As a developer, it’s really hard to find good plugins because malicious users are able to effortlessly bot fake plugins, trojan horses, and other undesirable content to the top of the marketplace.
As a plugin maker, it is nearly impossible to make a sustainable income from plugin development. Setting a fixed price limits the amount of users that can benefit from the plugin and heavily encourages plugin theft and re-uploading.
Why not allow users of plugins to patronize plugin developers by being able to donate arbitrary amounts of Robux to the plugins they enjoy using? I for one would be more than willing to donate upwards of R$100,000 to the plugins that I get the most value from.
Then instead of sorting plugins by installs, favorites, or other metrics that are exceedingly easy to spoof, plugins could be sorted by donation amounts, something that would be economically impossible to exploit given a 30% marketplace fee on the transactions.
This change would enable creators of high-quality plugins to receive better recognition and payment for their work, while maximizing the amount of end users that can benefit from their tools.
This is certainly an amazing idea. Donations not only support financially, but also motivationally. I don’t know about you, but knowing that people are paying extra because they love my work is more than enough to guarantee my full dedication to the project. Speaking of such, donations also boost quality for the
aforementioned reason.
With that being said, i don’t think there should be any sort of exclusivity based on who donated the most (not like you mentioned it, but I know the idea’s going to come up later on).
This can yet again be a stat used in automatically selecting verified plugins with minimal false positives because, like you mentioned, the marketplace fee will discourage abuse of any sort.
Donations can also allow devs to lower their plugin prices knowing that others can willingly fund more if they choose to do so. This will eliminate instances where devs have to set a high price in order to get sufficient profit (after all the cuts), which is also beneficial for consumers.
Full support. I have made a similar topic to yours back, not a direct feature request, but rather a discussion post to get an idea of what people thought about it. My original idea was to make the feature request if people seemed to like it, but I didn’t get that much feedback so I did not.
To summarize, I basically go over the issue that Roblox which is that Roblox does not provide much of an opportunity in terms of stable development when it comes to the marketplace. It is hard to be an asset/plugin developer because no one is willing to pay you. Those who earn more who are willing to pay you are not the majority, so developers may have to lower their prices to get more developers to purchase the asset/plugin.
My point is, there is a lot of assets/plugins I want to make for Roblox, but I am just not interested if I can’t profit from it. A lot of what I want to make is something I want to make because I am interested in making it, not the profit from it. But I can’t just use up time to make all this stuff if I can’t earn anything decent from it.
Full support. Many of us in the plugin marketplace beta have already suggested this directly to Roblox staff - having a Bandcamp-style pay-what-you-want model would be hugely beneficial for all of us
Great idea, I honestly think plugin developers should get the full 100% of ROBUX aswell, they are literally directly benefiting the WHOLE platform building these things
It comes from a good place but it won’t work, it will lead to people laundering money via that method if there is no Robux fee. The program is not going to stay limited to a few handfuls of people forever after all, eventually anyone could qualify.
Marketplace fee has to be consistent across payment transactions across the whole platform.
I want to point out that a lot of developers don’t like paying for software (open source exists too), but once they start making an income from projects they’ll usually buy / donate.
I remember Notch talking about how when Minecraft took off, he finally bought a WinRAR license. I imagine it would be the same for plugin developers. Allowing the best plugins to be free will keep them the most visible on the marketplace. This will likely lead to more revenue for the plugin developers and a better experience for plugin users
This actually happens with music software a lot. One of them being FL studio. Granted it’s not open source or a plug-in but, it’s one of the most cracked pieces of software out there because a full license costs a lot.
While the notions of “free now pay later” works, it’s not free to the developer who spent a lot of time and effort into the plug-in. If you want something to be easy and provided in your toolchain then, you should pay for it.
Revenue should be made will full certainty not, “let’s bank on them paying eventually”. The idea of free sounds nice and the eventual pay but, it’s too much of a risk to trust that someone will do the right thing and pay later. I certainty wouldn’t bank on it if I wanted to make profit from plugins.
