With the upcoming Roblox Audios change, all Audio is going to function like Animations currently do, where the asset must be uploaded under the game creator. This means that if you own a group, you will no longer be able to use audios stored in your account in the group, and vice versa.
This is the biggest downside of Animations, and having no way to control the access before the update comes will result in a lot of severe problems for games and by consequence Roblox.
Let’s see why:
1. Longer Moderation Queues
Take a game where 100+ sounds are uploaded under the group owner’s account. This user will have to reupload all those under the group. Those are 100 audios for moderation to review. Now multiply that by thousands of games.
2. Unsortable Clutter
Why upload the same audio twice? This is going to cause unrelated groups (for example, an audio made for one group might get used in another) to have to upload audios that do not necessarily need to be there. With the lack of a search mechanism for user owned audios, this is going to make looking for owned audios on the website a huge pain for any developer.
3. Games Will Break
A lot of people and teams, myself included, have a ton of our audios split across groups and accounts. If this change goes forwards and if we were hypothetically inactive or someone in our team no longer had the audio files etc., we would lose them forever. Now take a look at older games that are still enjoyed by many but the developers are inactive. Yeah, we’ll lose all those.
4. It is not professionally sustainable
In my case, I work with different teams across different groups. This is going to create a huge issue that we already face with animations where equal assets will have to be reuploaded and adjusted for all those different games.
Animations are extremely problematic as they stand for professional teams working on multiple games on Roblox. Managing a team with Animations requires hacky workarounds at the moment, where if you don’t want a developer to have access to all of a group’s assets you need to split the animations by group and access. (Yes, because the permissions system doesn’t work either!!!)
Now imagine sounds being the same pain. What would we even be able to do? Upload the same sounds multiple times and then create different handlers for each game? It’s unrealistic to expect professional teams to be able to put up with that forever. This will create incentives to move out of platform, which are visibly already happening in the changes thread, and that is no good.
We desperately need the ability to control asset privacy access. We need to be able to decide what users and groups get access to the assets BEFORE this rolls out.