The success of my games is irrelevant to the pricing and fairness for plugin developers, and the 3rd-world country argument is equally ignorant. Given the current state of the marketplace, it is not possible to make any profit from plugins. So, if a user from a country that has less currency value wants to support themselves, they cant without pricing their plugins in a non-Robux style.
This isn’t a “rich get richer” situation. I’ve earned under 20 dollars between all of my plugins in all time.
I understand you’re trying to be empathetic to those in other countries, but in the process you’re actually belittling them and treating those in other countries as users who aren’t developers themselves. Additionally, just because somebody is in a “first world” country does not mean their quality of life should be undermined. In order to survive in such countries, the proportion of earnings has to be higher, otherwise you don’t meet basic needs.
Also, food bills are about $400 a month, not $80. You’re also making the assumption that somebody is buying my plugin every day. Also, $80 in India is not “barely surviving”, it’s clear you don’t understand cost of living and quality of life in other countries like that.
If you want to use the argument that I’m just “so rich”, that’s not even true. About 90% of my game’s revenue goes to paying other people (including those in other countries) much better. In fact, I don’t even survive on income from my games alone and instead seek work for others to support myself so I can pay for rent, food, utilities, and other basic needs.
You don’t exactly have any experience with making plugins I have to assume.
I make paid plugins myself and this update is going to impact my ability to sell personally, but this update does not make the “rich get richer”. They were never rich to begin with. I have never been able to DevEx personally.
I don’t know whether you know this, but you only keep 24.5% of the money you make from a plugin and that’s before you even account for taxes by IRS/HMRC. If I price a plugin at 400 Robux, it roughly equates to US$5. With Roblox fees, it then goes down to just under US$1.25 (too lazy to pull out a calculator) that developers are earning from a plugin. You would probably need at least 1000 sales every month just to live comfortably (granted I don’t know how the situation is like in the US) and we aren’t even including taxes, which could take us down to more like US$900.
I am not happy with the update personally with not allowing Robux support in some way for those who can’t pay for various reasons or who can’t sell due to restrictions out of developers control.
How are those arguments irrelevant and ignorant? You’re throwing words you don’t even understand what they mean to see what sticks. You’re seriously toxic as you can’t even argue rationally but must insist on gaslighting people into doing your bidding like you are doing right now to me. No, those are not ignorant and they are not irrelevant arguments. They are important because fairness is not a static value that applies to everyone equally, but a relative one which is dependant on the persons affected. The very essence of your irrationality is that you think that everyone is the same and therefore has the same needs and standards as to what being fair means to them. This is the core issue with your thinking that needs to change if you are to actually start making sense.
They literally can with devex should they choose to use it. If you’re going to argue “oh, but the rates!” then forget it. Those rates for them are much better because their currency is weaker compared to the dollar and so it allows them to profit from devex more than you do, despite earning the same amount of dollars.
Making them purchasable via real-life currency only will not make them more profitable. Quite the contrary, it will decrease the amount of potential buyers and incentivise those who do to distribute them to others for a much smaller price, eventually leading to full-blown piracy where your plugins are given out for free. It has already happened in gmod without the game even making this change. It will happen here. It already is happening here.
Making those plugins of yours only purchasable via USD or converted currencies will not make you earn more dollars. It will only decrease the amount of potential buyers severely. If you’re making little profits from the market as is, you will make even less profit should the market be restricted so much as to disallow robux from being used in the transactions - which was the way plugins were bought since they ever could be purchased. Then again, I don’t really see why you would care about losing profits, since your profits here are negligible to you, and you earn more from other sources.
I am not. I come from a 2nd world country myself and I understand their struggle more than you do. I understand how it feels to be poor and to be hungry, which is why I emphasize with them more than you ever could. Those changes are immensely hurtful, as they make the level needed to enter the commercial side of roblox (by earning actual $$$ profit) much higher. This is my entire point. Because of this change the smallest developers from the poorest regions will suffer the most, as they will not be able to purchase those plugins without jeopardizing their financial stability - and that is if they even have one, as I sure didn’t.
Your quality of life isn’t undermined by my comments. I merely want to keep the status quo, in which your quality of life was already very high compared to mine and theirs. You ask for what you accuse me of - you ask to reduce our quality of life just so that you have a chance of increasing your own. You are in no position to ask us or demand from us this, nor are you in position to criticize us for defending ourselves.
If you mean the proportion of earning in DevEx, then I’m either understanding you wrong or you are completely wrong. Either way, the current devex rate is good and is sufficient to give those in 2nd and 3rd world countries enough money for it to be fair for them. Certainly, for you it’s not because you’re earning your native currency in your own native rate. For them it is because they’re earning an alien currency in in an alien rate which is much higher than it otherwise would have been should Roblox be based in their countries and operate with their currency and provide devex for their people only or focused only for them.
Roblox, with its current rates, focuses more on the world average, which means those in the first world surely are slightly impaired when it comes to what they earn, but those in 2nd and 3rd world are elevated.
You’re an ignorant arrogant guy who doesn’t even understand how to use google. In India for 80$ you could even afford to live in a flat in one of the cheaper areas like Kolkata. For less than a half of that you can afford groceries in India. Of course, it’s not going to be luxurious, you won’t be able to afford to go to a fancy restaurant everyday. Although with 400$ per month just for food, you definitely could afford to go to a fancy restaurant not just every month, but every few days and still have money left for regular groceries.
You certainly act like this, especially when you said you need 400$ for food to survive as proof that my arguments are somehow invalid (which they are not, you just used your own metric in your own country which is completely irrelevant because my point literally acknowledges that the devex differences are much better for 2nd and 3rd world than 1st world).
Also adding further to my stance on this: I wish there was a solution that made it easier for some people to pay.
If I was able to right now (can’t because I can’t post feature requests and I don’t want to annoy regular friends to post them ), I would be advocating for some sort of student discount system. A lot of plugin developers agree that the pricing that we may be charging now/in the future is unfair to smaller developers and we’re trying to solve that. There’s a feature request currently active for pay as you scale systems which if approved should help and I would also like to see one for regional pricing making it more balanced in certain regions.
Say that to those who have their plugins on the front page and of which there are youtube videos about that not just recommend you those plugins but tell you that you need them to work in roblox studio. Moon animator for example. They’re gonna profit the most out of this. They already drained the waters for broke potential buyers and are left with those who are the richest, so the amount of buyers will certainly decrease, but not by a large margin.
That’s fine. In my country, for 1250$ per month, you could live comfortably indeed. Although this is only for 2nd world countries. In other countries, say India, 1250$ per month would be enough to not just give you a comfortable life, but a luxurious one. Probably not enough to be part of the upper class, but definitely enough to afford everything the middle class in India has - at least if you live by yourself. If you live with a family, and you’re the only one who earns money, then sure, they won’t live as good.
Indeed, my only demand was that plugins should be purchasable with robux. I don’t mind if there is an option to buy them with irl currency for a price that is cheaper for the customer than buying them with robux and yet yields more profit for the seller than if he sold it for robux. I don’t mind, that’s okay. I only want robux to be still allowed to be used in transactions like those. That’s my only demand.
You completely ignored my own arguments and I can easily see why. Everyone check out his profile and look at his groups, they all have the same logos, names and cash-grab games meant only to profit off of this platform and bring nothing valuable to the table. He’s only arguing against it because it stops him from profiting at the expense of others. You really have no say in this.
No, that is incorrect. Robux pricing is great because this allows impoverished developers to get plugins without spending any of their money in real life. Thanks to this, they don’t have to resort to piracy to get what they want and thus don’t have to risk having their computers become compromised by bad actors who distribute infected files.
Do you need plugins to make roblox games? No. Do plugins help you make good roblox games? Yes. Moon Animator is one example. It allows you to do advanced animations while in roblox studio. DataStore Editor is another. It allows you to edit datastores conveniently and quickly. Archimedes - when you need to make complex shapes that doing manually would make them look off and would take 100x times longer. Stravant tools - fills edges, realigns parts, reflects entire models perfectly. RigEdit - allows you to create custom characters with a custom skeleton. Without it, making a custom rig would be a terrible chore. Welding plugins, RBX music plugins, etc. Without those plugins your ability to make games is impaired and worse. It makes making those games less fun, more tedious and more like a chore. So to say that not having plugins will not put you on a disadvantage is wrong.
So to sum it all up: Plugins are very important and can benefit you greatly and decrease the amount of time needed to do work. Paying robux for plugins allows the poorest developers to afford them without spending anything themselves. This update will hurt the smallest developers from the most impoverished places in the world.
Looks like @Elttob is making sure that when the store launches, anyone will still be able to access his plugins if it’s not possible to via the Creator Store through Access Anywhere, a no questions asked program that allows developers in unavailable regions to access his plugins.
You can earn robux without paying for robux. You can work for game studios for robux. You can sell gamepasses and game products for robux. You can even go as far as to beg in donate games for robux. There’s a lot of ways to get robux.
“Robux is not an option”
Younger developers exist and those who can’t take advantage of USD pricing because of limitations, including me. Robux payments are the only option if I feel like I need some plugin. Infact, not even Sellers are protected from this change. Some of them might not be able to monetize their plugin, resorting to other methods of monetization or completely just not bothering with it.
Simply said, young audiences would be stranded trying to sell plugins. Even if Robux is far simplier, the poison you get is insane fees due to DevEx rates so you either:
Keep Robux as an option for easier accessibility, but introduce ridiculous fees and very high pricing floor just to somehow profit off.
Go with new USD pricing to eliminate fees, but lose marginal part of store accessibility (which can also affect sellers)
and yes ik that if plugin is paid it doesnt mean that the end of the world is now. there are obviously free alternatives that potentially have the same function, but plugins simply automate some of the tedious tasks if youre lazy to whip out command bar
Glad for the approach taken. I really hope plugin developers will follow this either. It’s not fun when you’re in a top #3 world’s most popular country ending up just stranded away from a store because the service go “nuh uh”.
this took a while to properily formulate it, and i might still be in the wrong.
Hello, a question regarding plugins published under groups, will those all need to be republished under accounts in order to sell them now or will support for groups come later on? My sister and I combined our talents for a couple plugins we’ve launched this year however, while setting everything up for this change, I noticed that group plugins are excluded. Unfortunately too much time and work went into creating these plugins to make them free. If this is the case, will taking the current (group published) ones off the marketplace disable them from use in studio as well? There’s only 4 people who have purchased these plugins so far as they’re so new but I want to make sure they’re not going to be effected and will still be able to continue using the item they’ve purchased.
I hope this is the case then and they push group support soon because I’m not sure what I should do. I’m keeping them off the marketplace until I know then.
), I would be advocating for some sort of student discount system. A lot of plugin developers agree that the pricing that we may be charging now/in the future is unfair to smaller developers and we’re trying to solve that. There’s a feature request currently active for pay as you scale systems which if approved should help and I would also like to see one for regional pricing making it more balanced in certain regions.
