As a plugin developer, the current system of a static price is alright, but I would love to see a pay what you want option for buying plugins.
Instead of the current system, you could enable a toggle that switches to a pay what you want system and you can set a minimum price that a plugin can sell for.
With this pay what you want system, developers would be able to pay as much (or as little) as they want for a plugin. This would really support plugin creators, especially if people find it as a valuable tool.
A pay what you want system on Roblox sounds cool and all, but if it was added it wouldn’t really add anything new, it’d just make supporting developers a fraction easier at best.
Currently if someone wanted to get something, they’d pay whatever the price is. If they wanted to support the dev further, they’d just buy more of their stuff (be it actual creations or things created simply as donation placeholders)
If this was implemented, sure it would skip the need for having seperate donation items, but it would also be opened way up for abuse (no more need for users to set item values each time they’re trying to steal robux, just purchase an item for as much as possible)
I would love to see a pay what you want option as well, I just can’t see it bringing enough to the table to be worth all the effort for roblox to implement it.
It’s quite hard to get to that point though, since you can’t open Roblox links, for example to a game that hosts Developer Products, and this is standard on sites such as itch.io.
I personally didn’t want the Plugin Marketplace opened up, but Roblox could still limit this to us who was part of the beta to prevent this. They still have DevForum groups for this function.
It seems like pay-what-you-want systems on other platforms like Itch.io end up just being the minimum price every time (especially if the minimum is 0).
While I think this feature seems like a nice idea, I think there are already alternatives that work decently well.
For example:
Having a paid version of the plugin on the marketplace then having a free download on GitHub (commonly used)
Having a donation/tip link
“lite” and “pro” versions of plugins (also commonly used)
I would 100% support this if I thought people would actually pay above the minimum price at a significant rate, but it seems on other platforms this is almost never the case.
It’s been nearly a year since a bunch of us moved to itch.io and there has been no indication when or if we are getting this. I’m actually surprised it took this long for a thread to be posted. Honestly, I’ve thought about creating my own plugin manager to bypass Roblox. I haven’t done it… yet, and I hope Roblox can make it stay that way somehow - and I don’t see this being what stops me.
Variable payments was brought up many times in the plugin marketplace before and after it became somewhat public. In theory, it would mainly benefit those who have a small market but said market is really profitable and is willing to pay a lot for plugins. For example, my unit testing plugin is not a popular plugin because unit testing is not a common practice - a lot of colleges don’t even cover it despite it being critical in enterprise. This means those who use unit testing are probably the bigger players and have more money to give to solutions. Unit testing has helped enable games that have made tens of thousands of dollars. I’d go back and pay that tool a few hundred dollars for helping me out.
There is a problem with all of this though: Robux. For example, let’s say I made a cool plugin that is important for game developers on Roblox who take their work seriously. Maybe it is $200 one-time (this is nothing for enterprise software, but ignore that) as the minimum. In addition, you are new and don’t have Robux from a game. That becomes >80K Robux. You need to spend ~$800 just for me to get $200. That is 4x my profit and Roblox earns 3x more than me for simple file hosting. The concept of Robux is shared between taxing services that rely on large-scale, live game hosting to very simple “is there an update for this file?” and “can I have this 30KB file?”. Content delivery like that isn’t that expensive. Definitely not as much hosting game servers and the interconnects between them.
Because of that, I’m not even sure I would use this anymore if I suddenly got word this came out. The insane tax of Robux falls apart for plugins and still has to be paid. If the option is to force you to pay 4x what I want, why not 2x my price and handle it off-platform so you pay that same price instead? This incentive is dangerous, especially for Roblox. We’ve seen what has happened when people use external services to bypass Roblox’s protections. My hope in the plugin marketplace is low and I no longer think this feature would save it…
…but we still should have it. You know, convenience and safety after all.
Either way, I think this still could be worth it. We already know how Plugin Developers are underpaid (refer to @.Elttob’s videos), and Roblox isn’t even giving us much attention.
I thought it would end up being more like $144, since 30% sales tax + 70% DevEx tax + around 30% irl taxes. Roblox does need a whole different payment system for the marketplace whatsoever, but I don’t think they ever responded to @.Elttob’s complaints about the marketplace, I know they responded to some of their newer complaints about the treatment of developers.
Hopefully this should be getting back on track soon anyways.
Setting a minimum price to sell the plugin will not help smaller developers because they would still need to buy it. Maybe if the “minimum price to sell” feature was replaced by “pay what you want”, then I can see this helping out a lot of developers because they would have easier access to plugins to speed up their development workflows, and therefore, more games come out sooner.
“This would really support plugin creators” does not count as a problem. You should focus on the problem rather than the feature and proposed solutions.
The problem is the fact that plugin developers are underpaid, and no, this does not address changing the cuts we get, however this could result in an increase of income.
Wanted to bump this again with the recent Creator Store changes. This is more important now than ever with USD pricing and it would be nice if developers were able to charge less money for their plugins (e.g. $20 > $5) through this system if it’s funded by developers who can pay more for plugins (e.g. big developers could pay $100 for a $5 plugin which would allow the plugin developer to make a decent bit of money whilst allowing it to be cheaper for those who can’t afford it).
I’m hoping to eventually get a feature request through for integrating student discounts if plugin developers choose to (so plugins can be more accessible) using a verification platform such as UNiDAYS or StudentBeans, but it’s hard at the moment with not having access to post here
Honestly, you’re not wrong, paid access games could definitely benefit from this as well because some games are pretty high quality and they only charge 25 Robux to buy.
I don’t know how this would work with private servers though.
