Beginner developers will definitely struggle to come up with features that would actually contain a purpose. All the easy ideas would be taken already. And putting it on sale for Robux would be pointless if it is easy to make. I don’t believe this adds any incentive for newer developers.
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Loving this update, expanding the paid marketplace to here really goes well with the new UGC update. It really shows how much more developers can do now, and it makes me really excited for the future! Hoping this update will bring many quality plugins, and I think lots of people will be inspired by this update to work harder on and become more creative with their plugins. Super excited to see what this will bring!
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So when does the public get this access?
Also another concern I had, is that plugins are open source. When you download a plugin, it goes into your plugins folder, and you can easily get the source. How can this be prevented from buying plugins.
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I tend to disagree with this. In general, while some may be discouraged to find that their ideas are already taken, I think that many would instead rather have the experience of recreating that idea. In fact, many, many guides in #resources:community-resources that probably all address the same general idea (e.g., Trello how-to’s, intro to Lua guides), but tons are still created each week anyways.
If we are looking at the growth, I feel like the developer community would still grow regardless of whether there are paid plugins or not.
New developers, I feel, would actually feel more inspired to recreate the plugins that they see. From my perspective, they are purely looking for the experience, the ability to learn something that they are new to, instead of doing it purely for monetary purposes.
I think this has little to do with the entire update itself. If its features are being overpriced then demand will fall and the market will naturally do its thing, forcing the plugin to be lowered in price or new features that come out to meet the price that it’s being put as.
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I believe a possible solution to buying and selling without people re-uploading would be to include a server-side. On the client, the user would be asked which permissions they are willing to grant to the plugin developer.
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If Read/Write Script Source, Insert Assets and Require External Modules are all permissions, then no, a plugin would not be able to do this without raising eyebrows.
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Staff will check the plugins code before being published, right? Because people can easily sell plugins that doesn’t work very well or are a copy of others. (With other problems too such as security, etc.)
(My own opinion: I don’t really like this idea)
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Problems such as security cannot be solved by Roblox. It’s ultimately down to the developer to ensure that the plugin is clean and safe. Reputation from the owner is obviously excellent, but a long term solution such as plugin permissions is a more elegant, and easier solution for both parties.
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I think they should do something similar as UGC Update. You should met requirements and be approved by Roblox to sell Plugins.
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While this feature is quite nice, part of me wonders what the drawbacks of this could be. I can see a lot of people providing already free plugins for x-amount when it could’ve stayed free if this feature wasn’t out. In addition, the cost of what you buy vs. the quality of what you get will / can fluctuate and I’m not sure that’s a risk some developers are willing to take.
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That’s not the purpose of having an approval system. That also requires moderators to be able to read and understand lua code, which I’m going to take a wild guess and say only a very select few of them will be able to do. It takes a significant amount of time away from Roblox staff.
Not only that, but it makes a very slow process for updating plugins. I personally would much rather understand exactly what permissions a plugin needs to operate.
I think only certain people should sell plugins, people that Roblox can trust, if someone sells a “troll” plugin or bugged, etc. (which will be most likely impossible because they select who can sell) it will be easier to moderate that plugin than moderating hundreds of plugins.
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I have roughly 20+ plugins that I’ve downloaded for free in the past, but I only use 1 out of the 20 plugins to this day for my game development. Being able to experiment / try out the plugins is great because you can determine if it’s something that you will actually use or not.
I think that there should be a free trial (of maybe 1-week) for paid plugins (if your account is verified) so that developers can decide on whether or not they want that service / plugin.
To prevent developers from making alt accounts for new free trials, they could require the user to have a premium membership if they want to start a free trial - or they could limit the free trial to 30 minutes.
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While this feature sounds like a huge opportunity for developers, I can see that this is gonna be another feature that’s just there that no one would actually want to use because there’s no assurance that our code is actually safe. Currently, plugin source code is installed on a person’s local machine and I’m pretty sure almost everyone knows how to view and extract this.
Moderating the code per plugin uploaded would be a feature I’m waiting to hear about. Will there be some sort of obfuscation or encryption implemented to prevent code extraction?
Also if re-uploaded plugins can be moderated, what about plugins that are reuploaded on websites other than roblox? Sure, maybe there’s some sort of encryption implemented, however how far will the security be implemented in the long run? I personally would only sell plugins if my code was secure somewhere in the cloud and not downloaded on a person’s machine even with encryption whatsoever.
Given the current solutions Roblox has tried to use in the past and until now, there’s just no sense of security anywhere. I hope this new marketplace will change this and I am expecting a lot from this new marketplace 
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This is actually a big concern. Perhaps a “try-before-you-buy” feature would be required to combat this? I.e. a 30 minute trial period or something of the sort.
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I suggested a 1-week trial, but I think that your suggestion of a 30 minute trial would work a lot better - especially if the accounts have to be verified in order to start a free trial.
The market for plugins is probably a whole lot lower compared to the market for catalog items because most Roblox users are arguably gamers as opposed to top developers - so it makes sense that actual developers would probably buy the plugin as opposed to trying to trying to avoid paying anything.
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You always have the freedom to bring up concerns like this to the moderation team. I’m pretty sure your Robux would be refunded and the plugin would be taken down until appropriate action is taken.
Of course, you’d always want to buy assets from trusted developers and there are tools available to remove backdoors that the plugin may insert. However one concern is assurance that the advertized plugin actually works and does what it is intended to do.
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I highly doubt they would return your Robux. Last I checked you don’t get it back when clothes you purchased get moderated.
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This is just… sad, but true
While clothes may be one asset to compare to plugins, I think plugins would have a significantly higher price/value compared to clothes. You’re purchasing something that opens a lot of possibilities as compared to clothes, they’re just avatar appearance.
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The issue I see with this is that plugin “hijacking” is still going to be an issue even with permissions. If someone wants to inject admin, for instance, into many people’s games, all they need to do is find a plugin that legitimately needs script source writing, and use it as a trojan for malicious code that inserts their admin script. This is a very simplified example but the basis is still there. I think keeping the open atmosphere of plugins (I view as game code that runs in studio) is the way to go. Not to mention, individually approving permissions (as specific as they’d need to be for a safe usage experience) would become very annoying very fast.
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