Blender Market - Off to strong start!

Hi everyone!

We launched the Blender Market on June 10th, just about two weeks ago now. The response has been really fantastic. It’s been quite humbling for the whole team to see how positive everyone has been reacting to it.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out at http://blendermarket.com

I wanted to take this chance to share some initial stats with you and to open up an easy way for any of you to provide feedback on how we can further improve the market for everyone.

Blender Market Launched Tuesday, June 10th

The market will live or die by the success of the vendors and the products they offer. And so far I think we’re off to a really good start start. As of today we have 69 approved vendors, with a combined total of 50 published products. Of those products, there’s 39 contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

You can see all Dev-Fund contributing products here: http://cgcookiemarkets.com/blender/all-products/tag/dev-fund/

Personally I think this is really amazing. There’s a real drive from everyone involved to make sure that the market truly helps grow the Blender ecosystem and there’s no better way to do this currently than to contribute right back into Blender’s actual development. This additional development support helps everyone, as the development goes right back into official releases.

So far the most popular product categories (by sales) have been add-ons, shaders, and scene setups.

Going Forward

I really believe this is only the beginning. There’s so many good things to come. There’s new products being submitted every day from vendors in a wide range of disciplines.

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask for feedback from everyone. What do you think of the market? What would you like to see? How can we make it even better?

Excited to be a part of the market, and can’t wait to hear what the community has to say! Looking forward to where it can help to take Blender as a whole.

If the number of the sales shown correspond to truth, maybe a job in the nearest fast food is a faster way to opulence <sarcastic icon>.

I like the Blender Market, its good for Blender, developers and artists I hope to see it grow!

Are you guys up for suggestions about extending the services the site offers:

It would be awesome if you extend the service to allow for pre-order / crowd-funding! and by this I mean allow approved contributes to create a product/feature that others can pre-order or back pledge style. I mention this because there is a lot of talk and interest in different features/exporters that could be added to Blender but their currently lacks a mechanism to put money behind an individual request short of personally hiring a developer.

This would not only solve the issue mentioned above, it would also allow for more improvements to Blender because a “crowd-funded” product could be something that’s added to trunk and or freely available to all, even if it cost the backers to pay for its development in the first place.

And as for the question about what I would like to see more of.

I would love to see some quality shot ready rigged characters. I know that there are some good free character rigs for Blender but I’m talking about shot ready rigs like the Animsquador Animation Mentor rigs.

While I think this would be awesome, and definitely worth having within the Blender Community, I don’t think the market is the place for it. Perhaps it could be built along-side the market, and it could certainly facilitate development of products for release on the market.

That being said, there’s absolutely nothing stopping someone else from doing this. There’s lots of systems out there that can be used for building a crowd-funding site. In fact you can do it with Easy Digital Downloads for Wordpress, which is what the market is built on: https://easydigitaldownloads.com/extensions/crowd-funding/

@JonathanW
Awesome link, thanks although I am not brave enough to do something like that myself :frowning:

I wonder if you could answer a few questions I have:

I noticed that all the add-ons released on Blender Markets are GPL licensed, is that something that is mandatory or can a contributor choose to sell an add-on that is under a different license and what other licenses are compatible with Blender and the Market? BSD?

You state that some products contribute to the Blender Development fund, and you can see a heart on the products that do. What is the percentage of the total sale that goes to blender, I read that the “administrative service fee” is 30% so does that mean that products showing the heart are contributing “up to” 70% of there sales to the Blender foundation? is it possible to see the percentage?

Thanks for your time, this is an awesome opportunity for everyone.

Currently all add-ons must be GPL. That being said, we are not opposed to other licenses (so long as they’re all open source licenses), but we simply do’t support them at this time. We are intentionally keeping the license options a bit limited initially so as to keep the scope small. As things grow we will very likely add more license options. We chose GPL because that’s what Blender is licensed as and keeps things very easily compatible.

If any devs have their add-on already licensed under another license, but wish to sell it, just email me. We’ll work something out :slight_smile:

Vendors can specify anywhere from 0-70% to contribute to the dev fund. Contributions are capped at 70% because that is the maximum a vendor may earn from a single sale (without manual override anyway). Most products so far are contributing between 5 and 15 percent. It would be relatively simple to show the given percentage, we just don’t have it yet.

plugins and shaders should be crowd funded instead of selling it :slight_smile:
like if we hit this target…it’ll be open to the public

One issue with crowd-funding development is keeping it sustainable and maintaining (much less advancing) the development of the add-on. I think it’s a great thing, but it’s difficult to do much beyond the initial burst of development.

Whereas selling an add-on can create on-going resources for sustainable development.

It also creates an ecosystem where people who would otherwise have no problem chipping in $10 for a useful addon sit on the sidelines waiting for it to become free.

To an extent. The “sale” proposition is having the add-on now as opposed to later when it gets added to trunk. “Now” is worth something. :slight_smile:

Indeed, “now” is worth nearly everything. I’m sure if you could freeze yourself until the year 2100 Blender would have every feature you could imagine, and some you can’t. But cryo-stasis is very expensive :wink:

While I appreciate your sarcasm, I should also say that starting a new business, and even more a new business model, is always hard at the begining.

Pay for addons is a new approach for blender users, but I´m sure that this is going to be sustainable.

On the other hand people are always complaining on blender for the lack of plugins and professional solutions. I think that this could a nice way to develop such type of ecosystem while pushing also general blender development.

it will be like free to play game…where we can play with Blender but if we want to buy some additional plugins…thats cool too :smiley:

I’m really curious to see what other future add-ons we’ll find there, ndee’s Asset Sketcher is really amazing.

I feel the market is a great idea in itself as well as helping to push forward Blender’s ecosystem. I’m mostly interested in addons and things that help me create my own works more easily.

Speaking of addons, have you considered putting Contours retopology on the market as well?

What I’d change about the market? A few small things mostly. The left-right widget is obscuring the right-most thumbnail.
Also, it’s possible to drag-mouse the images to scroll through the gallery but not when it’s maximized.

Other than that, great work and I hope the market will grow well. :slight_smile:

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I have mixed feelings about the Blender Market.
On the positive side, I think it’s great if developpers can get paid for what they give to the community. It makes it more sustainable, it can motivate some developpers to spend time creating cool tools for Blender, knowing that they could make a bit of money with it.

Also, the market is only giving them the tools to get money out of their work, they could have done it before through their website with Paypal, or whatever, so it’s not as if it was a complete game changer.

The prices are pretty good also, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t pay 30$ for something that saves me hours of work.

My question is more about how will we get Blender to evolve, if there is a proper non-free add-on that can be bought?
Taking Contours as an exemple (could have done it with SSS shaders). This is a great retopo tool, something that should be in Blender by default. Is it going to happen someday? That would be unfair for the developper who made it to not get any revenue anymore because Blender integrated it, for free. The Blender team would have to create a new different tool serving the same purpose? That seems a bit of a waste of time.

So will we always have to pay for it? What happens if it’s broken with a new version of Blender, and there is no support for it anymore? Will the developper have to give support for it for the numerous Blender updates? I don’t think there is a way to force him. And if his updates are for free if you already bought the add-on, there is little interest for him to do so.

While if the add-on had been integrated in Blender, it would have had to be kept in a working state.

You might have answered all this already, but I just wanted to share my opinion.

Contours will be released on the market soon as v1.1 is ready. We’re trying to polish it up now and hope to release soon. We haven’t released it on the market yet because v1.0 does not work with 2.70, and I didn’t want people getting confused/upset with a “new release” that doesn’t work with the newest Blender :slight_smile:

The plan from the beginning with Contours has been to slowly integrate it in Blender. What we hope to do is continue developing the Contour tool set and then slowly release the previous tools into Blender. How exactly this will work I am not sure yet, we are not that far along.

This is something that is going to be a choice any and all add-on debs can make, and it’ll just depend on what direction they choose to go.

However, I believe there’s also a strong argument against always trying to include the latest and greatest paid add-on in Blender. And that is on-going development. Once an add-on is in Blender the core team agrees to maintain the add-on, ensuring that it continues to work with API changes and what not. But at that point there’s no promise of new feature development, unless someone chooses to.

By keeping an add-on paid for most, if not all, of it’s lifetime then it can help ensure continuous development and support. Obviously the developer can fail to hold up their end of the bargain, and stop development, but then people stop paying.

That being said, I don’t think there’s any one right answer and at the end of the day it’ll come down to the individual developer and their wants/needs.

@JonathanW
I don’t want to derail the thread anymore but there was an interesting post on Aligoriths Blog that went into this issue of Add-on vs included in Blender with lots of detail: LINK

I said already that I would like to see some awesome shot ready rigs, but while we are on the subject of Add-on’s I would like to see some production ready Animation Add-on’s too.

Crouch has talked about a Pro version of his Motion Trails Add-on in this thread: LINK that would be awesome :smiley:

A tool that I would really like is some form of enhanced pose library with images and blending.

Do you have any plans to do deal of the month or flash sales like the Unity asset store? Everything I bought from there was during a flash sale event, I don’t know why but it just gives me a happy feeling when you buy something for $90 instead of $300 :stuck_out_tongue:

Aligorith’s post is a great read! Thanks for the link, I had not seen that.

Regarding flash sales, we mostly definitely plan to do this. But likely not for a little while longer while we let the library build up. I’d like to get at least 100+ products on the market before we start doing bundle sales :slight_smile: