Ok, at the risk of coming across as a sore loser, or starting yet another ideological discussion and witch hunt:
Their “sales ranking” is now meaningless. It no longer represents quality, reputable products as being popular. There needs to be a distinction between free and paid, or better, let the price at time of each sale directly contribute to the ranking’s score. If a product for 10 USD is sold 100 times, it obviously has more value to the community than a free product “selling” 100 times. So, simply comparing the “sale” numbers not sufficient to make a reputational judgement. Frankly it’s also disrespectful to creators whose paid products have “earned” their ranking over many years, and are now being displaced by free, low(er) effort products, or even free variations of otherwise quality products. It pollutes the market, and is a terrible incentive. BM should aim to be a place for quality products, that are able to maintain their quality and (usually free) product support for a long time. That means, paid products.
Here’s a quote from another dev about this and another related issue:
The rating system is not very good right now. And the quality of a product is much more than its rating.
The “best” free addons are not and cannot be as good as the paid addons. It’s not possible and inevitably free products move to paid or just die. That doesn’t stop some creators on her milking the current ranking system which is what this issue is about. Creators very clearly abuse the current system by listing free, changing it to paid to trick people into thinking it’s a good paid product. The issue is that the creators who’ve been here working hard for years and growing their rank organically and not through tricks and games are being very clearly harmed by the landslide of low quality tools that keep appearing on the platform. We’ve seen this happen twice in the last year that people come on. Sell their tool super cheap or free. It goes viral. It turns out that it’s just stolen content and then the user gets a bad taste in their mouth and doesn’t use the platform again.
I’m not alone thinking this. I’ve talked to many other devs who think similar.
In short, quality is no longer incentivized on Blender Market, and their sales ranking (giving exposure to reputable, community trusted products) is being manipulated and abused.
edit: it seems like blenderartists changes the link I’ve posted and makes it non-functional. So go to the main page of Blendermarket and click on “View all popular items” at the bottom right.
edit2: This has been resolved on June 15th. Partly at least. Free products now no longer rank as sales. Still, no distinction is being made between a 1$ product selling 100 times vs a 10$ product selling 100 times, both would rank equally.
