14 posts were moved out for being off-topic.
Okay think of it this way, if we buy from developers we trust then how are new comer developer that made an awesome plugin suppose to ever sell of we are only buying from people we trust?
Simple, Roblox moderates the situation and roblox returns the robux to the person who bought it.
I hope this new feature works out well, I havenât been on for some time and just came back to start developing again. Though I can maybe see some people in the future exploiting this feature, maybe false advertising a pluginâs features for currency, I still think this is an amazing feature to be added into a diverse game like ROBLOX.
I think this feature might be hard on some new developers looking for plugins, though could benefit the seller greatly, if their product is very popular and capable of handling many of Studioâs features easily.
I just love how the security part of this whole thing like re-uploading our source code of the plugins isnât being addressed.
9 Likes
Great idea!
What about a Models?
I think itâs better with âbuyâ in Models ?
although i appreciate the idea (plugin creators work VERY hard at what they did, this is something that is kinda late honestly, wish it was there a long time ago like UGC but glad its out now) and I see how the benefits outweigh the cons, one thing comes up to my mind:
Poor developers: Time to add âLearn how to create really good pluginsâ to the list of things to do (because they canât afford buying good ones in the future)
1 Like
His comment was about Models and Audio, not Plugins.
I love the way that you guys are expanding ways to have developerâs grow. This feature is great but, having plugins charged for Robux is kind of not my wroth of looking at. Maybe down the road Iâll look at this feature again in 2020.
Thank you for saving this feature! Now I donât have to go to the manage plugin window
EDIT: Iâve seen some people saw the problems about the update, although this can save users from going to the Manage Plugins window, I felt pretty bad for broke devs when they saw robux for plugin as they tried to use some used free plugins (now paid).
There are already enough tools available to protect your pluginâs source code. I donât see a need to protect their files with complicated mechanisms.
The parent of the pluginâs uploaded model has an asset ID in the format âPlugin_12345â. You can check whether its name matches and then crash the plugin if it doesnât match.
To make it very difficult to work around this DRM, you can use an obfuscator like IronBrew to hide the source code, like itâs some kind of speghetti.
You can look at the error log from this picture to see what I mean:
I am not a big fan of obfuscated code though. I have a strict policy of not using anything in Roblox Studio with obfuscated code. This means Iâm probably going to refrain from using paid plugins whenever I can replicate the same functionality myself.
Iâm also not a big fan of this change overall. I suppose this means plugins are not free to modify and adapt in general, unlike other asset types in the Library.
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I sincerely dislike this addition in its current form. There needs to be a way to try plugins before purchasing them - asking newer developers to invest in tools they donât know will work is rather brutal. Many of the newer developers I know are younger and donât have the income to support spending hundreds or thousands of robux on building plugins. At a minimum the ability to add video thumbnails needs to be added for plugins so that people can see what theyâd be purchasing before doing it. The ability to try on items is a feature of the Catalog/Avatar Shop, and a similar feature needs to be implemented here. I appreciate that Roblox is trying to add more ways for developers to make money, but this I feel is a solution that wasnât well thought out and pushed without consideration for the developer community.
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thank for the excuse for spending all my group fonds
seriously : im whaitng for this for models also having a marketplace
I really hope these new plugins are marketable enough to spark some super high quality new development tools. I would be very willing to spend a decent amount of Robux on a plugin that significantly helps my workflow, but I donât see plugin developers making much of an income from this, especially from plugins with niche usage (probably 70% of the plugins I use) â unless theyâre really expensive 
Im sorry but i do not agree with this feature, tools that help bolster developer creativity and productivity should never be placed behind a paypal, one of the main benefits of robloxâs developing tools is that theyre all free, taking this path feels like a step in the wrong direction.
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I feel grandfathered in since I had Quentyâs class changer before he added a price to it, as well as a few other decent plugins.
However, this will definitely put new developers at a severe disadvantage. I know because I was once a new developer myself, and Iâve been on the platform for years. With all the good stuff on the Library being free before, I explored and experimented and then I was able to make my own quality things.
With this change moving forward, new developers will have an increasingly harder time digging deeper into the platform and learning about all the awesome things it has to offer, as well as the useful but obscure APIs buried within the game engine.
Also, like others said, this will make plugin copying that much worse. Many kids would rather find free versions of cool-looking assets from the toolbox if they can find them, which puts themselves at more of a risk for getting backdoored and then later abused in their little worlds.
2 Likes
It would be really nice if Roblox had a team that âendorsesâ popular plugins that have been vetted to be safe and optimized.
Now, I donât see that as a very likely solution since Roblox already has so many dedicated teams checking assets and such already. So, maybe they could release a separate voting system for assets that allows premium users to rate security and/or optimization on a scale from 1 to 10 (or something similar).
Since there is the possibility of users copying plugins and publishing them for free, it would be fantastic if premium users could flag products that are âcopiesâ and after a certain number of flags they could be automatically (or processed first) removed. Similar to flagging posts here on the forums.
Edit: Someone did mention reviews;
I definitely agree reviews would be a good thing (although it reminds me of the issue that used to be comments⊠This would definitely need to be addressed before reintroducing such a thing to assets/plugins)
Overall, I think that there needs to be some sort of standard for new users publishing assets, and a method to blacklist people from publishing them. This way it wouldnât be so easy to create bots that copy assets hundreds if not thousands of times, and if users do post intentionally malicious assets then they can just have their permissions revoked altogether.
1 Like
So, as a small plugin developer, im a bit concerned with this. As alot of devs have said, if you make people pay for something that you can see the code for, people will reupload the plugin and make it free, and also the other way arround. Im worried people start reuploading free plugins and make people pay for them and at the same time maybe adding malicious code. Weâve all seen how some devs exploit how the sort by relevance works, to get their malicious clones to the front page.
Some other people have said that only trusted developers should be able to upload plugins. I think that this is a very bad idea. Whilst this may stop things like malicious plugins, this will also prevent legit devs to upload their plugins; and would also give alot of power to those authorized devs, because theyâd have a whole âmarketâ just for themselves.
Something im also worried about is how to stop people copying plugins. If we obfuscate the code or make it so people cant check the source, this would open the door to plugins becoming privatemodules 2.0. But if we dont hide them the possibility of people copying plugins will always be there.
Maybe a way to fix some of this things is having more options. As a developer I love having options. Roblox could make something where we could choose if to hide or not our code.
All this things are issues that, in my opinion, should be solved or atleast consulted with the developer community before introducing changes such as this.
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⊠Aaaand thats why the Catalog is a disaster.
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So, weâre moving towards Roblox Studio having itâs own UE4 Marketplace/Unity Asset store, starting off with having to pay for the simplest plugins?
What about people with no robux who are just starting off? I am 100% positive developers will (ab)use this and make ESSENTIAL plugins, such as GapFill, or F3X, (or name any other very useful plugin) paid. (No offense to the devs of those plugins, unless theyâll actually do this)
Or what if a plugin becomes deprecated/broken eventually and doesnât receive a fix? Sure, the dev of that plugin can fix it, but what if they canât/wonât? That would put pressure on them and virtually waste the people who bought the pluginâs robux.
This is a horrible idea.
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