Thoughts on paid plugins for a free game?

As a free plugin developer I agree with trojaner as my own plugins no longer work after updates, and due to them being free I lack the motivation to redo them and have instead just made them for RM5 on the eventual release

They may not have created the means, but they are the ones causing P2W, not rocket. Blame the one causing it, not the underlying platform. You shouldn’t blame the house foundations on the fact that the house looks like a piece of crap.

Yes! Just as I had stated! But of course, when they are used for such P2W purposes, we should SHAME the server owners that are using them for P2W purposes, not the plugins themselves!

Read what I’ve stated above. You missed the point entirely. Permissions are not the issue, the server owners are.

Sure, he could’ve made his own permission system, but even then, even if he tried to make it “fair”, server owners that are driven by P2W lust will just figure out a way to get it to work as P2W, by possibly paying developers to override the entire permission system that nelson could’ve made.
You did repeat yourself again, and I’m starting to repeat myself, but it’s not the permission system leading to unfair servers, it’s the server owners, only them. The platform should never be to blame, only the people utilizing it.

Tbh, doubt anyone would spend any time to do something that’s already done, unless it’s about improving it.

They actually are custom one time paid workshop maps or mods that people have made for others. Later other players could use them for free, sure, but someone originally paid for them, already making it a paid mod. I can’t think of one right now that’s still popular, but I believe the Toxicity mods were paid by the server owner and then uploaded in the workshop for their servers to use.

They could, but as stated times before, it being paid gives an incentive for the developer to not abandon it. They can if they want, but then the plugin would stop being bought as soon as it’s known. Of course, the chances are higher if it’s free, as there’s no real incentive there to keep working on free plugins.

Rain now’s probably a good time to stop. The entire post is just you trying to argue fairly meaningless points against people who actually know what they’re talking about. It’s good to know when you’ve lost in any kind of debate, even in something like this.

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To be honest mate I agree with you rain, I feel there aren’t many free plugins out there and compared to other games that I have known the plugins are quite pricey. However, as the devs said earlier, its their own time their using developing their plugins. And if you want it to change, maybe you should try developing your own and by that I mean not pasting code but actually looking and learning C#, I learnt a good bit of PHP from that.

But I do see it as slightly ridiculous to the extent these paid plugins go, but then again it goes back to the whole peoples time point.

Going to what Trojaner said about devs being unmotivated to update free plugins, the reason for that could be the fact is that they look at IP and think ‘hey they’re doing the same as me but making money’, and maybe if they had more of a development team it would not be the case. Which seems to me like the modding community works, e.g People pay someone to make them a private custom mod just for them or you can use them and that is what it should be like in the RocketMod one.

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Very Well Said I feel like you summed up this thread!

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We all have to agree though, some plugins definitely are overpriced for what they offer :joy:

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Dear RainOfPain125

I would like to back you up on your idea of free plugins/mods and only accepting donations, There are many server owners like me out there that wish to make, a really good Server with custom plugins such as UconomyUI. What i would say to the Plugin developers is to either low your prices on some plugins and preferably don’t go over $10 so that more server owners can afford these Plugins. I love your idea of having plugins on steam it means easier access but does mean more workshop mods need adding to a server. This isn’t deemed to be any offence towards people with opposite opinions. it is just my own opinion.

problem with this is, donations are not guaranteed a 1 time payment is however

The only thing we can probably all agree from this, is donations barely gets as much as selling, if even any (due to people already getting the product for free, so they don’t need to pay or give any donations), though I have to agree with the following:

But only if the developer didn’t spend much precious time and they see their plugin worth that price, or if the plugin isn’t even complex enough to be worth 15$, eg: https://imperialplugins.com/Products/ProductDetails/46

Dear Jonny
I did say that they need to lower prices not just rely on Donations as i do understand

Dear Blah
Some Plugins will have to vary i do understand that but the plugin developers need to make sure that prices aren’t to high i would suggest

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Not blaming anyone. That’s just off-topic nonsense and doesn’t matter.

Never said anything about shaming plugin developers. Though I would shame them for them knowing full well that some plugins that are overpriced would only be affordable by the big p2w franchises. Or as I said all the plugins necessary for a decent RP can add up to $80+

Again you’re dwelling into server p2w. Which was not the point at all. Please don’t go off-topic. I’m trying to talk about plugins.

There would be zero way around my ideas for dealing with P2W servers, and none of them have to do with “config restrictions” or whatever you’re trying to talk about here. That seems like nonsense. Again this is not entirely about unfair servers, this is about plugins.

uh huh. sure.

Not entirely sure about that, but thats more of unregulated background deals that nobody could have any sort of control over whatsoever. Though I’d imagine it would be harder to do deals like that. So great.

Currently theres been tons of devs and only a single server owner. Let some server owners come in and discuss their thoughts on the topic as well. The idea of the entire post affects everyone, not just devs.

I can agree with you on that basis, Tironzodo prices his well, Adam does not, most people draw up the AVI plugins when talking about this, which I think is unfair as Sam (AVI Developer) has spent countless hours working and perfecting his plugins and his module to make it the best it can be.

So Yes I agree with you but I feel like they should be proven to be overpriced rather than just lowering prices because some people on a forum said so

I can agree with that but only plugins that are proven to be not as complex as they are made out to be, as I said above stuff like the AVI plugins I know to be fairly priced

I would like to say that I am formatting this argument on the basis of me being both a developer and a server owner

Alright, lets go back to the main topic.

Yep, and back then rocketmod already existed. Paid plugins as well.

It would allow it, but with nelson’s code being so trash, barely anything complex can be done by a guy that just started out making unturned modules.

Oh no, there would still be a need for rocketmod, until all plugins from rocketmod were transfered to the module system, which never happened, because as I stated before, nelson’s code is pure trash.

No, they’d still be paid for if done custom. Then publicly distributed if the developer wants, or sold yet again custom and off the steam workshop.

Well the modules happened, everything else didn’t. It’s sad to everyone because Nelson’s code is trash, which really just killed the point of having modules to be used as plugins.

Anyone can, but it’s best if the developer himself puts the price on it and then people try to discuss it with it downwards. Your point doesn’t make sense here, because it’s not the sites putting the price tag, it’s the developers that put the prices in them.

Rocketmod itself only has free plugins right now. ImperialPlugins is probably the only place for paid plugins. In rocketmod they range from 0$ to 0$, except for sven’s plugins, that can cost from 0$ to 999$. And the plugin you linked is worth the 35$, as the server owner that buys it will be making money with it, so it’s in the developer’s interest to ask him for cash so that he gets a cut out of it.

It’s sad for anyone who can’t afford it, or just doesn’t want to pay for it.

Actually, most of us price it because we worked on it and we want to be paid for our work. I haven’t heard of one of us that directly does it just because they want to make money out of it.

It may fuel them, but that’s because the P2W servers are not being restricted by Nelson. Unlike Mojang with Minecraft, when they wanted servers to stop being P2W.

To appeal… And steal :wink:

Garage plugin - Not essential.
Vault - Not essential, but highly liked. Free alternative right here: harbor.rocketmod .net/plugins/vaults/ (Due to limitations on new accounts, I can’t make this a full link, so deal with it).
Advanced Item Restrictions - Not essential. Free alternative right here: fr34kyn01535 (Sven Mawby) · GitHub
Chat Master 2 - Not essential. Free alternative right here: fr34kyn01535 (Sven Mawby) · GitHub
Anti-Cosmetics - Not essential.
DiscordHook - Not essential. Free alternative can be REALLY EASILY DONE, with discord’s webhooks and some event hooking in the game.
Damage Logger - Not essential. Free alternative can be even more easily done than discordhook, as you just hook to the player damaged event, and then just logger.log it.
0$ total for bare-bone essential mods for a good RP experience.

That’s steam standards. Plugins aren’t part of steam standards. And even if they were part of them, there can always be a hidden unregulated market that will produce paid products. Your argument basically is: Hey this product is free, therefore if I go this other store across that has nothing to do with where I got the product for free, the add-ons should also be free!

People that make PUBLIC STEAM WORKSHOP MODS don’t expect money for it. People who private sell them and take requests to make them and sell them will expect money for it. Normally they can cost even more than a single plugin, as other people will later be able to re-download the mod and utilize it themselves, so pimping up the price would help them feel like their work was worth it.

Yeah, but we all know how reliable donations are. 1 in every 1000 downloads, if it’s not 1 in every 10000, because I’ve definitely never received any donations for any of my work, despite doing a lot (and therefore resorting to selling my work instead).

Clearly you haven’t looked hard enough. Everyone wants to get money back for their work. If it’s not money now, it’ll be money later, either with exposure and more people wanting the user to work for them, or with a payment system being developed correctly for workshop mods.

IF, and I really mean IF, nelson can make a good API for plugins to use in 4.0, that’d be amazing, but still wouldn’t mean that plugins will not be sold. If there’s demand for a product, there’s supply, and someone willing to profit out of the market.

It would be cool, but would have to be heavily regulated to avoid malware embedded on plugins, such as remote access tools, trojans, or anything that could damage the reputation of the game, steam, and someone’s data. (This regulation could be the plugin being open source, someone manually checking every damn plugin before it going public to make sure there’s no malicious code, but that just becomes a hassle, so it isn’t really worth it).

They wouldn’t be paid for, but that wouldn’t mean that 3rd party sites that sell the plugins would cease to exist, or custom 1 time paid jobs wouldn’t get released on steam, or that a developer sells his plugins directly to his consumers instead of putting them on steam, or that a plugin includes a licensing system whilst it’s on steam, requiring the user to purchase a license from the developer’s site before being able to even use the plugin, etc. My point here is that there will always be a work-around for any type of anti-market practices.

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It’s very funny how @Trojaner joins the topic, a few other people that just made an SDG forum account join the topic, and they like eachothers comments. :thinking:

opinion. sorry to say. Not even sure what your last one even means

You act like every owner is a plugin dev, and they’re not. Which is why theres these overpriced discord plugins.

Again, the status quo would become plugin developers upload their content onto Steam, not a third party website. It would be much harder to use steam and underground deals to exchange plugins for money rather than a third party website with dedicated transactions / systems for such a thing.

Same thing goes for Rocketmod.net or Imperial Plugins. They need to heavily regulate what comes in. It doesn’t matter what platform it is.

I’d be very glad to hear that you’d wanna make public, open source, free plugins. And I’d definitely donate to you if you made a donation option c; Definitely get back to me once you get a bit better at plugin creation / learn c# and explain to me yourself if you think coding plugins for Unturned is ‘babywork’.

I agree. Completely. Not enough competition amongst plugin developers and as I said earlier -

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Actually I want to learn C# and when Im gonna be so far, probably gonna write some nice plugins >:)
Also if one person writes a plugin which is actually identical to the paid one, what do you think what would happen to the paid one? Right, probably gonna go to the bin, because if you know what a plugin does you should be able to program the same as a good programmer.
I dont know what I should think about paid plugins, as a former server owner I think they are just too expensive as you listed…

It’s a conspiracy theory… But actually it’s because this forum thread was linked in a discord, and most of us felt the urge to reply to this… So we made an account, either because we had none, or because we didn’t want to show our identity (My case :smiley:).

Thankfully, that didn’t happen when someone made a free jobs plugin… but ofc it wasn’t an identical copy. You are right though, it would go to the trash unless the dev of the paid plugin figures out a way to compete with the free plugin, if they even want to compete with it.

It’s an opinion, but that’s the point of this entire thread. Thoughts on paid plugins.

I act like anyone can make these if they care to search a little bit to do it. Or if they pay 5$ for the watered down edition of the plugin to get it custom.

But would it? Definitely for exposure they would chose Steam, but how does the content then get regulated? When should a plugin be determined broken and then removed from steam? Should that even happen?

They would for some hard-earned cash instead of giving it away for free.

Would it though? How hard? A developer would just have to make a message publicly to be contacted, or contact some people that are publicly requesting for some plugins to be made and it can start again.

True, but rocketmod regulates it by having it open source and having the plugins build on their servers. Up to then it’s people trusting rocketmod, not the developer. As to imperialplugins, I’d leave trojaner to answer how it’s regulated.

EDIT: Seems the forums don’t like members making too many replies either :joy:

Just commenting to let yall know I edited my old comment. I posted it a bit too quickly