Any real numbers you can provide to back up this claim?
I myself had this wrong notion in the past that people selling stuff on the web are making fortunes. It makes sense on the surface when considering the potential millions that would buy your product even at $2 dollars a pop. In reality, most sellers can barely sell hundred units… I’ve seen people start selling tutorials… same people are now gone venturing into other things…
Just look at the Gooseberry Project crowdfunding. It didn’t even reach their goal and had a hard time raising the funds. They overestimated the “millions” of Blender users capability to raise such amount. On surface, ie, million users, it makes sense. But in reality, only a tiny minority are capable of sparing some dollars.
Oh I don’t have time to elaborate here. I would want to save it for a blog post anyway.
No I don’t have any real numbers to back up my claim but I’ve been investigating this subject for years. Do you have any real numbers to prove me wrong? Don’t just take my word for it. Research it yourself. You were not wrong. There are many success stories out there. Most made it only through lots of hard work over a long period of time. If it was easy we would all be internet millionaires.
Before finding numbers, I would need a concise and well worded stance from you. But yes the numbers are out there. I know several students who are looking for a thesis paper, I’m sure I could scam one of them into doing the leg work for me.
The one common reason that Blender plugins are GPL is that they have to be GPL-compatible, and the simplest way to achieve that is to just use the GPL for the plugin as well.
No I don’t have any real numbers to back up my claim but I’ve been investigating this subject for years. Do you have any real numbers to prove me wrong? Don’t just take my word for it. Research it yourself. You were not wrong. There are many success stories out there. Most made it only through lots of hard work over a long period of time.
You only mention a wordpress plugin developer as an example. I’m aware that there’s a significant amount of money being made with wordpress plugins or similar, but that’s a completely different market. Wordpress (unfortunately) has a huge amount of users, a lot of which are business. The same isn’t true for end-user applications like Blender. Since the sales on blendermarket are public, you can see that even the top sellers do not earn enough to make a living (comparable to an ordinary developer job), which means they likely cannot dedicate themselves fully to their software. I’m not aware of a market to sell plugins for other GPL applications like GIMP, so blendermarket seems more like a novelty to me.
If and when Blender snowballs the Blender plugin biz will snowball with it. Jonathan W and friends and the plugin devs are getting in on the ground floor
Let’s be honest, “if and when” is not good enough. There’s a million opportunities for developers out there. If you’re out to make good money (or even just a modest but solid ROI), targeting an application like Blender is going to be an obstacle, not a catalyst.
how are you going to go after pirates under gpl? as long as they distrubute the license and source they aren’t pirates. if i buy your plugin for $100 and start selling it for $10 anything beyond 10 copies is pure profit for me. and perfectly legal. i could put it on bittorrent.
pirating is a huge problem when money comes into play. you read stories about id and creditcard theft sites all the time. on the old ba site there was even an ad for 3ddelight or something like that of people selling blender for only $75. and thats when it was free. you think the cons wont find blender market and sell the stuff? if they are selling your stuff for half the price you are guess which site people are going to buy from?
if there is big money to be made with hard work then there is big money to be made without the hard work under gpl and more people that will do it the easy way rather than the hard way. soon the legal pirates will be trying to undercut each others price not to mention the authors. the 2nd pirate will have the same idea as the 1st pirate and buy a $10 copy to sell for $1. a 3rd pirate will think “whats a dollar?” and decide to spend a dollar to sell it for dimes. gpl makes the money potential for pirate equal to that of the author. if they will pirate software and credit cards what are felonies and could land them in prison you think they’ll have honor to not touch what they can legally and risk free?
if you want to make money on blender safely do something that does not interface with blender at all directly. make tutorials or write books, those dont have to be gpl. they can be copyright and not copyleft. in the real world you can not make big money selling people something they have the right to then sell themselves in unlimited quantities. if you could there wouldn’t be patent and copyright offices. and pyramid schemes would be the great investments they schemers claim them to be rather than the ripoffs they really are. for ever way there is to earn a dollar there is a way for someone to take that dollar from you.
if gpl were in the physical world it would be making you take the locks off a business and giving every customer invited into the business equal rights as the owner and with the right to send out their own invites. pretty soon someone isn’t going to be buying your stuff, they are going to set up shop on your doorstep and be selling your stuff for half price. in retail 1 out of 5 people is a shop lifter, they are committing a crime. if they had the right to shop lift and it not be a crime…the biggest business in town would be the sign company that made signs big enough to have grand opening and going out of business on the same sign. throw in the anonymity of the internet rather than have to do it in person…
Oh OK fine. So Ace Dragon is correct? You’ll never make big money selling FOSS plugins (whatever big means)? Never as in forever? Blender will never change and will never go mainstream? It will never become widely popular and its userbase will always be a small number of tightwads? Don’t look at the successful for inspiration look at the failures? If you think out of the box you will fail? Is that what you all are telling me?
The text makes it look like I’m being defensive. I’m not. I’ve just not been exposed to this line of thinking. Except from my Dad (“you’re gonna fail so don’t even try”). I also don’t trust naysayers, especially those from the academic world. I’ve also went through the years looking at people who started with baby steps and became wildly successful by thinking out the box, while I sat on my ass and wondered wtf happened and why did I not get in while I had the chance. It’s happened time after time over and over.
Have the successful entrepreneurs of the tech world been leading me down the garden path? Are the Blendercookie boys planning for mediocrity? Tell me it isn’t so!
-LP
Edit: I forgot to mention fees for support and updates isn’t all there is for plugins. Plugins that connect to a service don’t work unless a fee is paid. So in this case support, updates, and the service is why people will pay and not just download the free plugin. Are none of you coders thinking about that possibility? Btw, I figure that is the long-term reasoning behind the Blender cloud.
Edit: Confronted a troll here. He was “moderated” out so I’ve deleted the quote.
I’m interested in everything these people have to say on the subject. Don’t be trying to shut us down already.
I’m also not afraid to admit I’ve probably jumped in over my head here. I want to be enlightened by those who know about this stuff. I welcome it with open arms.
The piracy angle doesn’t make a lot of sense… especially in the indie scene. This for a variety of reasons:
Trust. I trust the individual developer more than I trust a pirate. Sure, there may be some unscrupulous person who tries to resell a commercial add-on. However, to make any significant money that way, it requires that either the developer (or the add-on) to have enough mindshare that people are looking for it. Otherwise, the pirate would need to do a significant amount of marketing… which runs counter to the “easy money” angle. For that amount of effort, the pirate could develop and market his or her own add-on.
Mid-list success. Not everyone selling add-ons is in it for “big money”. A lot of folks are looking for “sufficient money”. They want to just cover the development cost or they just want to make enough (from multiple products) to earn a comfortable living. Or maybe they’re using this as a calling card/resume for a development job. Everyone has different definitions of success… and the point is that the folks who have what I call “mid-list success” don’t necessary make great targets for product piracy.
Proven models. There are already proven and viable examples of people and businesses succeeding by selling open source software (or services supporting that software). Some examples have been given in this thread already. There’s nothing saying it can’t work here, too.
You’re funny. With all due respect, there are dozens of threads just like this one; they typically get locked, because people get carried away with juvenile name-calling and quote battles. Par for the course around here. Why not have some fun with it before it gets shut down (which is inevitable, by the way, Larry)?
I don’t think I can. Concise and well-worded doesn’t come easy for me even when I’ve spent time thinking it through, and I’m not sure I’ve even done that in this case. I don’t know what I don’t know.
I’m using FOSS for a long time and I agree with Ace Dragon regarding that he said, but I do not think this is anything wrong with FOSS, it is just another business model. You should not criticize this as a bad thing related to FOSS and wanted this to be like other business models. FOSS is what it is, and if you do not like it, you choose another model.
Choose to sell only code using FOSS is not the best option I think. You should offer support and derivatives services in addition to the code. Red Hat makes money not only selling a DVD with an operating system.
I also think that with Blender Market developers are not going to get rich there, but Market seems to be proving it is a better way to support developers compared with the donation system.
It’d be interesting to hear from someone other than CGCookie selling things on Blender Market what their opinions on it are.
Bake Tool has 550 sales at $14.95 – that’s probably in the $5,000-$6,000 range after CGCookie takes a cut. If you can whip something like that out in your freetime, that’s not too bad of a return. Probably can’t quit your day job for it, but I’m not sure if it being closed source would necessarily translate to substantially more sales either.
I didn’t say that. I’m not sure what you’re saying, either. Given all the data that is available to me, I see nobody making a living developing Blender plugins, at least not one that is comparable to what a skilled developer will earn in other markets.
Depending on how you define “mainstream”, Blender either already is mainstream (it is a mainstream 3D application) or it seems unlikely to ever be “mainstream” because all 3D applications similar to Blender are not “mainstream applications” either. Keep in mind that developing plugins for commercial 3D applications isn’t a goldmine either.
If we ever have a “3D revolution” (maybe due to affordable desktop 3D printing becoming available to the masses), I doubt that a really complex application like Blender will be the driver. I’d rather expect it to be something similar to Dreams.
It will never become widely popular and its userbase will always be a small number of tightwads? Don’t look at the successful for inspiration look at the failures? If you think out of the box you will fail? Is that what you all are telling me?
If you want to make an educated decision on how to invest your time, you absolutely have to look at the failures as well. Otherwise, you’d just be fooling yourself. I don’t see how looking at the success of wordpress plugin developers is inspiring (or even applicable). I don’t see how choosing to develop Blender plugins is “thinking out of the box”, either.
Of course not everything is about money, but most people need to earn a living first. If you choose to develop a Blender plugin, that’s a big opportunity cost. You could earn more working less in other markets. You most likely will have to work somewhere else anyways, so you won’t be able to dedicate yourself fully to your product, which is a quality trade-off.
The text makes it look like I’m being defensive. I’m not. I’ve just not been exposed to this line of thinking. Except from my Dad (“you’re gonna fail so don’t even try”).
The lesson here isn’t “don’t even try”. It’s “don’t fool yourself”. Most businesses fail not because of a lack of vision or hard work, but because of misconceptions about costs vs. income and the reality of the market.
Have the successful entrepreneurs of the tech world been leading me down the garden path? Are the Blendercookie boys planning for mediocrity? Tell me it isn’t so!
If you just look at the 1 shining success and ignore the 999 failures, you are fooling yourself. Chances are, you will be a failure, so you better prepare for that.
Don’t forget that the tech industry has hundreds of billions of dollars to burn, just to find that one venture that ends up becoming the next Facebook. That’s not something for “ordinary” people, that’s a lottery for rich people and (mostly) Ivy League graduates to play in.
Edit: I forgot to mention fees for support and updates isn’t all there is for plugins. Plugins that connect to a service don’t work unless a fee is paid. So in this case support, updates, and the service is why people will pay and not just download the free plugin. Are none of you coders thinking about that possibility? Btw, I figure that is the long-term reasoning behind the Blender cloud.
There are ways to ensure that your GPL plugin isn’t useful without proprietary data, you don’t need to go to the cloud for that. Just put in some assets that your program depends on, and it’s less likely someone is going to create a free version of your program.
None of that ensures that your plugin becomes profitable, it just lowers the amount of “freeloading”. On the other hand, it may also drive away customers that are supporting only “free” software for ideological reasons.
You’re picking cherries. Bake Tool is the second best selling addon on the blendermarket. It was also a low-hanging fruit because of the horrible baking workflow in Blender (especially with Cycles). The median amount of sales on the market is 34 copies. So assuming you land right there in the middle, at 20$ per copy, your revenue would be 680$ (before CGCookie takes its cut). That’s not a lot for developer hours and continued support. Also, don’t forget the opportunity cost of learning the (rather hairy) Blender API.
I tried recently addon development for blender, and while I learned a quite a bit about python and blender api (which may be useful in future for speeding up my workflow) addon didn’t sell as good as I thought. So I probably won’t be developing anything big in future, except scripts/macros to help me improve my workflow. Btw. addon was GroupPro (see my signature).
But then I didn’t had a time to market it properly, so I’m not sure is it bad marketing, addon was not as useful to others as I thought (I needed this addon to simplify my work, so for me it is very usefull), to hight price… I’m not sure. But I’m glad I have it now, so I do not think I wasted my time. I’m back into 3d graphics business, with new knowledge and new tool.
I guess it is similar to other guys, who made some tools to improve theirs workflow and wanted to earn some $ with it as a bonus.
In your original post, you didn’t say anything about successful people in particular. You said 5k-6k was “a good return” for something done in spare time, so I assumed that was in reference to me questioning the ROI for the general case. Bake Tools is a cherry, whether you picked it intentionally or not. Interested developers should look at the “average case”, not the “best case”.
Business isn’t ever risk-free. The average game/app on Steam doesn’t wind up with Minecraft sales numbers either, but it doesn’t seem to be running short of risk-takers.
Yes, even a good business decision is not risk-free. But there’s still good and bad decisions. Financially, developing a videogame is not a good decision, but people are still driven to do it for creative reasons (or pure ignorance), despite the market having become hopelessly oversaturated and the median revenue hitting rock bottom.
Developing an addon for Blender barely has the creative aspect going for it.
You might not find it worth the risk, as it would cut into your Duty Calls time, but others apparently do.
Despite what you might like to believe, I would love to have my views on this topic challenged by positive data (or at least good arguments), because I actually have a reasonable understanding of how to go about developing Blender addons that I could try to turn into cash. I would prefer to be wrong on this.
However, the energy (more so than the time) available to me for development is gravely limited. Developing for Blender - unlike forum posting - is not recreational to me.
Did you try selling it on the CGCookie Marketplace or just on Gumroad? I wonder if the CGCookie Market would get more exposure or about the same. I’ve thought about doing paid tutorials on Gumroad but it seems you kind of have to do the legwork advertising it yourself.
My participation here started with a knee-jerk reaction to Ace’s post which was making a statement about open source plugins in general not Blender plugins. Hence the reference to Pippin. Wordpress started as a simple blog software and exploded (90% of all websites now, IIRC) and its theme and plugin biz is booming.
My thinking was the same could happen with Blender, although probably not those kind of numbers and certainly not the whole suite as it is. It would probably be an alternate version as Ton has been talking about. Or because of plugins that highly customize Blender for specific purposes. I was thinking along the lines of the customization / personalization 3D printing tech I’ve been reading about. That’s where the “if and when” in my first reply came from.
Anyway, I realize I’m the one that sidestepped from discussing the FOSS world to the Blender world after that first reply. My pie-in-the-sky vision of the future Blender is a bit far-fetched, and a Blender plugin probably couldn’t compete with the likes of digitalforming.com, but hey anything seems possible nowadays.
Your other points are legit as well. Thanks.
Oh man why do that? That’s what turns these discussions into nipple twisting contests. Not good.
Thanks everyone. I hope to see the discussion continue.