Plugin Marketplace / My complaints with the program
Hi there, I'd like to make a post talking about my complaints with the Plugin Marketplace program, and hopefully help Roblox improve the program with some of my points.
The plugin marketplace program was introduced sometime in 2020 or 2019 from memory, and the concept of this was to allow Roblox developers to sell their plugins for Robux. However, this program has been extremely flawed from the beginning.
Throughout this post, I may refer to groups of people as beta testers. These are people who had the ability to sell from when the program was created, up till the point that Roblox said that anyone who is phone or ID verified is able to sell plugins.
In this post, I want to discuss my complaints with the program and I want to serve this as a starting point for people to understand why we complain about the program.
I would highly recommend watching https://youtu.be/yEOG_Bzrw0Y or reading https://devforum.roblox.com/t/plugin-marketplace-is-still-flawed/1921186 first, since I will use points that are used in both of them.
Point 1: The amount of taxes on sales
I recently made a point about this on a Mastodon post around discussing about increasing prices, but the tax Roblox takes is simply absurd, and is like nothing else. Heck, even YouTube pays me better and I'm sure I'm paying taxes that I shouldn't be paying.
Let's put this into perspective shall we? I decide to sell a plugin that I'm really proud of for 100 Robux. To the user, this might seem like $1.25, but to the developer, it's much less. On every sale, Roblox takes a 30% cut from the developer. By calculating this off our $1.25 amount, we get 88 cents. This may seem normal in the industry considering Google and Apple charges a 30% fee on any application or in app purchases in their respective marketplaces. But, this is not the end of the line on Roblox. We then have to apply a 65% cut through Roblox's Developer Exchange. Calculating this to our 88 cents leaves us with 30 cents. We've seen 75.5% of our earnings just disappear completely. We haven't even put taxes taken by the government into play yet either.
This is the same procedure for everyone who develops on Roblox, except for UGC creators where the tax is 50% instead of 30% from Roblox as far as I'm aware. It's appalling that we have to go through this when all Roblox is doing is providing us a platform to develop plugins for and file hosting (usually less than 1MB per plugin).
Enough about that though, let's move onto something else.
Point 2: Piracy
Yes, even Roblox can have a piracy scene. It's wild isn't it?
When someone owns a plugin (not required when a plugin is free), you effectively have the ability to distribute illegal copies of that plugin you've downloaded. Heck, even backing up copies is technically illegal to the best of my awareness, which needs to be changed in all honesty. All a person has to do to make illegal copies is go into Roblox's folder, then into a folder named that person's user ID, and then enter an InstalledPlugins folder, and now you have access to every single plugin you've downloaded, and you can paste the RBXM files of whatever you want to distribute pirated copies of into Studio, then just simply right click and publish as plugin. You've now committed piracy, congrats!
This is a huge issue, and this really just builds off of our previous issue. In fact, we have one more issue we can talk about which is related to the community.
Point 3: The abuse that developers get for making a plugin paid
Could you imagine charging $1.56 for a plugin that we get 38 cents from in return? Clearly, some people can't imagine it.
I have faced this criticism multiple times from developers, here is the latest that Roblox hasn't taken down yet after over a week, on a plugin that was free for a temporary period before going paid which was also available on GitHub:
“I feel like a plugin that I can make in 10 minutes should be free.”
This is incredibly hard to read, especially when you've spent hours crafting your plugin into something amazing. After a response I made, they replied with this back:
“The only reason it took this long was due to gui design and ideas. It really doesn’t take long to make a texture applier. You just loop through all the face enumerations and create a new texture. Same with the copy character and dev ex calculator. Not saying it isn’t useful but plugins like this, especially paid, are just cash grabs in general.”
I would like to ask you that isn't it more of a cash grab that Roblox gets 75.5% off of everything? Isn't lootboxes more of a cash grab?
People on the internet are unfortunately really mean at times, and we just have to deal with it. The increase of the minimum price for paid plugins from 5 Robux to 100 Robux didn't help either.
Point 4: The awful update system
*WARNING: Explicit language used in this section.*
Did you know that there was some updates for your plugins when you last opened Studio? I'm guessing that's a no, and that's because the Roblox Plugin update system is shit. I can't use any other word.
Roblox has zero notification system at all to notify when a plugin might have an update available. We had to make our own, before Roblox decided to screw us all overnight with not showing up in search due to certain functions our scripts used. Thanks Roblox!
Roblox also doesn't have a way for developers to actually point out what has changed in an update. Users do not know what has changed, unless they want to browse through the DevForum page for that plugin or something. I'm currently trying to change that here: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/add-support-for-update-information-to-plugins/2204731
Point 5: Roblox's awful communication with the program
Did you see that post announcing that the Plugin Marketplace was being open to everyone who is ID or phone verified? We were not notified of this in advance whatsoever. That's just one example of Roblox's awful communication.
Here's another: After complaints of the program being abandoned, Roblox denied this and said they'd have regular check-ins with the group of beta testers. I made a post yesterday asking whether Roblox is actually going to check-in with us before the end of the first quarter of 2023. I received a reply from a user that something had been scheduled for March 27th. However, I was not notified whatsoever, since this was posted in a private Discord server that I was never invited to, nor told about by Roblox. Thanks for that, when's the next opportunity I'm going to have my say?
Conclusion
I'm gonna end it here for now, but my video and posts on this is the best places to go to now if you haven't looked at them earlier. They cover some additional stuff that I couldn't be bothered in typing here.
If you'd like to support me as a developer, I recently released a new plugin, auroraSuite. Check it out here: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/-/2215382.
Follow me on the fediverse to see the latest posts from me: https://mstdn.social/@experiencersinternational
Take care.