Paid Plugins

@FerusGrim You are actually making money off the game when selling a plugin, even if it is not using native mc-code, because you are making money off the idea.

The same way that anyone who makes a program makes money off of Computers and In-Car radios make money off of Cars, and Game developers make money off of an XBox.

There’s one small problem in your argument: They have the license to do so.

Yeah, well…

Shit.

We’re getting a bit offtopic here…

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I have read about the donate button and it seems like no-one uses it.

I’ve received a small amount of money sent as gifts as ‘thanks’ for my various plugins. Not nearly enough to cover the work I did, but I never published any of my plugins with the goal of making money from them. I prefer a community that creates for fun rather than a community looking for a quick profit.

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I think there should be a distinction made between “selling plugins” and “being paid to make plugins.” In Bukkit, the latter was permissible on the forums for a little while, but the former was never allowed. Eventually they stopped that too, but I can’t say I really agree with that decision. Of course you can pay someone to write a plugin for you in private, but not being able to use bukkit forums or ircs to do so was very inconvenient. I have no problem seeing posts offering money for plugin requests–it was a nice way to get a couple bucks for something you like doing and cleared the requests section a little bit faster.

I also think that you should be able to sell your plugins with Sponge considering the MIT license, but I really do not care about it enough to say any more / Being open source is generally better.

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I don’t see the real need for paid plugins (especially considering it violates the EULA, you can say what you want but in the end you won’t get around it) if Sponge could do something similar to what Bukkit was doing with the CurseForge store. It was mentioned above, and I think it’s a valid point. Sponge would have to have a way of generating revenue from ads or whatnot, and based on the number of “hits” or downloads your plugin gets you get points in a store. I’m just saying this because I liked the way this was set up with Bukkit, and I think it could work for Sponge.

Granted, I was new to Bukkit (on the developing side; I only developed my first plugin a month before the takedown), but from what I saw the system worked fairly well. I don’t know how practical this would be, but I think it should at least be considered.

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Personally, I think paid plugins is stupid. People are already paying to purchase a server host and yet paying further for a plugin would only reduce the amount of downloads for that plugin. Not everyone would want to pay for a plugin (and then there’s those people like me who CAN’T pay for one because they don’t have paypal/credit card or whatever you use for payment these days :S)

I prefer the way that Curse did it with Bukkit where it generates it’s money from ads/donations etc. and rewards you points for plugin downloads, leading to a store where you can purchase amazon/paypal vouchers.

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After some discussion, I have decided: NO. There will be no plugin sales or any other sales on Sponge websites under any conditions. We will not be responsible for managing or overseeing any of these transactions.

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I fully support your decision on sales, but just to be clear, does this include any system of payment through ads or something else, as described above? I would just like to know if there will be any sort of compensation/reward for developers making plugins. Regardless, I still plan on making plugins, and many others do as well, but I’m curious.

There’s nothing quite as sweet as getting paid for doing something you were planning on doing anyways.

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I’m all for open source, but see a huge benefit in the symbiosis of paid/free plugins.
If someone wants to put in the extra effort, and others are willing to pay, by all means, allow it.

If it will complicate the release if a sponge plugin repo, postpone it. But don’t block the paid plugins. No need.
Thanks.

I’d say it would be legal to sell plugins, as long as they don’t reference to Minecraft code, based on the fact Sponge isn’t Minecraft persific (the API that is). See GitHub - jglrxavpok/OurCraft: A wanna-be-community-run sandbox game written in Java for another implementation.

There are many holes in the EULA according to someone I know who spoke with lawyers.
Basically, you can charge for your time. Time it took to develop the plugin for example.

In the same way Mojang allows companies to host minecraft servers. They charge you for the bandwidth and disk space and time to set it up.

It’s a very nice idea in my opinion, but a payment middle-manning service would also be great. Perhaps an automated PayPal script or something?

Sounds nice…
But I don’t know if Sponge staff wants this.

@RobiRami

This thread should be closed, to prevent the decision from disappearing again.
There’s nothing more to post on this topic.

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This topic is now closed. New replies are no longer allowed.
This decision has ended and the answer is no. We will not support paid, freeium etc plugins.

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