So far if you pick up any of the giveaway they are all tied to either lite version or only a 30 days trial. Also Retopoflow was an alpha version.
So the blender market guy’s should rename this as free trial for 10 addons(that all software offer freely) instead of giveaway since there is no giving there, be honest at least and if you think i am the only one thinking this just have a look at comments sections.
Chat Companion was the full version. They might have a few more full versions of things before it’s over.
There is also this saying “beggars can’t be choosers”. I’m happy and thankful for the even the free trials. If I like the program enough I’ll buy it. Proud to support Blender and the Blender community. Most of these plugin developers work so hard for so little.
I also have support blender market all over the years but i find this practice not very honest!
Either you give all 10 or you remove the term ‘‘giveaway’’ that’s about it.
Also there should be a trial period for every single addon.
For me, this is nothing to do with developers or what they choose or choose not to give away… many of us have supported a lot of them financially.
It’s more about having a promotion and telling people you’re giving things away, when in fact you are not really quite doing what you’re promoting.
In a former life when I worked in television, one of the first things I did when I moved into management was to shut down promo giveaways that in fact usually gave nothing away… ie “Do this and YOU COULD WIN”. In the past, hardly prize was ever awarded as the odds pool was created to make winning rather unlikely. Sponsors loved it because they didn’t have to provide a prize, and sales loved it because they could sell a prize promo.
The new rule was “someone is absolutely going to win something of value, else your contest isn’t going to happen.”
Everything about marketing is dishonest. Welcome to late-stage capitalism. As far as dishonesty goes, this is a lot more palatable than the children’s applesauce packets full of lead, or the people selling “homeopathic” water and calling it medicine 
Or my personal favorites, Powerade “bursting with electrolytes” which has a whopping 0% DV of any given electrolyte per serving, or “sugar-free” tic-tacs that are solid sugar but don’t weigh enough for it to be measured
Greed is the worst part of humanity unfortunately!
You refer to selling Blender addons and other content (as opposed to an enforced “sharing is caring” environment) as ‘late-stage capitalism’? Do you also go around to your local small businesses to tell the owners how greedy they are for having more money than their neighbors?
The Blender market is not going to force people to take the deals or else, everyone deciding to just not buy anything and creating alternative addons for free will send a good enough message.
That’s not what he said. He was drawing a line between sketchy marketing and capitalism, not indicting capitalism itself.
I’m not going to fight with you, dude. Sorry
You can’t actually sell something for the most part without at least telling potential customers what the product is, so taking the first line into account it does in fact come across as a blanket condemnation of private enterprise (which many of us here make use of Blender for, so it is also a baseless accusation of dishonesty by a staff member).
Now to expand on how the community can respond here, keep in mind that since the code within the addons for sale have to technically be under the GPL to work with Blender, it also means they can’t legally have anything within that can be patented (so ideas can be copied and placed in a new addon that is free for the community to download and contribute, though with the risk that the community will have to be willing to maintain it to keep it running).
I think you’re going way off the mark here. I don’t think it has anything to do with GPL or patents or whatever.
If Adobe threw up a promotion tomorrow that said everybody that clicks a button gets a free version of photoshop, and then you downloaded it, and found out that it only paints in red with one brush and only saves things in jpeg format… I don’t think anybody would be talking about how great it is that Adobe gave away a free version of Photoshop.
Software companies and individual developers have been giving away demo copies of software since the internet was invented. It’s a fine thing, lets people get a taste of what something might be like. Nothing wrong with that. Just don’t tell everyone it’s a free copy of the product.
If I notice that a campaign is advertising more than it actually offers,
I won’t look at it again next time.
If you think simping for capitalism is the best course of action in this thread, I disagree.
I have to agree that the promotional giveaways so far have been not exactly what I was expecting. The Retopoflow one which is an alpha version, which I have to assume will not be eligible for updates in the future, was particularly weird.
At least today’s offering of the Better Lighting add-on does appear to be the full version!
IMHO, I would have preferred less-sexy offerings from lesser known developers but 100% enabled, than more visible add-ons like Retopoflow and Population which are heavily diminished.
Maybe this thread and all the negative comments on various forums made them be a little bit more honest.
I agree with the sentiments of most of the posts in this thread.
I have the full paid version of the procedural crowds addon (Love it BTW)
But I grabbed the “free” population addon just to compare and found it crippled beyond any level of usefulness.
And the 30 day Demo of the Divine cut Cloth simulation addon being called a “give away” is literally trolling IMHO.
Today’s is a free version of BagaPie – when I clicked the claim button, I was told I already had it:
Checked the earlier order, I’d gotten BagaPie’s free version a month ago. That’s what today’s “free gift” is.
Most of BM add-ons come with “future update” promises. If the vendor is serious about selling their ware they really can’t giveaway in the same term and beholden to free users forever. It will be either demo/super lite edition, limited assets, promising extra free goodies for customers previously paid, no update/support, small package of their product suite etc. Which is understandable for business perspective, but I’d rather have birthday sale price for full instead.
They are also pretty greedy on sale with a mere 10 to 15%.
Yeah, creating expectations and then disappointing before making the sale seems like a rather bizarre way of advertising.
