Plugin Deving in the Future

This is not to troll or anything of that matter. This is an honest question to all those who currently develop plugins for Bukkit.

Now that Bukkit will eventually 'die' and be 'replaced' for the Mojang Official API hullabaloo, there is something that was burning in my mind.

Mojang gets paid for the work they've done. Bukkit will get paid for the API work they will subsequently do to enhance Minecraft under Mojangs name, thus no longer being an open-door (I say that with tongue in cheek) system for people to feel the same 'pain' of developing for not much in terms of $$ but for pleasure. For the good of the game and community.

How many of you will continue to develop knowing that, you are the only person in the chain not getting monetary reimbursement for your time and efforts outside outstanding people that donate to you? I'm in no way saying that you should code for cash, or anything in the regard...but that your efforts ultimately go towards 2 links in the chain to their pockets and not a 'labor of love' like it used to be.

Basically what I'm saying is...before it was a group of coders trying to make something amazing together. Now its dev's spending time to work towards something that adheres to "official" business and all things that trickle down from running a "legal business". No longer the freehand model.

 

I'm kinda upset they're Mojang-ing too...

 

TBH im thinking of quitting with developing plugins. Even though this new API is being released, i truly dont want any part in it.

1 - Ran out of ideas for plugins. I cant think of anything original.

2 - Ive gotten extremely bored of Java lately. This mostly ties in with my #1.

3 - The amount of time ive put into developing, ive gotten hardly any positive feedback or NO feedback at all. I havent made a dime with the plugins ive made. I feel more of a slave then anything now. I need some insentive to show myself and others that " yea im not a fatass sitting in my room 24/7 doing nothing but pushing buttons on the keyboard ". Ive learned alot through developing for bukkit and spout but I need to move on and make some moola. I need cash man, i cant rely on my parents to buy me food. Ill be going to college next january to learn more about java and possibly C#. So hopefully ill get into a good position and develop my own games.

Im not saying I WANT money. Like i said above i just need that " thing " to drive me to create plugins for fun and not waste my time.

 

You're doing it for the wrong reasons if you want to make money.

Use it as something to add to your CV to show future employees maybe, but don't expect to get rich coding and giving away plugins which will be used mostly by kids.

 

SkyJohn -- that's a very idealistic view, but not a realistic one.

I, and I believe many others as well, have thought for a long time that Mojang really missed the boat on the REAL revenue stream it could be making -- on the sale of plugins iTunes-style. My suspicion is such a system is coming down the pipeline -- just you wait! In which case plugin developers WOULD be incentived for working on Mojang's game. The only people left out of the loop, then, would be server admins who stand to make money by collecting donations to cover server costs/plugins, etc. My fear is that maybe server admins might be charged a "licensing" fee, or perhaps somehow cut out of the picture altogether (Mojang Hosting Company, anyone?) But even if there were a license fee for server operators, there would be enough potential money in the mix to motivate me, for sure!

In my opinion, that would be a very smart way to do things if everyone could get on board. EVERYONE would win in that scenario, and the game "minecraft" may very well become almost its own mini-industry! How exciting would that be?

 

mpmumau Your idea is definitely something of a good idea.

But again..to manage it, would be hell. Imagine how many kiddies and newbs would be rushing in with entry level Java just to try to make a quick buck. Or on the flip side..how divided the community could be if they had to pay to get a plugin vs going open source (which is an option).

Unfortunately...I don't see a Pro Side if anything involves more money...

 

I have no doubts the Minecraft community would flip out at first. And certainly there would be TONS of crappy plugins (how many "push the button to make me fart" apps or "flashlight" apps or "take a picture and make it look weird" apps are there in the App Store? Last I knew it was in the several hundreds of thousands of total apps). But from Mojang's perspective that's a way to generate a LOT of long-term capital, and the complainers wouldn't have much to stand on if they can make money on their innovations, nor would Mojang care all that much.

There are always people who are kind of afraid to make money, or afraid of money in general, but money is not a bad thing -- it's the juice that keeps the world spinning!

And as for managing the whole thing, it definitely would be hell. But Mojang has to give SOMETHING to its employees to do -- it's not like afterschool playtime -- it's work! If they want to make GOBS AND GOBS of money, they'll do the work it requires.

 

Because Mojang really need the money right...
I don't know of any other game that charges for 3rd party plugins, feel free to correct me if any games do.

You're severally underestimating the amount of work that would need to be done to make an "iTunes for plugins" anyway.

I'm sorry but if you really expected to get rich by making plugins you were fooling yourself, even the most popular plugin developers only get minimal donations and do it as a hobby and not as a way to earn a living.

 

But the regard of the whole thread is about what peoples feelings are now that they would be developing for someone that is 100% commercial...and no longer "part of the crew" as it were.

 

Well, somehow iTunes does it! iTunes isn't too much work for iTunes, haha. The "big" kind of money Apple makes requires vision beyond the difficulties -- they can be accounted for in time -- it's called "planning." I mean, they'd have to hire more staffers, lawyers, developers etc. But yes, they are one of the few development companies who probably COULD do that.

As for whether or not other games do it -- frankly, I can't even think of any other game that allows users to harvest blocks to build worlds. For sure, it's totally unprecedented! Just because no one's done it before doesn't mean it wouldn't work -- it just means that no one KNOWS it would work.

As for "needing" more money -- Notch could have stopped entirely years ago if it was about "need." Capitalism isn't about "need" it's about WANT. If I gave you the choice between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 would you take $5,000,000 because you don't NEED $10,000,000?

 

I'm not going to get into a pointless capitalism debate here....

Comparing a few dozen Minecraft plugins to the multi billion dollar investment Apple made to create the iTunes Apps/Music/Video Store is a pretty dumb discussion.

Mojang isn't going to get rich off a few 3rd party java plugins, and they certainly will never want to spend time and money supporting them.

 

Think small, lose big

As for the investment, what is it, 5,000,000 copies of Minecraft x $20 or so? That's $100,000,000 they can invest in such a thing! And honestly, the only thing you CAN do with $100,000,000 is invest it somehow, one way or another. You couldn't personally spend that much money if you tried all day every day to buy every consumer item under the sun.

And it seems obvious that Notch's hope is to use it build up a development company: Mojang (does he have any other job or interests?) If he wanted he could cash it in for himself and live a happy life off the dividends. Why waste all your time and effort on a relatively small development firm if you don't have big goals for it?

As for the revenue possibilities, they're there, trust me! Maybe even not exactly the way I'm describing it, but given the number of users who play this game, the number of developers involved in the mix, the number of server operators out there willing to put their computers out for public use -- there's a LOT of potential in there for making even more money, yes! You may not see them, I may not even being seeing the correct way it could all go down, but it's there, for sure!

Perhaps what you're saying is you'd RATHER Mojang NOT be financially successful? Do you hate money?

 

Besides being totally off topic...

This entire scenario was hashed out 6 months ago. Mojang just doesn't want money that bad. Its really a moot point.

 

It's not a question of whether or not Mojang wants money or not -- it's a question of what do they do with the money they already have?

And I don't think it's off topic -- it's just a complicated answer to your question. In my opinion, as an answer to your question, perhaps the whole thing won't be as "free-form" as it's been in the past. If Mojang gets it's crap together and picks a definitive direction to move in, everyone COULD make money off plugin development in a more direct way.

As for whether or not you SHOULD feel slighted in the meantime, I would say the answer is yes!

 

Plugin developers were never promised money by anyone, why would anyone feel slighted?

Dozens of people worked to create this great site and community to participate and share in and all you do is moan because you weren't making any money? Jeez...

 

Maybe when you get done working at Burger King you'll understand business. Until then, have fun with that minimum wage and your love of not getting paid well for work you do that benefits others. Let's agree to disagree, because we clearly see the world through two different lenses.

BTW -- IF Minecraft/Bukkit were 100% open source, I would agree with you. Think about that for a while.

Haha oddly enough, as we were speaking about this stuff, they posted this on Minecraftforum.net:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/422-notch-gives-3-million-to-mojang-employees/

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Only $3 million? What about the other $97,000,000?

 

That be Notch's

 

I don't write plugins expecting to get paid, I do it for fun. Yes, it's nice to get the occasional donation for my efforts, but I wouldn't mind if I never got paid. I have a real job I make money with. Minecraft is a side project.

Also, plugin devs are not the only person in the chain to not get paid. Most server admins don't get paid either, except for donations.

I really don't see a "Plugin Store" type system working well. Who pays for the plugins, the server owners or the players? If the server owners pay, it would just end up being an annoying start-up cost for any hopeful server admin. If players pay, would a player have to buy all of the required plugins in order to join a server that uses all of them?

Many games that have modding APIs, and many of those don't allow people making mods to charge for them. I don't see why you expect anything different. People mod games for fun, for the experience, and to attempt to improve the game. You shouldn't expect to be paid for it.

 

I do not know Notch or Jeb or any of the members of Mojang personally. I've never had a conversation with any of them. I've never tried, because it's none of my business to know anything personal about them. I do know, however, from reading tweets and webpages of different members of the team that the main man in charge of their money and profits, Notch, is a very generous man. According to a tweet two nights ago, he cashed out his dividends and shared it among his employees. Imagine how great you'd feel to be a part of a team working on a video game that millions of people love, living in Stockholm, one of the most beautiful places in the world and most progressive in the technology industry, and making enough money just from sales of the game to take care of anything you need and keep your employees happy.

Now think of that in terms of Bukkit's crew. We can only guess that they'll make just as much as their coworkers, at least I'd hope so. I, for one, feel that all four of these guys deserve the jobs they got after putting in as much work as they have, without demanding any kind of monetary support, and only slightly asking for donations, after paying monthly/yearly to have these sites ran to provide all of us with an API for free, just so that 80% of the user base and community will complain every time Mojang releases a new update. How many nagging questions and rage posts have you seen around the forums whenever this happens? Lots. LOTS. Regardless, they provided this API for both users and developers who wanted to use their knowledge and skill to advance the API further with their plugins. If anything, the plugin devs should have seen this as a time of practice and learning. This may very well give them more knowledge to help them later on when trying to find a job, not necessarily because they can use it as examples of work for a career portfolio(I don't know how you would..), but in terms of having a goal in mind, working and troubleshooting to achieve what you worked so hard for. That's worth more than money, and they gave you a medium to do that. For free.

So what, they've merged with Mojang. That only means that the name Bukkit will be removed from the work they've already done, some things will be re-written, and then it will be added directly to both the client and server jars, replacing the default server jars that were already there, only now they're going to get paid for their hard work. I'm personally kind of terrified of the thought mpmumau brought up, about them possibly developing a somewhat store format for plugins to be purchased from. I'm terrified that either Mojang or the plugin dev's will see the most successful plugins as a great opportunity to make a large amount of cash because of their popularity and a server's playerbase pressuring the server's owners and admins to buy that plugin regardless of how much it may end up costing. It wouldn't be so bad if they had decent caps on their prices, because I know I wouldn't end up paying more than $5 for a plugin. Why? How many large servers are there with tons of players? Some. Now how many smaller friend and family servers are there? Tons, and they're not going to want to pay $10, $20 or more for a popular plugin when they won't have as many people using it. I hope that if the day comes that Mojang decides to sell plugins that they'll think about these things and charge reasonable prices for their plugins. But, as I mentioned earlier, Notch and the rest of the team seem to care very much for their employees, so I imagine they care greatly about their players too. I think everything will work out just fine.

 

FourThunders, I think you have a great and refreshing view in terms of how to see the whole "scene." I think you're right, and that nisovin is right, in that it would be a huge slap in the face of all Minecraft players themselves (meaning, normal players, not plugin devs/server admins) to charge for individual plugins. I'm pretty sure that approach would be a catastrophe for the Minecraft community at large, that it wouldn't work, and that it wouldn't be in the best interest of anyone.

However, let me share with you my perspective, and why I feel the way I do about somehow monetizing plugin development.

I am currently a full-timer web developer, and prior to that I was a journalist for a local newspaper in New York for about 3 years. My journey in becoming a web developer started as a hobby. I simply had a deep sense of "awe" about computers since I was very young (I am 29 now) and have read countless books about the subject. When I was 16 I taught myself to program in BASIC on an Apple IIE in my high school's computer lab. I've always been fascinated with games, particularly, and later in life became fascinated by the internet. My fascination became a true hunger for knowledge. I did not go to school for programming (I graduated about 7 years ago from college with an English lit. major, my deepest, truest passion), but I had the opportunity to take some programming classes in college, and learned the rest of what I know now from reading an endless amount on the subject of web programming particularly, and programming at large.

During my years after college, I learned much about the media business, and later realized that the future of the media business is exclusively in digital form. The internet is everything in the world now, and everyone who is reading this forum probably, to a greater or lesser degree, believes the same.

After I realized it WAS possible to earn a living exclusively as a web developer, I encountered many adventures in the "professional" web development world. I learned that for every programmer who realizes that their skills have monetary value, there are 10 "noobs" who will do projects for free, because they believe that doing so helps them "learn." To a limited extent, they're right. For anyone who wants to get into professional web development, I would certainly advise them to take on some small, manageable, simple projects for free, simply to learn about the process and what is involved, and to sharpen their programming skills. I'm not ashamed to say that, long ago, I did so, and I don't regret doing it.

However, since then I have learned that there is a VAST amount of money to be made in programming in general. Traditional marketing agencies, for example, charge $10,000s to $100,000s to literally millions for web site development. Many of we lowly "programmers" are considered low on the totem pole, and are not paid nearly enough of those large sums of money.

Part of the problem is the "I'll do it for free" crowd as well as an even greater threat --- the "I live in India, and minimum wage is $0.05/hour, and I know 15 HTML tags" threat. There are always people willing to do the work of professionals cheaply to get in on the market, to "learn" how it works, etc. Not meaning to dissuade newcomers to the field, I personally see these people as "posers" and as the TRUE exploiters.

However, the issue of QUALITY often comes up. I've had countless clients come to me after going to a "I'll do it for free" student, who are practically in tears, because such students abandon projects, can't handle the work they agreed to, produce low-quality work, etc.

The point is that just because something is a hobby to you doesn't mean it has no monetary value. I could honestly write pages about this topic, but when you say "I'm just doing this for fun," that's TOTALLY fine. But that sentence doesn't have to go right next to "Therefore my work has no value." People who do work that benefits others (and yes, although it's hard to see the direct connection, Minecraft plugin developers do work that benefits the company Mojang financially, if only for PR value alone), and then say they shouldn't be paid for their work cheapen EVERY PERSON who has the skill.

I "get" the spirit of "let's all work toward a common goal for no monetary return to better mankind" philosophy. But what many fail to understsand is that when you do that, OTHERS GREATLY benefit -- yes, financially -- from you essentially agreeing to be a slave, with no recourse! You are, in the eyes of those who ARE making the money, a sucker!

Think long and hard about your "free" work, as there ain't no such thing! I'd even encourage those who hope to "learn" about the web development world to skip programming as an academic course altogether, and instead study business, as when you understand, deeply, how money exchanges hands, the "trick" of programming becomes MUCH more valuable.

P.S. Just as a quick follow up thought on that. My experience as a journalist was in covering the music scene in the area I live. I covered MANY rock bands and learned a LOT about that business. Rock musicians definitely have fun doing what they do -- it's fun for them to go up on stage and to perform and to practice theirs skills. But, rest assured, few, in ANY of the "serious" musicians you may admire would EVER play for free, unless it was to benefit a cause or for some other unusual reason. Rock bands place emphasis on the value of their skill. They know it costs money just to be ABLE to practice it (instruments costs money, etc.), and that people WILL pay for it, because they value it!

Programming is a creative skill, too. You don't have to believe that you HAVE to do it for free to be "legit" or "cool" or "with-it" or whatever term you think is better than "getting paid!"

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.