Pay-as-your-scale plugins and packages

Feature Requests Website Features
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#1

I’m making this post to highlight current inequities in creator-store monetization and how pay-as-you-scale (PAYS) plugins and packages can solve this.

Roblox are making good steps forwards with the creator store. One recent change was sellable plugins in USD that enable creators to bypass marketplace fees. This is positive but as highlighted from the replies in a post Elttob recently created (and many more threads) single-time-payments fall short for both users and their creators:

This issues

Single-use-payments are inherently unfair

A large team of already established developers will have no problem paying 50 USD for a high-quality plugin or package; upcoming developers can’t. This restricts the best resources to developers who are already in a well-off position and limits developers just starting out from competing with these bigger players.

Roblox’s pool of developers is often younger (with less financial means) compared to the broader ecosystem making these all the more important.

Single-use-payments restrict income

Creators will only ever receive one-off payments from their users. This is fine for assets such as models and images, not for larger applications like plugins and packages which will likely require regular maintenance over many years. This system also incentivises the creation of quick-to-make applications as apposed to large-scale high quality resources.

Monetization is solely limited to plugins

Roblox is restricting the variety of tools that can be created by limiting monetization to plugins. Providing these and more for packages (therefore runtime applications) further increases the range of tools creators can make. I cover this in a lot greater detail here.

What are PAYS

Pay-as-your scale applications are plugins and packages free of cost at purchase which users instead pay x amount of Robux for regularly (such as every month) depending on the scale of their experience (i.e. an experiences revenue or Monthly Active Players (MAP)).

For example,:

  • A plugin creator sets their cost-per-player to 0.01 with a free period of <10,000 MAP
  • DevA and DevB agree to these terms and install the plugin
  • DevA’s game does okay with 2000 MAP and pays nothing every month
  • DevB’s game does great with 10,000,000 MAP and pays 99,900 Robux per month

A guarantee such as 1-year would also likely be required to prevent users benefiting from plugins that enable them to create experiences but aren’t essential anymore after release.

How PAYS plugins and packages solve this

Greater availability

PAYS applications are effectively free upfront, enabling any developer to benefit and create games from the best resources. The greater the availability of high-quality resources, the greater the speed and effectiveness individuals and teams can create experiences.

Greater income potential

Creators will have a significantly higher income potential when their revenue scales proportional to the success of their users (and the amount of players playing the experiences of their users). There are 297 million more players than developers so associating income with players enables income to be dramatically scaled up.

Higher incomes enables greater skilled teams enabling higher quality resources across the whole platform. This is explained in a lot more detail here.

I understand the broader economy works with people more well-off getting access to better resources. The Roblox engine is in a unique position to overcome this, benefiting both its application creators and developers at the same time.

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#2

It’s not common in industry to have pay-as-you-scale for tools unless they are foundational (e.g. whole engine you build on top of).

It’s more common to have different tiers e.g. hobby vs. professional, dependent on your use case. (You can technically achieve this in creator store MVP by having separate plugins and trusting your consumers, I guess.)

Or alternatively, what is much more common outside of Roblox is having number-of-seats-based options for tooling. So maybe in the future, group owners could buy a number of seats for a plugin that can then be assigned to developers in the group. I’m not sure if there are enough Roblox game studios set up professionally enough where it makes sense to implement this feature yet though, but it will become relevant at some point.

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#3

These alternatives work but I think would struggle to be financially viable (at least where Roblox is now) because of how tiny the developer-base is relative to players. This creates challenges such as why work on the creator store at all when it’s 100 fold easier to earn from games?

Number-of-seats definitely could be a monetization option. I feel this would still have similar challenges; the Roblox developer ecosystem is no where near as mature as the greater web in general. Software like Figma financially thrives as a business because there are millions of people who want to design interfaces. How many developers currently are willing to spend on developer resources? Maybe a few hundred?

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#4

Yeah, though the nice part of selling seats is that it could be per group / per game project (e.g. only use a specific plugin when you have Team Create of a specific game open), so the potential is actually relative to the amount of groups/games instead of to the creator community.

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#5

I would have to assume that this wouldn’t work for most plugin formats, most plugins are in a case in where you only use the plugin while actively developing updates which for many creators may not be often. Outside of Roblox, I’ve only seen this pricing model for assets that are used regardless of whether you are actively developing the experience (example: networking tools).

I know you suggest requiring a 1 year minimum subscription, but why should I need to pay for 1 year when I genuinely only use the plugin for 1 month? What happens if my game scales up during that year and yet no longer have my card connected to my account?

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#6

I’ll run the plugin in an offline or empty place, delete the plugin, transfer the assets that I processed using the plugin to my main place.

There are many flaws with this and it’s going to be a massive no from me.

#7

All in all this will never work due to the nature of how plugins are formatted on your computer, which is quite literally just the raw RBXM file in your installed plugins folder.

I also don’t inherently know that this feature is something that is truly necessary, I don’t quite understand as to what sort of plugin would need you to pay more as you… use it more often?

A lot of software that requires you to pay as you scale does so because they have to maintain and expand the hardware that you’re using; this is not the case for plugins or packages? What would change between a plugin or package that’s free, versus a plugin that’s up-charged due to a larger game using it?

Not to mention, what sort of plugin or package would even be that important to where people would use it and then proceed to pay more money for it as their game grows? It’s not like your plugin would be hosting a large database that requires constant maintenance? This is quite literally just a way to ride off large games success for playing such a minor role.

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#8

In my opinion, this is not a needed feature. As some of the previous posts stated, plugins aren’t fundamentals of any game. Because of their nature plugins don’t do the impossible as well, they are just nice tools which saves everyone time. However I personally don’t know any creators who would be willing to give up on some of their profits repeatedly in a percentage for a plugin.

Bigger studios would make their own internal plugins so even if this was released it’s really hard to tell who would be the customers of a such plugin sold with this method. Probably only people who would be using a such plugin would be the ones in the free tier, which would be less revenue for plugin creators at the end.

Because of all these reasons I don’t think that this would be a good method of making sure that plugin creators make a good amount of money for their plugins.

Subscriptions would maybe make more sense but to be honest I don’t know if this would be popular in Roblox or not. However subscriptions would still be better as an option, especially if plugin creators are also encouraged to release single purchase versions (like Office 2021 relasing alongside a subscription which is Microsoft 365) of their plugins, which they would not maintain on a regular basis unlike their subscription plugins.

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