What’s all this then?
Yanfly, the author of the most popular set of RPG Maker MV plugins, announced retirement lately and due to reasons I am not able to understand made a good deal of previously free plugins, pay only.
What can I do? You/someone else recommended I use a Yanfly plugin.
Many of the generic, useful to everyone plugins are still available for free and are now hosted on itch.io. No bitrot here!
If you needed something more specific, like for example Weak Enemy Poses, you will have to pay the dollar piecemeal, or more if you spring for a bundle. I recommend reading the wiki carefully to determine if a plugin can do what you need it to, or you can feel free to ask in this here thread.
What if I am already using these plugins in a project? Have I become a criminal?
You’re fine; Yanfly’s post makes it clear that any past usage will be free going forward. That is the only reasonable way to handle this, anyways.
I spent all my money on bellies, how I can afford these too?
Collaborate with your fellow Weight Game Makers; if we all maek gaem together, we can pool our resources! The TOS seems to allow this. If you consider that technically cheating, read below.
I don’t like this.
Keep in mind you have options! There’s a website full of plugins, and rpgmakerweb forums have a bunch too. And google! Yanfly’s not the only community in town.
And don’t forget about your own two hands. Anyone can write plugins, even you! Plenty of smart people here would be happy to help you. Even creating a custom plugin for you (we’re so helpful like that.)
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that really is stupid for them to suddenly change a free thing to a paid thing, downright idiotic
I dunno. I’m not gonna scream about it, but it does seem kind of strange that it coincides with his retirement… Especially since he wasn’t even targeted by the incident that inspired him to do this. Whatever, I guess. As long as the proceeds actually go to keeping the library updated, then I guess it’s fine.
Also, whether or not it’s “true,” I’m instantly turned off when anyone refers to their consumers as “freeloaders” in any capacity. Call it entitlement, but it just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t see why he’d feel unappreciated, anyway; he was already pulling a significant amount on Patreon.
I think he’s a bit bitter that it wasn’t culturally acceptable to sell game dev assets mass-market when he started (he did a lot of VX Ace scripts, too). Now with Unity Asset Store, Gamedevmarket, and Itch.io there is a proven market for such things. And he missed the boat by being too early.
I say we do a petition to make those formerly free plugins free once again
I’ve witnessed most of what went down to make yanfly paywall, there’s a couple of RM community discord servers where some stuff went down.
Basically, he accused a fledgling coder of stealing his code and tried to sic the whole community on them, but some of the other coders accessed the situation and suggested that there wasn’t any stealing, it ended in a large portion of the community becoming skeptical, yanfly found it disrespectful that not everyone would follow what he says unconditionally, and this I suppose is the punishment to the whole community for not being on his side of the argument.
There’s a bit of a problem with his ego ever since he started interacting closely with the community and he seems to look down on the majority of the users of his plugins since they often can’t code for themselves.
As stated in the original post he has no control at all over the previously distributed plugins, legally or otherwise, any copies of his library before changes of his terms are free to be redistributed, I haven’t been following so closely so my last copy contains everything up to dec of 2018 which has 198 plugins.
I recommend trying to learn a bit to avoid things like this completely, but also remember there are many other plugin makers:
Hime
SumRndmDde
Moghunter
Gustavo
Alistair Engine
JP coders also have alot to offer: Tkooler Guild (Japanese plugin database)
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so the unfair paywall only applies to plugins that haven’t been sold yet, but still those plugins should not be put behind a paywall period