I’m sure we’ve all taken a look at the Superhive spring sale banner up there, so let’s talk about it.
I’m not usually the type to use a ton of add-ons, as I prefer to keep my Blender install to the bare minimums. I only particularly rely on the free ND extension, Modern Primitive extension, and the SimpleBake add-on. I’m curious to hear what everyone here might be looking to pick up in the spring sale, or recommending add-ons that you feel are really worth the money.
You’re free to leave recommendations for things like textures, brush alphas, and other things beyond the scope of add-ons too.
Based on what I’ve been reading lately on the commission split between blender market and the actual developer, plus the other fees involved with having a product listing - honestly, I won’t be buying anything at all during the Spring Sale.
And in the future, will be purchasing via Gumroad when available.
Approx 30% profit goes to blendermarket, unless developer pays blendermarket $200/month in advance.
I personally find it somewhat predatory(?) to establish yourself as the dominant source of blender addons, then demand either a very high commission or a $2400 annual “store member fee.”
Even more amusing that blendermarket uses the marketing message of “buying from us, supports Blender!” - when the fact is that blendermarket made nearly $25 on this transaction. Blender dev fund got .50 cents.
I’ll agree that a lot of .50 cent donations can add on, but the individual transaction split doesn’t seem as impressive as the marketing message.
(And on that point, who’s pile of money did the .50 get taken from? The developer or the store? I don’t know the answer, just wondering.)
In addition, blendermarket doesn’t collect/pay VAT for the developers. I’m sure that’s a problem for some of them.
Yeah, I can definitely agree that marketing themselves as supporting the Blender dev fund, but then only providing this paltry amount (taken from the add-on dev) is pretty misleading. Thanks for the reply.
They do support the dev fund themselves, they’re a corporate gold sponsor:
The donation to the dev fund is completely voluntary on the part of the seller. There’s no functional difference to the seller deciding to donate that money themselves.
Crazy, some stores don’t even demand $ 200/per year and you would then get ~95% of the profits.
Merchant of Record( MoR) is another great and very important feature.
MoR is worth it, especially when you are forced to do taxes four times a year (some unfortunate ones have to file taxes every month) - the time savings to have all the sales in just one single number can be gigantic.
On top of the commission issues, the customer service is almost non-existent as well. I bought an update to an addon, which came with a discount code for customers of the older version. At checkout, the transaction timed out so I had to do checkout again. I didn’t notice that the discount code was removed and needed to be reapplied until after I clicked buy.
Instantly emailed customer support and again with a follow up a couple of weeks later. No response. So much for the “30 day money back guarantee” they promoted everywhere.
The final straw was the first Humble Bundle Superhive addon bundle. They used deceptive marketing to make it seem like you’re purchasing the addons as normal, rather than a snapshot of the current version with no updates. A lot of wording like “You’ll get access to them on Blendermarket the same way as if you bought it directly on there”. They’d constantly mention the total retail value of all the addons and compare it to the max humble bumble donation amount. Clearly an addon without future updates isn’t worth the same as one with updates.
There were only 2 addons I was somewhat interested in trying out after I finish my current project the following year. Much to my surprise, those addons will likely end up outdated and useless on the latest version of blender by the time I actually have use for them.
Customer service refused to acknowledge the issue, just constantly repeated that it’s a great value and how they are ingrained in the blender community and love giving back. They got review bombed by a lot of upset people feeling deceived and only then updated marketing on the next bundle to reflect that the bundles don’t receive updates.
Mind you, the bundles can be a great deal if you have use for the addons and are aware of the caveats. In my case, I essentially donated $30 to Superhive and have gotten 0 use out of the bundle. It’s not a lot of money but the negative experience has made me prefer other markets like gumroad instead. Used to even have CGCookie membership but now I entirely avoid anything related to Superhive when possible.
It seems to be not “easy” in general to sell some useful addons/extension/assets… in this
there are also some other “markets”, “shop-systems” mentioned with pros and cons…
Weird idea ( properly not useful ):
On Ebay they “charge” 11% (commercial) for PC-games… (??) may depends on the country; found nothing about PC-software (but also wasn’t looking too depp into this…) but thee also seems to be not a MoR…
Maybe for promotion one might use bazaar.blendernation.com( shamelessly promoting @bartv’s other site to make him enough money to drive this one here… but of course everyone is free to use www.patreon.com/blenderartists to “secure” the existence of this site ) to promote one own products and sell them “directly”… (but then you have to manage this on your own… or use any “shop”-system…) ?? IDK…
) to promote one own products and sell them “directly”… (but then you have to manage this on your own… or use any “shop”-system…) ?? IDK…