The Creator Marketplace team has been deeply focused on making the marketplace safer and easier to navigate. As we continue to build on those initiatives, we want to address another key focus for our team: How can creators build sustainable businesses within the marketplace?
Starting today, we will be inviting hundreds of creators to join the Plugin Marketplace Program and will open up to all plugin contributors in the coming months. Based on our learnings from our last two years of experimentation, we are implementing a minimum price for paid plugins. Today, developers are able to list plugins for free or for a price. While they continue to be able to list items for free, we will be introducing a price floor of 100 Robux for priced plugins. Plugins are critical tools for developer success, and we believe that this change will better allow creators to fairly price their tools and re-invest in improving these assets for the community.
The minimum price of 100 Robux will apply to all new paid plugins added to the Creator Marketplace. For plugins that are currently priced between 1 and 99 Robux, the minimum price will go into effect after two weeks or upon updating your asset. On August 25, any remaining plugins between 1 and 99 Robux will be automatically updated to the 100 Robux minimum.
Plugins continue to push the boundaries of the platform and enable creators to do amazing work. We are actively investigating further improvements to help this community grow, and this expansion of the program is just the start. We look forward to seeing you all continue to innovate and change the future of experience development!
It’s so great to see work being done in improving the plugin ecosystem. I’m hoping that more changes are made in reducing the cuts taken for income made directly from plugins, as many of the costs that make this cut reasonable for experiences do not apply to plugins (App Store fees, server hosting, etc.) and plugins have no other income methods (game passes, developer products, etc are inaccessible to plugins)
The price floor of 100 Robux is a great improvement, but until more changes are made to the cut given to developers, it still seems too low. If we assume the user spends 1.5 USD per 100 Robux (rough estimate, as rates vary), then 30 Robux is taken as a cut, and the remaining 70 Robux is exchanged at the current rate, that’s 25 cents given to the developer. In my mind this should be at least a few dollars.
Other plugin ecosystems on other platforms have more rich systems that allow buyers to see what they’re going to get after purchase (reviews, proper thumbnails, markdown/stylized content, videos) are missing on Roblox. Until these are added, I’m worried it will be harder for buyers to justify spending money on plugins.
This issue has resulted in me having to use Internal Mode as well as other undocumented RBXM features to try and protect the sourcecode of plugins. While I can hide protection code with compiled RBXMs, its still a nightmare protecting sourcecode, especially for people who dont have access to these tools.
What makes it difficult is that I need to recompile my sourcecode every single time Luau bytecode updates, which doesn’t seem like an issue initially, but its really difficult to maintain.
I am having mixed feelings about this change. Plugin Creators should have the freedom to decide their own prices, and Plugin Consumers, that don’t have Robux, should not have less access to plugins. To me, it’s just 100 Robux, but it’s taking a bit plugin availability away from the less wealthy developers especially young developers.
Thank you, I don’t know else what to say but I really appreciate this update a lot since I am plugin developer myself and being able to make some money off plugins will help me a lot. Although I agree that this isn’t a complete fix due to issues mentioned on this thread, such as:
To people complaining about paid plugins, R$100 is roughly $1 while the actual earnings are just couple cents. There are some amazing plugin developers out there overworking themselves to make complex and helpful plugins that save hours or even days of work for a price lower than what would cup of coffee cost.
The unfair part is that there are people that are complaining about this. We all been there and could not afford something, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t ask your parents or make some money yourself like me. It might not be easy but it’s possible with enough of hard work. If you can’t do that, then you are better off doing something else.
Indeed, it seems a bit greedy on roblox’s side. I used to not have robux, and it was easy to get plugins, but now new devs might have a very hard time.
Plugin developers valuing their hard work isn’t greedy. Though we’d all like to see more done to improve plugin security and prevent theft, Roblox is expressing their value for plugins on the platform and I think this is a great step in the right direction.
I believe that plugin developers have the right to choose whatever price they want, not being forced by Roblox. In fact, in future, this may actually have negative impacts as devs may not want to price a plugin at R$100, so instead of 10, 20 or 50, they’ll just make it free, resulting in lost revenue.
Mhm. Unity addons can be more than $100 and its normal for their communities. 100 robux is basically a dollar when buying and and barely a cent for DevEx
It should cost more; I work really hard on my plugins like the plugin I made called “Make a part”. Took a lot of work to make I think this would be good towards the community.
Just received a message about this, would be joining if there wasn’t ID verification requirement (this is sorta a barrier to development but its invite only anyways (verified now anyways), either way, I hope developers can now get the proper discovery they deserve.
The higher devs price the plugins the more roblox profits, and people should be able to price plugins lower, as plugins at prices like 5 robux or 30 can still make money. Also, as some others have pointed out, roblox has less reasons to take a high cut of this type or item.
