter615]

what in the world?? why??? how does this help you at all roblox? this provides no meaningful addition to the platform and only serves to hurt developers and further restrict creativity.

so from what i’ve gathered; you power imagination unless you

1. want to make a game themed about roblox itself using classic roblox gears and items
2. want to make a roleplay game where you can equip certain marketplace items
3. want to make a dress-up game where you don’t feel like modelling a billion different clothing items

tldr: game platform/engine higher ups try not to make the worst policy additions ever 1 week challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

[AWESOMEguy101412 (MarzDev)]

we need to keep roblox from falling apart!

[OptimizedFunction]

This change will directly contradict the commitment of Roblox to continue to support old experiences through backwards compatibility.
I understand that this is not exactly an engine feature, but this will directly cause old experiences to violate the Community Standards, and make them vulnerable to moderation.

Is this how Roblox wishes to modernize itself? At the expense of its legacy?
Could Roblox explain what it has planned to prevent old games from being moderated?