I will be going over my experience with buying Bukkit and Spigot plugins compared to using the free plugins. I know these aren’t Minecraft Forge mods but it is paid Minecraft content.
I am currently running a Minecraft server with many players, and, one of the things that I had to go out and do was buy premium plugins. I didn’t buy a single plugin off of BlackSpigot, so here’s my opinion on putting a paywall behind work.
First of all, Minecraft plugins are more limited than Minecraft mods, but, they are something that have saved many of the server owners who are starting up a server. It was a lifesaver being able to use the Towny plugin for free. My server would be nothing without it. But there was many additions that could really improved the quality of life for many players.
A big plugin we had was Crazy Enchantments, a custom enchant plugin. The biggest issue with this plugin, is that with it being free, the plugin was updated back in January 16th 2020, with it being June as of now. A new plugin that I plan on replacing it with, that’s a measily $10, called Advanced Enchantments, gets updates almost every day.
There are also many other cool plugins like ItemsAdder, PyroMining, and McMMO that I bought and it really improved the quality of life for players on my server.
While I don’t want to pay money to play on a server or use a mod, if a server is making money, it makes sense that a mod author would want to charge someone who plans on monetizing their work money.
I disagree that you should charge individuals players to use a mod. But, imagine being a person who decides to go through the work of making mods or plugins. I’ve personally had to go in and code some Java plugins, and, as much as I love seeing the end result, it would be nice to make a little bit of side-income from my work.
What if you saw a giant faction server making thousands of dollars a day using your plugin? What would you think? If someone wanted to make mods 8 hours a day rather than take their valuable time and skill on the side (which is what many of these modders and plugin creators do for us), shaming people for putting a pay-wall behind it would be very discouraging for us to have some really good mods.
So here are some examples of paid work that I believe are examples of good paywalls.
Does Sonic Ether not deserve to make $26K a month (this is after patreon fees and 40% income tax) after being the only one to make ultra-realistic shaders? He quit his job to make shaders.
Does the ImanitySpigot team not deserve to make a simple $30 from their highly optimized Spigot jar?
And most importantly, from what you’ve likely witnessed if you’ve been on any Minecraft server, does the MCMMO author really deserve to make $15 off of his plugin that will be likely used on a monetized server?
You might not think about it, but every time you drag another person’s mod or plugin into your folder, they likely sacrificed dozens or even hundreds of hours of their life to make it work.
It is not free for a person to make a plugin, they are spending their valuable time and skill to make that mod. That’s why whenever you load up a giant modpack, you are loading up thousands and possibly tens of thousands of man-hours into what made that possible. I believe that people should have the freedom to charge for any content they wish. You have the choice to flip them off and tell them you aren’t going to pay them for a copy, but, when you do buy a copy of their work, if they really do care about making money, maybe they’ll go and start updating the plugin every month or even every week rather than you having no control over a plugin that hasn’t been updated for half a year.
Even if you don’t agree with me that we should be able to allow anyone to charge for their content, we can all agree that they spent their valuable time on what they made. Whether it’s a build, drawing, plugin, or mod, they spent their valuable time so the only thing you have to do is drag something into a folder. We all take people’s work for granted, and, while I think we should have paid content, we should also highly praise people who make their work completely free.
TL;DR: There are many plugins that I found that wouldn’t exist without them being paid, there is many existing paid works that wouldn’t exist without a paywall, some people would love to make a living off of doing this full-time, server owners can monetize other people’s free work, and, most importantly making a free mod isn’t free, it takes your valuable time and skill.
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