I used to support paid-for assets on the marketplace, but the issues that stand out to me include the following:
Reuploading assets
–This is a given topic of conversation. Obviously in the current state of things anyone can access anyone’s source code, however in the context of a paid-for marketplace, this simply cannot be the case. People will work hard just to have their assets stolen and released for free the day after it’s release.
Discovering Plugins
–The toolbox sucks. Let’s be honest. You can’t search the word “Trees” in your inventory and have all the models relevant to the word “Trees” appear. It just doesn’t happen. The search engine is so trash, people couldn’t find good plugins and models if they wanted to. There are plenty of high quality assets on the platform already, but you’re never going to find them without knowing the right people and communities to help point you in the right direction - this is something roblox admins will never experience because they’re involved in the entirety of roblox, not the clans / communities within it. Search in toolbox, still bad after many years - #8 by ToldFable
Killing small & beginning developers
–Devs like myself teach themselves everything from example. TurboFusion’s gun script is how I learned how to code, and from there I explored other free models. The problem is that by making every good free model pay - to - use, small developers (what roblox currently revolves around, I haven’t seen many AAA studios around here) have no outlet to see new applications of code in action, and the cookie cutter games that roblox produces for beginners are too simple to learn enough to make a steady game. Successful devs are born through experience and teaching themselves how to stitch the pieces of the puzzle together.
Killing communities that revolve around certain assets
–Take the car community on roblox, for example. Their whole existence revolves around the existance of Blender and A-Chassis. If the A-Chassis developers suddenly decided to make the price of their assets cost R$1000, all the members who didn’t have robux would have nothing to use as a chassis, pushing them back to modding other games like Assetto Corza or something.
–The same goes for the military community. The military community would not exist had there not been TurboFusion’s gun script back when it was first made. I haven’t been a part of this for a long time, so I do not know if they have diversified from it or not (I believe they have), but from what I do know, there are many, many communities on roblox which heavily rely on public free models. This would kill those.
Backdoors and clickbait
– We all know that exploiters use infected plugins to inject scripts into victim’s games so people who buy their exploit can inject server-sided code, but with something like this where it is a paid-for plugin, it is very easy to be a semi-respectable developer, get paid by an exploit developer, and publish a paid for plugin with disguised source code with a rat in it. @berezaa said that this could be fixed with permissions prompts, but to a newbie developer who has no experience with exploit protection or cautious practices when making a game, or an experienced developer who is too lazy to double - check his code, this could easily become a vulnerability. Obfuscated code, indenting off the screen & using require(assetid), etc. There are a million ways to exploit without invoking a permissions prompt; you’re really giving any plugin maker access to your game in studio. Any exploiter with half a brain could see this as a real money-making opportunity. Services like HTTP Service could have a legitimate use to the plugin, but also be used as a backdoor at the same time, and there is no way to vet that out.
–Clickbait is already a problem on roblox and we all know that. It would be very easy for a “developer” of a clickbait, empty plugin to sell it to some unsuspecting kid who is told it will give him robux and doesn’t know up from down. Let’s remember this is roblox we are talking about. I’m not going to go into major details because we all know the facts about this, but keep it in the back of your mind.
There are three types of roblox players - the kids who play games and spend a lot of money, the middle ground who participate in group activities and make small - time assets for personal use, and the full - fledged developers who make games. This (uncalled for) update would kill the entry to that middle ground and basically eliminate all the 12-16 year old players on the platform. I think pretending roblox is unity is a very bad, risky move.
There is a very common issue with plugins in general: some of them are malicious and perform undesired operations to our games in Studio, and most of them are secretive. Thus, personally, I would have to disable each and every plugin to stop this issue; but then I do not get to USE them.
For this, there should be a Security factor built-in with every plugin that shows how secure a plugin is in terms of the trust (can I install this without it causing trouble to my Studio?). It should depend on customer reviews (now “customer” because of the money aspect) and maybe an AI that “checks” for malicious code. This way, we know that the plugins we install can be trusted.
Yeah, I think a review system would work but only for like Premium users. This would basically completely demolish the chance of anything being botted as you’d have to pay to do so. The reason I say this is because developers usually have Premium anyway.
While I agree that adding safety features is a big step towards confidence and security, what’s to stop someone from making a plugin that just gives their user admin when they join the game?
Even if you block http, etc so the place can’t be remotely attacked or copied, or destroyed, it’s still fairly easy to do damage just by telling Roblox to do something different when a specific user joins the game.
Maybe restricting access to seeing what parts exist within studio? Ie can’t see the players folder? Can’t create certain types of objects?
I would imagine it would have to be fairly complex. Your thoughts?
Isn’t this kind of going against their whole model of anyone can create a game? Putting prices on things like models and audios would limit the number of developers who can create a game. Although this amount may be small, it would affect the younger developers, newer developers and those who aren’t skilled in every aspect of creation.
Also as many have already brought up, this would cause a plethora of copied assets ultimately creating another insanity like the clothes catalog.
Allowing developers to create plugins for Robux incentivizes growth. I believe this would give beginning developers something to strive for.
I don’t see free models going away any time soon.
I also believe that if an entire community forms around a model, said community would be more than happy to pay a relatively small fee to get higher quality models with more frequent updates.
This is by far my biggest concern. I would have to agree with you on this point. Permissions prompts could work, but even this has vulnerabilities.
One possible solution would be to have a community-led team of trusted plugin approvers who look through the code, coupled with a fee of around 1K Robux for making the plugin pay-to-use.
Can Roblox at least display all current free plugins in the marketplace though? I figured this meant that only certain people could sell plugins, not that only certain plugins would be displayed.
This creates an unfair advantage for those who can currently sell plugins. Literally all other plugins are essentially nonexistent being hidden away in the highly-obscure library. Since sellers have all the visibility, they can flood the market with their versions of plugins and render everything else null.
If the concern is bots, they can already flood the model and image tabs. I don’t see the point of barring the plugins tab to prevent botting if those aren’t going to be fixed.
This allows the mid-tier devs to incentivize public asset creation, but for the people who want to learn how to code from scratch, and learn by viewing other people’s examples, this is a catastrophe. Eventually you run out of aspiring devs.
Free models will always stick around, but the quality of those free models will degenerate to nothingness. You’ll be stuck with a bunch of outdated models that have broken with roblox updates and are simply useless. The users can’t appreciate the model enough to “donate a small fee” when they’ve never tried the model in the first place (which will happen when the search bar continues to suck). Not to mention, this will basically make it impossible to become a roblox developer without paying money. I’ve bought robux very few times and have made quite a bit more robux than I’ve bought. It doesn’t make any sense to limit the community like that (not to mention, kids don’t beg their mom for her credit card to buy a store asset, they buy game powerups.)
I agree. Not everyone wants people looking at their asset’s source code, . Still, being able to view the source code of plugins and models and scripts I put in my game has helped me to learn and understand programming in Roblox better.
This is another issue. For the plugin marketplace to be perfect we need to be able to find plugins easily, and like some have said, a review system and perhaps even the ability to upload videos and pictures of your plugin like on the page for a game is critical.
I don’t exacly see how paid plugins goes against their model. I do agree that it would be wonderful not to need to pay for asset uploads, but at the end of the day, Roblox needs to generate revenue, and so do developers.
Overall I am excited about these new changes, though I am somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, I desire to sell assets without people stealing them and giving them away for free. On the other, I also want to know exactly what I am putting in my game.
A welcome addition, but personally I have no hope that this will work effectively if the clothing botting issue still hasn’t been fixed. I would rather want to see something being done to fix bots before more marketplace features like these are implemented.
Regarding closed-source plugins, it would be cool to have a “permissions”-based window that shows you what exactly the plugin uses to work, similar to a window appearing before you download apps notifying that it accesses your camera, microphone, etc. This would offer developers more peace of mind into paying and installing other paid plugins from people that they dont trust as much.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)