Seeking assets for our new store!

Well loss of an expected profit margin means nothing if people won't buy it at a higher price.

ne of the big characteristics of good business acumen is being able to identify opportunity costs. Is the time spent writing javascript for a plugin more valuable than the time spent writing javascript for something else? In my opinion, not with a $5 per-dev license.

You just need to add more value, more bling, and more shiny, to get more people interested... which is what I'm looking at.

uite the contrary: spending more effort means raising the costs of production - if you can't pass on those costs to the market, you lose money. The best solution with a $5 ceiling would be to make tons of low-effort plugins (thus lowering the cost of production).

A lot of what is being discussed here and feedback we've received does makes sense

hank you.

I really am sorry if this is a big disappointment so close to launch, but they are categories we do want to support in the future.

'd love to see a "premium tutorials" type section as well, is that possible? It's functionally similar to the e-books section, but a bit shorter in scope and not limited to text (you could add video, exercises, step-by-step capx, commented source, powerpoint presentations, etc).

Tom Make a list of rules of plugins, if they break one rule, then the plugin submission will be rejected. That's simple.

don't think the issue here is with plugins breaking the rules. The problem is plugins adhering to the rules but breaking the spirit of the store, and making rules for those is a highly subjective process with tons of caveats and exceptions. Manual curation is already being done, I'd like to see manual pricing (by scirra staf, in case that's not obvious) as well.

In fact all plugs up until recently have been free.

ree and commercial content are produced for entirely different reasons. For instance, I have lots of ideas for cool plugins, but I don't make them because they take A LOT of time and time=money, which I need in order to survive.

Also, commercial plugins require constant support (you can't just let them die) and documentation (which you can forgo if your plugin is free).

But if you wish to continue the argument then lets look at something comparable, say for example Spriter.

Its an editor, and a plug, and costs $24.99.

Can you make something of that quality?

priter can be sold mass-market, and plugin costs count as a feature for the software itself, which is the main product. That's not the case with a construct-exclusive plugin.

Let me make an analogy: photoshop is sold to millions of people for a (arguably) low price, and is a very high quality product. The euphoria middleware, a much less complex product (though still pretty complicated), costs millions of dollars. How do they get away with it? Simple: euphoria is a niche product and thus can't be sold mass-market, just like c2 plugins, but on a much bigger scale.

If you could provide a turnkey solution (a plugin bundle plus a game with source) for, say, a top-down MMO-game in construct 2 - which is quite possible and something I've considered briefly - I don't think charging upwards of $1500 would be a stretch, even if it ends up being less complex than Spriter. The possibility goes to hell instantly if you cap prices at $5.

As a costumer, a rather pay more for a plugin that I know will have long lasting support (as Spriter, or a lot of tools on the Unity Asset Store), than pay 5 bucks for a simple plugin that will not be long supported. I think that the freedom to set their own prices is better for the seller and for the buyer.

Plugins and tools add much more value than assets, because they offer a change in workflow and on the toolset at your disposal. I bought some beefy priced editor plugins on the Unity asset store, but I feel like they added value to the software, and that way, the creators see like the time investment is worth it and they can keep make high quality addons.

I am looking forward for the time when the store is full of amazing workflow tools and resources, the graphical assets and such are ok, but I won`t use them.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. And sorry for my "engrish", it is not my mother language.

— thanks for the feedback!

Hi!

I was wondering who, if anybody, will take responsibility if products, say add-ons for example, sold in the store don´t work as advertised?

My guess is that if the official store were to contain (too many) buggy/faulty assets, that would reflect poorly not only on the author of said asset, but also on Scirra and Construct 2.

Will there perhaps be some kind of quality control before things are allowed to be uploaded?

Tom Are you planning on making categories for the assets (graphics/sounds etc)? Its going to get very messy to sort through many submissions soon.

Definitely handy to have Genre categories for assets, or even Themes category: Scifi, Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic etc. Sellers can pick Genre & Theme when listing.

Can't wait to see how it opens in next Monday

Tom

After some analysis and a nice cold beer, i've changed my mind regarding pricing of the addons.

5$ is actually acceptable, if the volume is big enough and similar rules are applied to the whole store. As i don't have any info on the volume, i'll give Scirra benefit of doubt and hope they'll do their best to gather customers.

If we're going cheap, it will only work if the whole store is cheap.

Also, i'm not fond of the "per developer" license if the price is maxed at 5$. As a trade-off i can propose "5$ per year per developer" as it will motivate dev's to maintain their plugins, and 0,42 cents per month is laughable for a piece of code that enables you to create better games.

I've changed the price on the store for my plugin. It's up to you to work out the licensing.

Tl;dr: I'll live with 5$ per pop. It's your store, please decide what you want to do and stick with it, the developers will adapt.

$5 is actually $3.50 - a maximum price cap is a bad idea as it completely discourages quality if a developer has no direct competition.

Let developers adjust the price of their products and let the market dictate the price; to ensure quality Scirra could charge a developer licence of $30 a year to ensure people take it seriously.

True, the amount that Scirra gets does make the $5 seem ridiculous, but its a hard thing to pass the buck off to the consumer as well.

On the other hand paying for a dev license, as well as getting charged for selling stuff seems silly as well.

All I can say is if it goes beyond the $5 it better be pretty darn good product.

Then again we don't want a gillion "flappy" knockoffs in there either.

Or even less if you pay income taxes to your state/country.

I'm good with any set of rules, they only change dev's strategy on how to compete on the market and answer to a simple question "is this market worth competing on?"

No matter how good your product is, you'll only get that many visitors/potential customers as they come to the store. If the price is capped to 5$, only thing that can make this market viable is the amount of people they will attract to the store. Let's say you're selling the ultimate plugin that is unbelievable for that price, and your product page is visited by 100 users per month. There's no way for you to make more than 100 sales, and you'll probably sell to a small percentage, let's approximate 1% or 1 sell a month. If there are 10000 unique (with a big percentage of new users) visitors per month, then 5$ is acceptable, as you'll earn around 300-350$ per plugin.

With 5-6 good plugins and low maintenance costs, you'll start to see some significant earnings. It seems like a good strategy, it'll force devs to create smaller, more defined plugins, with a focused and specific need, which are easier/cheaper to maintain. It'll also force devs to expand, offer documentation for the plugins as separate eBooks, or sell advanced examples that come bundled with the plugin for the price of one. And the most importantly, it will give easier/cheaper access to the addons for the users of C2.

I'm more ready to spend 5$ on any plugin than 29.99. With 5$ i'll buy it if it's interesting enough, store it to aside and use it when the time comes (just like steam games, probably never ). If it doesn't work as i expected, i won't be so angry. It just 5$ after all. But if it's 29.99$ i'll be careful with my purchase, and be more ready to request charge-backs if it's not what i expected.

In the end, the only thing that matters are the rules, and how clear they are. After the market is open, pretty soon we'll know all the info we need and either Scirra will adapt, and/or sellers will adapt to the new information.

Who'da thunk economics and industrialisation would be complicated, eh gents?

I'm just excited to see where this goes, I've got some stuff I might sell, but I think I'll enjoy watching the opening stages of this development even more than a possible financial return!

A good plugin that works with a feature you need is nearly priceless to be honest.. well, priceless isn't huge for poor solo indie devs.. $20 would be tops for me. :p

Either way let the market decide, we're living in a capitalistic society, let's not go the other way.

Thanks everyone, this thread has run it's course so am locking it now. The new store is released!