- License changes from "Per Project" to "Per Developer". Makes more sense for this category, buy once and use in any projects you're developing forever.
- Max price $5 USD. Current plugins are in the £15 - £20 range which we are not comfortable with. This is a significant % of the cost of a Construct 2 License. We're happy to allow plugins for a higher price than $5 USD but only with special permission and if we think it's justified. We also don't want potential customers for Construct 2 browsing our store and thinking that they will be locked into or tricked into having to buy expensive plugins once they own a license.
Those are massively discouraging words. I thought the store was supposed to be a viable way to generate income... there are so few coders in the community, is a developer's work really that cheap? Seriously, did Scirra forget Tigerworks already? Making addons is hard work!
Let's explore the differences between asset and addon creators:
- Audience:
- Addon: Limited to construct 2 owners, since addons don't work anywhere else
- Asset: Unrestricted. Addons work with all game creation software (MMF,GM,Unity,GameSalad,etc), as well as custom engines.
- Skillset:
- Addon: Must know how to program (which technically means you don't even need construct). Must learn the SDK. Work produced is only applicable to C2 and doesn't work anywhere else.
- Asset: Can recycle your old work, as well as sell said work in many other asset stores.
- Price:
- Addon: Maximum price is $5 (and that's probably before scirra's and payment processor's cut). A single chargeback eats the profits of at least three sales.
- Asset: Unrestricted pricing.
- License:
- Addon: Per developer instead of per project. This means each plugin can only be sold to a user once. Depends on a steady flow of new users to remain profitable.
- Asset: Per project instead of per developer. A user can potentially buy as many licenses as he/she has projects.
- Support:
- Addon: Breaking changes means new versions have to be tested for compatibility and quickly fixed, or else you'll get a swarm of angry users and a reputation hit.
- Asset: Once uploaded, never has to be changed. Files are all but guaranteed to continue working forever. "Conversion" permission means the user never has to worry about files becoming obsolete or incompatible.
- De-Listing:
- Addon: Can be de-listed if scirra makes a similar, official version - all your work goes to the trash. Official versions will most likely work better than your addon version, since the SDK is incapable of many things official addons can do (such as spawning custom interfaces in the IDE and modifying engine code both at edittime and runtime).
- Asset: As long as your work is original, it will not be de-listed, even if the art pack included with construct 2 is updated to include a functionally-similar piece.
The only saving grace is that addons are massively more reusable - a feature never gets stale, whereas art/music seen repeatedly across games screams "unoriginal". This benefit is negated by having per-developer licenses.
In the near future, with modularity, addon developers will also have to face modules as competition. Modules will probably be more desirable, since they're accepted in the arcade and suffer less from breaking changes.
So let's make a quick calculation: a person working full-time for minimum wage in the US makes around $290/week. In order to make that much selling addons, that person would have to sell 58 licenses per week (this doesn't take into account Scirra's cut). Is that viable? I don't think so. Even if it is, one can probably make more money by selling javascript code in other stores (i.e. codecanyon).
Current plugins are in the £15 - £20 range which we are not comfortable with. This is a significant % of the cost of a Construct 2 License.
Why aren't you comfortable with that? Look at the unity asset store - scripting section. Those prices are quite hefty, yet I don't think a user looks at that and thinks "gee, I'll have to waste a lot of money buying all of those", instead they look at it and think "wow, this is so flexible! Look at the possibilities!".
I've said in the past, we need an editor SDK (look at what unity can do) as well as a more powerful runtime SDK to make construct more extensible, but with that statement it appears you think all (of most) functionality should be out-of-the-box...? That the more addons exist, the less a user will be inclined to buy construct? I don't agree with that viewpoint at all.
The only way I see to work with a $5 per-dev-license would be to flood the store with single-purpose plugins that can be coded in an hour or less.
Now, I know that many developers have an inflated sense of what their plugins are actually worth (I'm not going to point fingers, but really, look at the current offerings in the store...). However, keep in mind there are IMHO only two sensible approaches:
- Either let the market self-regulate, in which case competition and the rating system will ensure that those plugins wither and die (albeit generating some angry users)
- Or price items yourself. I supported this approach in the past and continue to support it.
Keep in mind the primary goal, above all else, should be to maximize profit for content creators (as with any store), not to garner more customers for construct - that's a secondary benefit stemming from giving potential users a multitude of options. Putting that goal before content creator's income is the kind of conflict of interest that makes me think maybe an unofficial construct store would have been a better option.