Olivia Switching to Paid Plugins

@Archeia

Yeah, that's a bit abusive for sure, and no one making things for people deserves that kind of toxicity. I'm not sure whether that was you or someone else you know that was being blamed & cursed at, but I'm sorry you (they) had to go through that. I'd be majorly ticked off to be told "f u take responsibility" for something that wasn't my fault, as well!

These were two toxic, entitled kids (or adults acting like kids, which would be even worse). They're not worth the time of day, and it sounds like you've had more bad experiences beyond just those two.

I really don't feel that's representative of our community, though. (Do you feel it is?) I feel that a supermajority of our community is kind and respectful, even if we fail to understand directions sometimes. Everyone who's written me about my scripts has been kind, even if I had to tell them "no" to a request.

Additionally, while this does illustrate a need for some members of the community to be more supportive to the content creators, I don't see any way that hiding resources behind a paywall will change this behavior. Some number of people will be turned away upfront (including the good community members), and if anything, the people who do pay will feel even more entitled to say things and request things.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I still feel the solution would be to closely integrate resource purchases with the program itself (through an in-client asset store or similar). Among its many benefits, this kind of feature would reduce toxicity in three ways:

1. Answers and advice about how to use the plugin properly will tend to conglomerate in a single place, meaning fewer frustrated devs
2. With a single place that every RPG Maker owner is a member of, there will be far less need to offer personal contact info like Discord
3. Community members who are consistently abusive could be restricted from posting/sending messages on this store

 

*takes my head in my hands* *then choose to laugh* Do not take their stupidity personally @Archeia , I know it makes fuses being blown. It is really hard to imagine they will grow up and mature some day... oh dear!

(I think first one should had been redirected at video game business class in the form of a neutral video if it ever exists. Not sure if with the degree of patience they would understand.)

 

@Wavelength I think the problem starts for plugin creators when you start showing up enough on search engines to draw an audience from beyond the main RPGM community. I also think that the attitude of the RPGM community is generally pleasant and supportive of content creators, and there are probably also lots of nice people out there who haven’t ever visited or interacted with the community. But the problem for plugin creators is one found commonly online: happy users are quiet, while angry users are loud. And even if the percentage of toxic people is actually small relative to how many people they interact with daily, having those negative interactions regularly can make the percentage feel much larger for content creators.

Just to make up some numbers, if 90% of the community is pleasant to plugin creators and 10% is toxic, and a major plugin developer receives 5 comments from users each day (via their website, Discord, forums they’re active on, etc.), that would still work out to them having negative interactions with users more than three times a week on average. While those numbers may not reflect reality, the point is that even a relatively small amount of negativity could build up a lot of fatigue over the span of a major plugin creator’s career.

Sidebar: Based on how they worded their final reply, I think the Pokémon battle system guy thought they were literally being told that the standard price of a plugin commission was “millions of dollars.” Would go along with the general financial cluelessness which would make them think that $70 is “big money” to spend on a custom battle system plugin. Not defending the aggressive attitude they took, but I thought their lack of common sense was a little amusing.

 

Yikes!! Death threats because they don't like your assets? Those are some horrible people!

It's weird that our experiences have been so different, but if multiple content creators are seeing this kind of toxicity as a majority (or even a significant minority) of the responses, then I'd have to agree that something needs to change.

Well, surely there would be less toxicity if there are fewer people that ever see your asset because of the paywall, but you could also say the same thing about taking your resource down entirely or failing to properly promote it. Less people, less toxicity. Certainly that's not what we want, though!

I do understand your argument that putting resources behind a paywall acts as a "how badly do you want this" where only the people who are really serious about using it properly are going to access it by paying. However, at the prices that we charge in this community, I don't think that will be the reality of it. I think anyone who thinks "it might be cool" can still get the resource, and once they've paid you money for it, they're going to feel a lot more entitled to asking for full support in its implementation (which I actually think is reasonable to expect for a paid product) and to give you a piece of their mind if they don't like it (less reasonable). This doesn't even consider the people who will pirate your resources (easy to do), and these tend to be the most entitled-feeling people of all.

This is something we'll probably have to agree to disagree on, as it's speculation on how people will make decisions and react. You might be right about it; I might be wrong. It would be interesting to hear more people weigh in on.

Additionally, in the case of plugins, putting it behind a paywall can absolutely screw over developers. A while back I bought the Effectus script in hopes that it would improve the performance of my game. I've done a lot of custom scripting in my own project, so I knew there was a chance there was going to be incompatibility, but I figured for $20 it was worth a shot. As I feared, it was highly incompatible, causing my game to crash upon startup (I wrote patches for the first few apparent incompatibilities, but it soon became apparent nearly every method would cause crashes in some form or another). I was out $20 with a script that wasn't going to be of any use to me. This isn't Source's fault - I tested Effectus with a clean project and it worked like a charm. But I still felt cheated. If it were the standard try-before-you-buy model, I could have tested it out, seen it wouldn't work with my project, removed it, and left. Of course I wouldn't leave any toxic messages (and I didn't do so, even having paid the $20)! But it would have been a much "fairer" way to do things, all else being equal.

 

Death threats... users.... NO! no! If this is the generation of tomorrow I will go hermit!

 

While you're absolutely right about this, the same thing could be said about pretty much any product or service that reaches enough people to be viable - triply so when it's something you do over the internet, where people take more license to act badly. No matter how altruistic the service provider's intentions are, there are going to be some disgruntled users and a few are going to be way too vocal about it. Customer service people generally handle the brunt of this for big companies, but for an entrepreneur you are going to have to deal with it yourself.

If you're not doing this as a business, you can avoid this by making yourself intentionally hard to reach (e.g. not having places to post on your website, not giving a support email address, or posting resources on forums without ever checking your PMs there) or by reducing the number of people who see your resource (e.g. putting it behind a paywall, not promoting your resources anywhere). I don't consider this to be an effective solution, though, and IMO it certainly isn't viable if content creators want to be able to work full time on it for any length of time.

(If Olivia ends up making a small fortune with her new business model, and her users seem happy with it in the long run, then I'm straight-up wrong, and it's exactly the solution we should be using because it solves everything. I have my serious doubts that will be the case, though of course I hope I'm wrong.)

At the end of the day, as a creative who is running something, you have to be okay with having a lot of customers call in with stupid questions that can be solved with "Please pull the plug out and then try plugging it back in, Sir." If that's the majority of stuff we're seeing, we need to be okay with it. If a ton of messages we're seeing are things like the unprovoked "F You"s and death threats that Archeia got, though, that's a much bigger problem that we need to solve through a systemic change.

 

There's a subreddit called ChoosingBeggars. This is what they post about. It's ridiculous that there's these kind of people all over the world.

Honestly I've seen it so much that I find when I see that behavior it's just hilarious. I know it's not the same for you or the others, but maybe seeing others pain and suffering can help build a heavy tolerance to it. This behavior will never go away, but we can educate those willing to listen.

 

It's terrible to have to endure more than your fair share, but if nothing else, think of yourself as the Lightning Rod of Hate, doing a valuable service to the rest of us by absorbing it.

Plus you probably have a lot more hair than Colin does. Hey, for me, sometimes that's enough to get by.

You'd be shocked by how many people I know doing it solely as a hobby, but for sure there's more of a professional air now.

If you're saying from personal experience that content creation was profitable for you before joining in an official capacity, then that's awesome!! I'm really happy for you, and maybe that's a more common thing than I realized.

 

To a degree, @Wavelength is correct. I spent 2 years working in customer service for a phone company. No one ever called in to say "I love your service!". No, we got all the complainers. In fact, some were so bad we had processes for what to do if someone gave us death threats (that is a felony and since we had their name and address, we were to call the authorities on them) to what to do if someone threated suicide, just to try to handle all of the strange cases we could get. To give you an idea, here are the odder calls I or others I knew at work got:

1: I had someone call in who was convinced everyone was tapping his phone, and would ramble for an hour about it.

2: We had people call in complaining asking us to take responsibility for the rival company taking out their connection between the box and the house (of course, it didn't help that we interpreted the federal law that we only had to provide the service to the box literally).

3: We had people calling in demanding phones fixed NOW when a lighting strike took out the entire state. Sure, you and everyone else, get in line.

4: One person got into such a swearing fit that I threw down my headset, went to the restroom, went to the break room, stood around for 15 minutes, came back and they hadn't missed a beat. Yep, they were swearing so hard they didn't know that I had left.

5: One customer swore so hard they had an asthma attack on the phone.

6: One person called in asking what their new phone number would be after they buy a new phone at walmart (keep in mind we serviced land lines). That one was hard to keep a straight face as it was answered.

7: People who didn't want to pay for extra services.

8: People who did not understand that phone service is paid one month in advance. This was usually those who had switched from another company, and wondered why the first bill was 2 months service. And guess what, their old company did that too. But did they believe us? Nope.

9: People who failed to understand that they did have to pay for accepting collect calls. Some of them ran up bills of $900 or more.

10: People who would decide to call in drunk, thinking that was a great time to debate their phone bill.

I could go on.

The point is, when you support something, you should expect about anything.

 

Personally, I think some of the confusion from not understanding the plugin, feature requests, false bug reports came from the demo being behind a paywall which limited how many people bought it versus downloading just the plugin when it was free. Demos for plugins are great, look at galv and moghunter. A user will ask how do I do this, the author just replies: it's in the demo. I mean look at almost all of galv's responses both here and his website, it's in the documentation or play the demo, or sorry this plugin doesn't do that, etc. But because olivia's was locked behind a paywall, many if not most of these "attackers" didn't pay for the demo or they wouldn't ask the same inane questions.

For the way people treat each other online: that isn't just restricted to people online, go work in retail or the service industry. People suck, it's a fact and the only way to avoid their wrath is to just not deal with people. You want to release something to the public, better grow some thick skin. For every 10 people that like something one person hates it and guess what, he/she is the loudest. You could paint a masterpiece that the whole world adores, but there would still be seemingly more people that hate it just because they are very vocal and very loud. It's just the nature of the beast.

I've been hanging around this forum and a couple of discord chats for a little while now, not near as long as others, never heard of Olivia until all of a sudden everyone wanted an Octopath clone. So a couple of bad eggs made your feelings get hurt and you (her/both) decide to wall off your creation to protect your feelings, I say if this product is so amazing, why let these dumbasses get under your skin. Customer satisfaction is not about people praising you, it's about the willingness for someone to keep shopping with you and if they recommend you to their friends. This applies to all avenues of business. Most people just don't have the need to log on to the internet and sing praises of your genius but if they have a problem they go searching for answers get frustrated and throw tantrums. Once again, nature of the beast.

The locking of the thread here just proves how inexperienced one of you is, and Archeia you've been around forever so I just don't get it, and it screams you sunk to their level. You let trolls get under your skin. It doesn't speak professionally and the decision to move the plugins also reflects this. Its like children playing in the park, little Billy called little Suzie a name and now little Suzie's mom took away the park and put it in her backyard and charges kids to play on it. To hell with the poor kids who used to play there. It's all childish. I for one will not be using her plugins anytime soon. I was going to check it out when I had time between games but I am not going to pay for something I am not sure I need and until I try it out, how do I know it's a good fit for my game? I'm not going to waste money on something I can't try out. You drive a car before you buy it, try on clothes before you buy it, etc.

I am a manager at a big box retailer and I have been spit in the face, people have tried to come across the counter and choke me, I just walk up and they come unglued before I even know what is going on. A few nasty emails and PMs seem like a small price to pay to release beautiful art onto the world.

Just my 2 cents, good luck on your/her endeavours and happy game making.

 

@OnslaughtSupply while what you say is understandable for a situation where actual money is being payed to the developer. Olivia took hours out of there day to create plugins that they had hoped was going to be rewarding by the community. The difference though is it was free and there is no need to act "professionally" this is not a business it was a gift to the community not a product, for someone to throw it back in your face and practically say f you, well then so be it, I'll just charge $$ and treat it as a product. That decision is a dayum good one and I'm glad Olivia did that, even if the decision was not because of idiots, it's still a reasonable decision, not much different than paid assets from unity or GM.

 

@LTN Games No I believe it's her business, she can do whatever she wants to, but to announce it publicly and then get upset that the public sucks well... I think you can see where I am going with this. It's just silly and unfortunate. Like I said, I for one won't be checking it out because I want to test drive it first. There is an old saying where I'm from, don't cut your nose off just to spite your face. And no, it's a product, whether released for free or paid, shared or bought. If I release a demo for free and then a paid full version, they're both products that I have to maintain.

 

It's already dumb that plugin developers release all this stuff for free to begin with. They have the potential to make SO MUCH MONEY if they invested their time doing real coding jobs, but instead they give it away for free and then deal with a bunch of whiny children who don't have money, pirated the RPG Maker software and any other DLC they can get their hands on, and will never actually release anything.

It's cool that she's charging money now, because she'll put more time into developing the plugins rather than dealing with jobless, toxic man children. If you're interested in anything she has, then you can just buy it.

It's cheaper than hiring a developer to make the plugins you want anyways.

 

@OnslaughtSupply I have to disagree with it being a product, there are many things I can release to the public and it not be my responsibility to maintain it for them. It's like saying that just because I drew a picture and left it at the park for someone else to see, then they can come to me and tell me to fix it for them because they don't like the way it was drawn. Well, I'd hate to break it to them but that was not my intention. In fact all the plugins I made for the public were personal plugins for my own projects or a commission that was not in the terms to be exclusive, that I wanted to share because I thought hey, if I can get a use of these than so can others. In the end the intentions behind the release is only known by the author and Olivia may have had the same intentions, who knows? Either way, to say it's the responsibility of the person gifting to maintain that gift, to me is ludicrous, do you tell your friend the gift they gave you was awesome but it's broken and they need to return it to get a new one?, I've never heard of such a thing before.

@MMMm You're right there is plenty of money to be made, in fact I've made so much money doing commissions that I wondered why I even bother releasing any plugins for free. In the end it's the community and I was forever grateful for the amount of free resources provided by others that I felt the urge to share mine as well. I started my RM journey back VX Ace days, where I joined the RM scene late and their was script after script and sprite after sprite available for (mostly) free, in fact I would not have learned as much as I have learned if it was not for this community giving me that drive to do so and follow the path that I was able to walk on due to so many authors before me.

 

@LTN Games if you release something and don't want to maintain it, that's fine, that's your prerogative, you have completely missed the point. The point is, it's still a product.

And charging for plugins is also fine, like I said, it's her business. The point I was trying to make is that when you have trolls and haters and asshats as someone pointed out, you take the high road. You don't stoop to their level, that's what I mean by professionalism, and you surely don't hide (behind a paywall) because that's just as childish and actually is a victory for the haters. Now if say Olivia was like wow, people like my stuff and everyone says its awesome, I think I should charge for this and try and make a living, then yeah, that's just good business and like I said, it's her business. It's the nature of which she changed her model. Personally this is just drama for the sake of drama, and to call attention to itself.

 

What's done is done, what would you do now if you were her?

 

@punchybot To be honest, her hosting on itch makes me think at some point monetization was considered, I mean most people just host on their own website or dropbox, at some point. So maybe her switch was inevitable. But when someone calls you names, just ignore them, am I the only person who has heard sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me? If someone legitimately threatens you, you report it to the proper authorities. If trolls are picking on you on the net, just ignore, block, report to admins.

If it were me, which it's not, once the stupid started becoming overwhelming, you set up templates for auto responses, once again see galv's responses, it leave it at that. Someone says, hey this is broken on my end, you got your template that just says "please submit a proper bug report" with a link to your bugreport template. If it gets real dumb, do what Yanfly did by having to navigate through patreon. And let's say that wasn't good enough and you decide to monetize the whole thing, as she's done, you don't announce it as due to excessive morons it's all paid now, say due to overwhelming demand/popularity my plugins are no longer free as the time it takes to update and maintain them is too demanding. That right there I could stand behind. I read a great article about a year ago that pretty much said, don't feed the trolls. Asinine comments and questions just don't warrant a response.

I get it, it's your baby, you get upset when someone attacks it, but just step back from the keyboard take a few breaths, go for a walk, and just remember that the other person is having a way worse day than you and because misery loves company, they want to drag you down with them. So don't let them.

On a side note, the RPGMAKER community is a passionate and giving community but as we grow in popularity so does the people and more people means more asshats, so buckle up boys and girls!

Also I am done with this thread, so if anyone tags me I will ignore it, I have said what I wanted to say. Good luck and happy game making!

@punchybot what if anything would you have done differently?