When we first started publishing our source mods, we wanted to make them accessible and easy to use for server admins to customize and enhance the game play experience for their players. Completely open sourcing our plugins was considered and in many cases we have made experimental code and plugins available on our github repository, as well as including the source code in our downloadable archives. At the time we talked with a few server operators (who in many cases also rely on donations and assistance from their communities) who had opined that we should make it easier for owners to contribute to our efforts – so we made the decision to sell our plugins through a (this) website.
We also know that friends share; be-it splitting the cost or just handing out their copies (yes we do keep an eye on who’s been sharing!) and that is completely cool with us and even encouraged by the sourcemod license terms, but at the same time we also recognize the need to recoup our costs in terms of server hosting, software licensing and over-all time put into coding and experimenting with new features, maintenance including updating plugins to function under newer versions of sourcemod and tweaking “bugs” – but frankly, we only have so many free cycles available and this is not our full time job (sadly – life, kids and bandwidth are expensive and nothing is getting cheaper these days, except maybe us).
Having recently received inquiries asking about alternate pricing on some of our sourcemod plugins and with the concern about affordability in mind we’ve decided to change the way we offer our sourcemod plugins. We’ve now updated the pricing on our sourcemod plugins to have multiple tiers. Unfortunately we could not simply change it to a case of selecting a “pay what you want” option, but we hope the new tiers will strike a balance.
We’re also toying around with some other ideas including simply opening up our github repositories and soliciting for donations, or implementing a subscription model with some value added services for server admins, or maybe something else. Which way that goes, we don’t know yet but we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers,
- Foo
