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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I know this probably rarely happens, but do you get refunded for gamepasses if they or the game gets moderated? Gamepasses can cost a larger amount of Robux and usually serve a bigger purpose than clothes.
And considering scamming with gamepasses, the most Roblox will do is remove the scammer’s permission to use devex. I have never actually heard of instances where players have been refunded their Robux.
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I’m not completely sure about the area of which Roblox assets can be refunded or not. Gamepasses are actually a good example to compare to the new marketplace
Gamepasses can’t be tested and the purpose/function in-game may change over time.
Paid plugins sound like they’ll be treated this way as well.
As per observation, only special cases that involve purchases actually get refunds, so plugin scamming may actually be an issue upon release. The most we can do is to hope plugin moderation will consider refunding or post a feature request for this to be considered.
Please, never put a price floor on my plugins or I will just take mine all down and distribute them on github or something. I personally think plugins are best made open source, and I certainly won’t be developing any plugins that are closed-source any time soon.
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That’s part of this work - switch the asset type in the Toolbox → Marketplace tab to Plugins, and you can see whitelisted plugin creator’s work and install / purchase directly within Studio. The website mechanism still exists here.
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I also wonder what the profitability will be for plugins. It seems to me that, given your sales only make 24.5% of what comes into roblox, plugins won’t make too serious of revenue, but I would like to see some statistics once this is utilized for long enough.
My prediction is that the plugin catalog might be used to sell many things other than plugins (namely assets). However, once your assets are leaked, they’re leaked, and with plugins it’s really easy to leak them. Compared to the sales one could make on a game, it seems to me that plugins won’t be that lucrative of an investment. I could be wrong on that front though.
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The reason I suggested a 30 minute trial period is because the trial period must be short enough such that nobody can complete everything they need to do with the plugin within the trial period and avoid paying for it, yet long enough such that they can verify the plugin does what it says on the tin. (Though, to be fair a plugin such as this should/would not be terribly expensive to begin with.)
Requiring accounts to be verified in order to get the trial period like you said would also greatly discourage people from making alternate accounts to get multiple trial periods.
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Actually, on second thought, this is a non-issue considering there is already an upvote/downvote rating system. People are capable of determining whether a plugin is legit or not based off of this.