I think despite its flaws, the asset marketplace did what it was supposed to do.
I’ve gone through the replies and I understand that people take advantage/scam, there are a lot of beginners, and most of it is considered useless trash. These are good points and definitely solidify the removal.
However, I would like to note how removing a general, public and legal marketplace for plain assets leads to a black market formation. And sure, there is probably already a black market, but do we want to take the legal marketplace away just so a black market is one of the only options available?
For all you LMADers out there, this is really the same exact case the Roblox Forums had with LMAD. People used to have a free and legal place to sell advertise their limiteds, create offers. And if people were interested, you dealt with the matter privately. The issue is, so many scammers came around that it was hard to manage the marketplace. You didn’t need a membership “status” to post, so imagine what the forum would look like now with the bots we see today.
Here, however, we have restrictions. You need to be a New Member to post in selected sections. And while it isn’t that hard to attain that status, it is definitely hard to bot - we don’t have random “click me” posts appearing. The only issue that remains is scamming.
So I would like to propose that instead of wiping the asset marketplace from the surface of Roblox, perhaps we can have a trust system for assets. i.e., a separate place that has the same restrictions as the DevForum has now, with the same status, but some added restrictions based on consumer satisfaction and number of products allowed to sell/week.
Again, I really think this is important to help developers realize that selling their assets shouldn’t be considered wrong. We just need a proper environment. Obviously the old category had its flaws, but I believe there is room to improve the concept to make the asset marketplace what it should be.