Paid Assets?

Questions
#1

After reading a few comments that brushed on the topic, I realized that all of the assets in the Asset Portal are free. Monetization is sometimes there through donations on PayPal or something similar, however I’m not aware of any Lua modules or other Defold-specific assets that cost.

I’m thinking about gunnie-pigging this idea. I don’t believe paid assets have inherent value simply by including a price tag, however I do believe they have potential to be more reliable, specifically in quality and maintenance. Why? Because when developers are paid to make and maintain high-quality stuff, it’s easier to justify making and maintaining high-quality stuff. Paid assets also come with a reputational implication. Why? Because free and open-source software is under no obligation to be professionally written or maintained, however there is that inherent expectation for paid software. (This is debatable and nuanced, of course.)

Does the Defold team or anybody with relevant experience have advice or guidance on how to go about this? A paid asset wouldn’t be freely available on GitHub, obviously. Not exactly sure how I would distribute the code to work with Defold’s dependency system.

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#2

have you tried gumroad?

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#3

I think @sergey.lerg had something like that using the Patreon. Maybe he can give advice on how he implemented it from a technical point of view.

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#4

It’s up to developers to choose what to do with their code. If they consider it a product and wish to maintain, then a paid or service based models are used, but as you noticed, for now there is nothing like that for Defold. If you though use some assets or module it’s totally encouraged to support developers through voluntary payments or subscriptions, almost all of them have linked Patreon, Kofi, or so :wink:

That’s said I would totally buy a solution, asset or module for Defold if it would be solving some issue, that’s why it happens many time in this community for those developers to really receive the payments, even the code being open :wink:

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#5

I can think of a few options:

  1. Provide the asset on GitHub and ask for donations. You will basically be hoping for the good will of your users. You could use GitHub Sponsors, Patreon or Ko-Fi.
  2. Provide the asset on GitHub and allow free use in non-commercial projects. Sell a license which allows use in commercial projects. Pretty similar to 1, but at least you’ll have a legal right to pursue anyone not paying for it in a commercial project.
  3. Provide the asset on your private server and provide your customers with a username and token which must be included in the dependency URL. The server checks the username and token. Similar to Working with library projects in Defold
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#6

I guess itch.io is another service for selling content.

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#7

Thanks, I think the third option is more along the lines of what I’d want.