We've Updated our Legal Policies, Privacy Policy and Commission Rate

But seriously though, if this means more frequent site improvements I don't think most creators will mind much.

Bit of a shame for the money, but it's great to see there'll be more investment back into GMS.

*Me addin 10% to all my addons' prices*

Ah yes, just in time for me to submit my first addon for publishing.

In all honesty though, as long as the site improvements reflect the bumped commission rate, I think it will be fine.

This seems overall like a bad idea in my opinion. I'm not entirely sure how raising commissions for developers will help you work more either. I understand it's because your earning more from the website so you don't have to do as many client projects, but at the same time you can do this so many other ways. You could get another sponsor like you did with Crident, gmodstore is used daily by hundreds of people and is actually approved of by facepunch so I don't see that being that much of a challenge. I feel even ads on the side would be better than you taking more of a creators cut.

I'm also really not happy about the new way you handle licences, it seems like your trying to push for gmodstore to control how users can use addons, instead of the developers themselves. I understand you can add your own altercations, but this will probably just have the opposite effect and confuse the user, as the licence will just contradict itself. I don't use any custom licence terms on my addons, so I can't speak for the people who do, but this doesn't seem like a particularly good idea.

I could be misreading this entirely but from how I'm understanding this, this is a step in the wrong direction from a creators POV, and other creators I spoke to about this seem to agree.

*All addon prices now 10% more expensive*

*Leaks are now 10% more common*

10% extra seems excessive for more development. I'd understand 5% but 10% god damn.

Total amount processed since 2014 = $3,858,349.32

10% commission = $3,858,349.32 * 10% = $385,834.932

Mean commission per year = $385,834.932 / (2020 - 2014) = $64,305.822

Any further than that cannot be calculated reliably at all, but I think it gives you an idea of how tight money really is for the platform.

That's not even profit, anyway, so you have to factor in server costs and other operational costs, too, and then Norwegian taxes.

And one more thing, a while back commission rates were variable - the more you earned, the less your commission rate would be, which ranged from 5% to 10%, so even that calculation is a best case.

Still though, I wish that GmodStore could come up with some alternative forms of raising capital other than raising commission rates.

I've suggested user-run ads for years.

While I understand and appreciate the reasoning and intent behind this decision. To double the commission on a site where prices are already super low and every penny counts seems a little unfair. As Billy said, exploring extra revenue paths seems like a good idea on paper.

Sell featured positions

I remember this was mentioned a while ago, but you can sell featured spots like you used to. Considering featured scripts are now a lot more in your face they can be worth a lot more too. Even to the point of say $10 for 5 days. Max it out at 10 scripts at a given time, that's $600 a month in potential passive income. Having the featured thing limited to boosters only was always a dumb idea anyways imo.

Reworking the jobs section

You're currently running the jobs section essentially for free. Reworking the jobs section to take a bigger middle man position and then feeing for the service is a good opportunity to tap in to potential income. Offering on-site communication between client/freelancer, along with holding and distributing the funds at the end of a job means not only less scam incidents but an excuse to charge for the service. Yes, there is overhead of handling chargebacks and in reality only you guys really have the experience of handling that on a large scale. But some profit is better than none 🤷‍♂️ Edit: Maybe you can restrict the max job prices to how much rep you have? That way people can't make $400 map jobs (or take them) till they hit X rep.

Hosting Ads

You guys already do it with Crident. Contact some hosts (Or have them contact you) and allow them to bid (Or flat out buy?) ads across the site. They don't even have to be intrusive, a few well placed spots don't do any harm. And I'm sure you'll have an easy time getting companies interested, the crossover in customers is like 95%. MCMarket do this pretty well.

Open the site up to more games

It'd require some rebranding, but why stop at just gmod? Offering Rust and even Minecraft as a basis gives you very little to lose. Either people show interest and buy stuff or it doesn't catch on and you lose nothing. Using MCMarket as an example again: Their site from a UX point of view is complete ass, gmodstore is actually made with some competence.

Some kind of Premium membership

Admittedly my ideas for this run short. But people will pay just to have their name in gold, nothing like paying $5 a month to flex. I for sure wouldn't mind spending even up to like $20 a month on a membership just to support the site and get a few perks in return. Name in gold across the site, cute Discord role, no ads, a free feature or 2 each month. (I actually just checked and it turns out MCMarket have this feature already, I swear I didn't know till after I wrote this 🤔) Edit: nice 😕

You've probably brainstormed all these ideas before and have a reason for not doing them, but some insight would be great especially now you're upping commission fees. It does feel like the creators are getting the worst end of the deal here.

now we will see freelancer option ALIVE WOW

I would heavily appreciate and prefer if you guys took another route for funding. There’s some great alternatives above. I can’t think of a single site feature that I would consider worth it in terms of doubling commission. You would surely have a decent of amount of extra income if the features of scripts were not paid for by discord boosts. Garry’s Mod isn’t getting younger, so even focusing your time into adding extra features, to a gmod exclusive store, isn’t worth your time in my opinion. Furthermore, that may lead you guys to expand your market into more games, which I’m sure you’re doing. Expanding into more games will attract more customers and content creators and greatly increase revenue without the need to raise commission. Adding support for these new games may require a bit more of your time, however you could easily consider it an investment which will without a doubt payout. The next logical step in your plan should be focussed on improving content creator relations and getting more users to your platform. Making content creators pay more surely does not make me and some others want to develop addons for the site and due to your current setup and logic we seem to be the only way you guys make dependable money. Don’t double commission, double the users.

I will try to explain why we made this decision by answering the rest of your post 🙂

(1.) The featured thing was never supposed to stay a Discord booster only feature, but we haven't been able to prioritise things like this due to time constraints. Our time has been spent managing the website's infrastructure and the wallet & payment systems. This unfortunately takes a lot of time. I've been working full time for Everyday with external customers on-top of the aforementioned GmodStore work and a lot of these projects push past my regular work hours and have forced me to work some weekends as well.

The problem with this is that we haven't been able to justify working on GmodStore in-front of external customers who ultimately pay a lot more.

This is also something we've considered on and off for many years but the entire reason we haven't done it boils down to risk management. There are too many risks associated with such a system as we see the job section spawns a lot of disagreements, chargebacks and disputes. We would be at a high risk of paying these fees and the entire job's price in full as we've seen the "pay and dispute" (hit & run) method used quite frequently. There's no way for us to claim this money back as access to GmodStore is often not too important for these types of people.

Creators are way more likely to make money and cover up chargeback and dispute fees automatically as opposed to "paying off" debt.

We explored this option and it doesn't seem lucrative enough in the Garry's Mod space to us. We've been contacted numerous times by small server hosts who want to spend $100 on a month's worth of ads. Margins in the hosting industry don't provide anywhere near the amount of money necessary to actually fund development of an entire platform to this level.

I can't remember a case where anyone has contacted us wanting to advertise anything other than a game server hosting company. Billy's right and GmodStore's primary demographic is developers and server owners. This means there isn't really a market to advertise Garry's Mod servers on here.

Going back to point (1.) in terms of time constraints. This is exactly what we're planning to do. The current GmodStore platform is not capable of supporting a multi game structure and this is a big part of what we want to work on going forward. GmodStore is currently written in Php and we've noticed we can't support more than 20 requests a second on a single web process, this is not good if we want to scale to more audiences with the same platform. We also don't have any concept of other logins or separate front-ends at the moment, which is something we'll need to develop as well. You can imagine "gmodstore" doesn't work for Minecraft and Rust.

The Minecraft community is ultimately much bigger than the Garry's Mod community and we don't see much value in having a Premium membership on a marketplace where most people look for jobs/post jobs or buy or sell addons. While we'd like to be more user centered the platform is at the end of the day product centered.

To continue working on the platform the most realistic solution was to increase the commission rate. You have to remember that to implement features, even ones that make us money, we need to have the time to actually work on them 😅

We explored this option and it doesn't seem lucrative enough in the Garry's Mod space to us. We've been contacted numerous times by small server hosts who want to spend $100 on a month's worth of ads. Margins in the hosting industry don't provide anywhere near the amount of money necessary to actually fund development of an entire platform to this level.

I can't remember a case where anyone has contacted us wanting to advertise anything other than a game server hosting company. Billy's right and GmodStore's primary demographic is developers and server owners. This means there isn't really a market to advertise Garry's Mod servers on here.

I'm sorry to be that guy -- but source? Source???

You can't really know this for certain until you try.

You also have not considered the fact that content creators may want ad space, too. We already fight each other over the damn features carousel. You could take the payments directly from the wallet.

The margins thing isn't a fantastic point either to be honest, companies don't make all decisions based solely on their margins. Marketing can widen those margins, remember.

And ads auctioning can increase that $100 per month to whatever the advertiser thinks is appropriate.

I would be down to pay some good money to advertise my youtube channel as most of you know. Kappa

What about ads from google adsense or carbon (https://www.carbonads.net/)? I feel like those could be good solutions for generating some passive income. Specifically ads from carbon might be nice, as they are specfically targeted at developers.

We don't have anything to sell, we know our user base. To grow and advertise a business needs more money.

Selling addon features is planned and it's something we can implement given actual time to work on the site.

To put it in numbers for you guys as we like transparency. With the 10% commission rate we earned an average monthly revenue of $4 000 - this was enough to pay Josh for 48 hours of development a month ($1 426), servers ($510) and accounting (about $450). We also have to pay huge fees in currency conversions every time we pay VATMOSS on behalf of our creators, we're talking about $600 in currency conversion fees each time. That's a direct loss for us that we don't get back.

Norway is not a member of the EU so we don't get to see any of this VAT money ever again.

That means we pay about $2 586 monthly in upkeep with the current amount of work ($1 426 + $510 + $450 + $200) This leaves us with $1 414 ($4 000 - $2 586) left after deducting the fees required for GmodStore alone. This is before deducting company tax, the other licenses we pay for and incorporate in GMS development like GitLab premium (we wouldn't need premium if it wasn't for GmodStore) and the time I spend doing GmodStore work instead of working on external customers, this type of work typically gets us $140/hour (and that's far below the market standard of $180/hour) and you can quickly see how the remaining $1 414 disappears. That's about 10 hours a month of work for me. One more thing I didn't mention is that we spend quite a bit of time dealing with disputes, site tickets, transferring money from PayPal to TransferWise to ready payouts every month and other administrative tasks.

If you double the amount of revenue to $8 000 you can see we'll be able to work a fair bit more on GmodStore and the future platform. That's a $4 000 increase, such a figure would be hard to reach and maintain with featured addons and ads.

For the record, the Crident affiliate links we've had have only made us $2 600 since March. That's roughly $360 per month, having more similar ads will not generate more revenue as a selection of people will not host with several hosts at the same time. If you do the maths regarding ROI you quickly see that server hosts wouldn't want to pay a lot of money for ads and nor would most content creators at the asking price.

Currently our site statistics tell us we have 86 people online, Google Analytics tell us there are 19 online. This means about 75% of our users use some form of ad blocking technology. We've noticed we have a very high amount of users with adblock compared to the average on other websites we've worked on.

Don't mind the 10% increase much tbh - especially cause if gmodstore ends up branching out to different games and making a LOT more money than gmod can offer it'll probably end up going back to the old system where creators commissions go down depending on the amount you make.

Should also be a reminder to people that existing (actual) marketplaces are still wayyy above 20% for all creators on their commission (with some being as crazy as 60% (unless themeforest changed that) for non premium members) - and you still get way less tools and resources from those marketplaces compared to gmodstore lul

Although I can agree with billy a bit on user ads, they where pretty popular during scriptfodders' start when it was a thing so it might help make some extra dosh.

I think the reason MCMarket can charge the amount they do for their ad space is because it drives a lot more traffic than we've seen from the gmodstore x crident thing. I don't know if this is because MCM simply gets more traffic than gmodstore, or if it's because MCM runs much more intrusive adverts (large normally animated banners). Maybe it's simply just because their audience is more likely to buy stuff.

To compare a bit, between April -> October, running a large image advert at the bottom of MCM,we got well over 200% more traffic than we've seen from GMS in a similar timeframe. I think we could drive even more traffic than that if we didn't use a generic banner. What's interesting is the conversion rate from the GmodStore banner is much better than MCM. (Probably because it's not an actual advert/bidding system?)

According to MCMarkets advertising system, their site receives 3,900,000+ page views a month, from 110,000+ unique viewers, with an average of 15,000+ active users per month. I don't know how GMS compares to this traffic wise.