Developers have been able to price their plugins however they want for a while, this update only serves to increase roblox’s profit.
They’ve been able to price them however they want but would be shunned and harassed by users when charging anything close to 100 robux. This update sets a minimum price floor to help prevent developers from undervaluing their work, especially as the marketplace program opens up more.
If you ask me, 100 robux is still far too slow, but whatever.
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If Roblox wants people to develop more plugins, stop taking ~75% of the money the buyer spent on the plugin.
On average R$80 costs $1. If I sell a plugin for R$160, that costs $2 to the buyer and I earn $0.39. This gap in cost/earnings is disrespectfully high and way too big for anybody to even consider developing plugins as being a good source of income
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Ooh! Hopefully this can prevent more plugin knockoffs from being promoted!
Unless I missed something in this post I really don’t see how this helps anyone. From what I read in the post all it is doing is just stopping people putting there plugins for a small amount under 100. I know personally I am not really willing to pay much for a plugin unless it’s a really good one I want.
I also don’t see how like some people above have been saying about how it will reduce copies of plugins and to be honest I don’t massively see any positives to this update. Sure it will make people not be able to under value there work but 100 is not much at all. I just don’t see how this helps any one tbh. Also I don’t understand why people keep saying it will allow them to earn more, I personally think this update would rather reduce sales of plugins cuz people might be less willing to pay causing plugin devs to just put them free.
Like what @gillern said if you really want to help us be able to make real profits off a game and plugins then remove the % or at least reduce it. Or you could make us get more via DevEx which I think would be even better. On Roblox at the moment it’s legit nearly impossible to make a living off unlike other platforms where it is possible. I know some people will say things like “Well Roblox gives us a free to use platform” which is true but the price of Robux to purchase is sooo much and how much Roblox earns I kinda feel we should get more.
This update changes nothing really at all. I wish rather then just giving an update Roblox would explain well why this is being implemented.
If anyone can see any real benefits about this update I would love to hear them but from what I can see it’s just pointless.
UPDATE: I just found out that not everyone can put plugins for sale which I just find also pointless. How about Roblox just removes the whole plugin program and make it so everyone can just make plugins for sale on the marketplace rather then having this update. Gonna allow more people to earn money rather then this update that is 100% pointless.
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Game developers: imagine if the only way to make a source of income was to convert your game to Paid Access. Not only does this restrict a large majority of your players, it also severely limits your income potential. That’s in addition to an economy where there are tremendously fewer developers (buying plugins) than players (buying game-related products).
This does not provide any meaningful change at all.
Without new inventive revenue sources or the introduction of changes like a reduced plugin fee there will continue to be little-to-no incentive for experienced developers and large teams to truly invest into the marketplace. The stigma around paid plugins will remain.
Roblox: why do you expect developers to devote time, hard work and years of experience to the marketplace when they can alternatively earn x100 fold the income by creating a game within the same space of time? The marketplace cannot continue to depend on the good will of the community. Good will doesn’t pay for rent. It doesn’t pay for large teams of highly specialized developers.
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I’m really happy with the price floor. Creators were being pressured to sell their plugins for far too low of a price and now customers are forced to pay fair prices to plugin developers.
hmm gotta buy all the plugins fast
but nice to see that roblox is now caring about the plugin devs, however why the hell did we get a price floor?
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I don’t understand the point of adding a price-floor, sure it encourages forces people to increase their plugins’ prices, but if I am a developer and I want to charge only 30 Robux for my plugin, I should be allowed to do so. A better solution would be to encourage developers to increase plugin prices by making deals with top-plugin creators to increase their price, this increases the expected-price for a plugin (as the most-installed plugins set the standards for plugin prices) while also not stopping developers from intentionally charging a low amount of Robux per-sale, if they want to.
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I don’t really believe this is a reasonable claim. This doesn’t explain why the minimum price change is necessary at all.
I do like the idea of the Plugin Marketplace Program.
How is that exactly a reason? They can set how much they would like, This change isn’t a very reasonable change and a dumb change.
One thing to note is people won’t purchase those paid plugins as they are 100+ robux, so you are basically defeating the purpose of these plugins.
I’m disappointed in most things you guys are doing, Why not let them freely set their price?
But of course, that’s just my opinion and many others!
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Discoverability.
Getting to the plugins marketplace is still somewhat obfuscated through multiple menus in the website version, and through a Roblox Studio widget that I think most developers have closed the majority of the time.
Once you get to the marketplace the plugins are shown by their popularity, so already successful plugins and tools tend to continue to do well, because they’re the ones that are being pushed.
Customers need to know what they’re buying before they’re willing to fork over 100R$. There’s no way to clearly and concisely explain what a plugin does and how it works using a thumbnail, title, and description. Links are no longer allowed in descriptions so linking to demo videos is out of the question. How do we convince a customer who may have never heard of the developer or the product before to trust and buy the plugin at this new price floor, when they were barely willing to buy them at the lower ones?
I think the pages for plugins needs updating to allow video embeds that can be used to show tools and plugins in use so that customers can have a clearer and better understanding as to what a tool does.
Roblox’s Economy.
One of my plugins is on the ‘front page’ mentioned before. I’m selling my plugin for 350 Robux, it has 21 sales in the past 7 day and has earned roughly 7350 Robux this week, but Roblox takes their 30% cut from that, making me a total of 5145 Robux.
Buying into Roblox’s Robux economy is roughly $1 ~ $1.25 per 100 Robux.
It’s a flat $0.35 per 100 Robux when a developer cashes out.
I can cash out $15 USD, and Roblox will have made something like $50 USD or more because of the way the Robux economy works.
The average US salary is $56,310, if making plugins was my full-time gig I would have to make, upkeep, and offer support for 72 unique plugins (which all would have to sell like this one, and at the same price point) to be earning the average US salary, never mind building a sustainable business.
Plugins can never be fairly priced when Roblox take cuts from sales in the same way that they do for games.
I’ve happily purchased third party plugins for software that is priced upwards of $90+, because I know that the majority goes to the creator for making, and upkeeping the plugin. Sadly that isn’t the case on Roblox.
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Remember when they had the built-in “Plugin manager”? That thing made it way easier to find the plugin rather than open a web browser and click many menus which takes about a minute.
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I’m in the boat of Plugins that should cost money, but your comparison with $100 Unity addons isn’t great.
Unity Creators tend to have much much much larger budgets than the average Roblox Creators.
I don’t mind Plugins costing up to $20 if they’re actually worth it. You also have to consider the market you’re selling to though. If you price your plugin at $20, way fewer people will buy it and you might’ve been better off listing it at $5 or $10, which is much more affordable for most of the market.
I really don’t like the floor price idea.
I feel like people wouldn’t buy my plugin for that price. It’s currently 65 Robux and that’s doing really well.
Forcing it to minimum 100 Robux will not be good for us, plugin developers and it will be bad for the game developers who try to use our plugins. I want freedom with the pricing of my plugin and not having Roblox decide about it.
That’s of course just my opinion.
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But I recommend for update plugin marketplace have more updates, just be at 50% of money devex at spent before buying it.
On that price over 100 robux but this is good plugin floor price, it is just improving changing of directed on made for plugins, as well make at apply plugins other developers.
It’d be hard for people to earn money off of making plugins if there wasn’t a price floor or it was too low. They’d have to compete with people who price plugins as cheaply as possible.
Exactly my thoughts.
Price Floors don’t encourage people to invest their time developing plugins because it’s just a price floor. It doesn’t rectify the fact Roblox is taking a whopping 84.75% cut for hosting a literal kilobyte of a RBXM file (89.32% for ones collaborated on!)
Pushing these problems under the rug isn’t going to solve anything. It’s demoralizing for creators and completely goes against the TAKE THE LONG VIEW company pillar.
I highly support the notion of releasing plugins on a seperate platform like itch.io where you have so much more freedom in payment plans. If a 3rd-Party platform can give a better solution to file sharing so can a company on the stock.
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I personally find adding a minimum price floor to be good, even though it might cut off some developers in the process if they don’t have 100 robux at hand.
Consider the fact that many addons, plugins, and tools created in other external programs usually go for around $5, $30, or even $60 and you’ll see that the minimum price of 100 robux (around $1) is generously low.
However, the tax cut issue and devex issues should be addressed since that generally is what makes the cost of certain assets go higher.
This is really a flawed take.
No, and if it deters someone from buying a plugin, they should not get that plugin. Plugins for software like Unity, UE5, photoshop, and more can easily cost more than $100 USD (source: I’m a part-time photographer. Plugins are expensive).
Frankly, I would like to see the minimum higher so the culture can adapt to be more realistic, as it’s current outrageous how little plugin developers are paid.
Great video explaining this topic.
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