DragonByte Tech add-ons not coming to XF anytime soon

[DragonByte Tech]

So why is the hostile community one of the main basis for your argument on doing work for XF? You'll see this everywhere. Especially at vBulletin.com. There are so many good people here, helping out, offering advice, creating free addons, creating free styles, promoting good morale...a few bad apples doesn't scare them off. Why should it scare you off?

A few reasons it's a major part of the decision:

Firstly the coders really don't like doing support in hostile environments. It wears them down and if they have the choice of not walking into that environment they'll generally choose not to. It's harder for me to convince the guys bringing their work to xF is a good idea if they think they're going to have to deal with... difficult people when they do.

Secondly the market share of xF is still really small - its growing but compared to vB or IPB it's still tiny. To get xF to be profitable would basically mean being able to have a receptive market to the pricing structures required to maintain profitability. As the market exists just now there are lots of cheap mods and cheap/free branding free initiatives. That's fine for someone doing it as a hobby, but the truth is those people and their work won't be around long, because they're simply not making enough money to make this a full time job. What that means is for profitability to be possible the market has to be "conditioned" to realise that a certain price level is required to get professional work that will be supported and updated long term without people vanishing into the night.

That conditioning is really hard to do when there is an extremely vocal minority trying to push resistance to it. Those guys don't care if they don't get good coders here long term making enough money to live on - they just want stuff as cheap as possible for them, with the copyright layout THEY want and they'll do or say whatever they have to in order to keep the market prices at a low level for THEM, regardless of the damage long-term.

Thirdly, xenForo will be unprofitable for us in the short term for sure, probably in the medium term and very possibly in the long term. The truth is that dealing with difficult people saps motivation and takes it out of you - no matter how used to it you are. Getting up every day and releasing things to people that they will use on their sites, often for free, then come to you and try to make your life difficult is hard to do when you know you're LOSING money on it. Doing it for people who are appreciative, friendly and understanding is a LOT easier.

The truth is that we don't have to deal with any of that stuff in the vB community any more. It's very VERY rare for us to get a negative comment or post either on our site of on vbulletin.org anymore. We've had more on xenforo.com in the last year than we have on our site and vbulletin.org combined. That's despite vBulletin having a community dozens of times larger than xenForo's. That's just crazy - pure numbers should mean there are more people on vBulletin giving us crap, yet not only are there more on xF as a percentage, but there are more as a whole number as well.

TL;DR When you're trying to grow a market, vocal resistance makes it several times more difficult than it has to be. When there's no guarantee of profitability in that market it becomes a serious consideration.

 

[Mouth]

But I like dancing. Haha. Especially with Mr. Howard.

Yeah, get a room you two. Everyone else see's the writing on the wall

 

[DRE]

But I like dancing. Haha. Especially with Mr. Howard.

Either way, I could really see a benefit for DBT to get involved in coding some modifications for XF. Just my personal opinion, but the Signature and Avatar ones I don't think really went well, and were not well received. That was over a year ago though. I could see the case being made for say that Activity mod, or Shop mod, I know the Shop has had many members here at wits end to get one. I think their shoutbox would be a viable competitor to TaigaChat, and when you have competition, in the end, only users benefit.

I do hope they hop on board, at least with one of their major add-ons (Shop), to get their toe wet and test the waters. They would have 500+ downloads instantly, and then they would see what could be done.

I'd purchase a shop add-on in a heartbeat ( a decent one )

Good idea. I voted for a shop. http://xenforo.com/community/thread...-addon-would-you-rather-see-on-xenforo.49854/

 

[Shelley]

Good idea. I voted for a shop. http://xenforo.com/community/thread...-addon-would-you-rather-see-on-xenforo.49854/

I'd have a field day and in my element designing my own custom icons for it. I'd be in happy land.

 

[Fufu]

Which vBulletin Add-ons were those? We have only ever discontinued one product out of over 50.



RPG Inferno was Inferno Tech - of the entire DBTech team (currently sitting at about 7) only one member of it (Iain/Decado) was ever involved with Inferno Tech. By that logic any time someone leaves the vBulletin team any new job they have is actually just a new version of vBulletin. I guess XenForo Ltd used to be Jelsoft Ltd?



Is that based on anything? The polls and surveys we've conducted among our customers all come out very positively in terms of our support. Is "DBTech have too much to support" just conjecture based on what YOU think a team of 7 can support? We're a company, of course profit is one of our motivations - if our motivation was to not make profit we wouldn't be a company, we'd be out of business. Our products, even though there are so many of them, overwhelmingly receive feature updates more often than the product you're using right now - XenForo. Do KAM have a bad business model in that case? They must since they don't manage to develop their work as much as we develop ours by your logic.

For all the talk of how the community at XF has changed, when we pop over here this is the sort of stuff we see. People claiming DBTech is Inferno Tech to discredit us. People claiming we discontinue a bunch of products. People claiming we don't support our products. Basically people lying and spreading false rumors - that's the impression you guys give of the XF Community so... thanks for that, I guess. I don't know WHY the community is so poisonous and venomous towards developers (especially certain developers) but if someone has an explanation i'm all ears.

Ian, we sunk a lot of the community's hard earned donations into buying a DB-Tech vBulletin add-ons, and one was a card game. Instead of paying the server bill, we decided to buy a unique game. Then the announcement came, due to, lack of demand on one of our scripts, the DB-Tech team has decide not to support this script. Be professional and fix the script before discontinuing.

Also, it was stated that DB-Tech had no interest in xenForo and whatever scripts we bought cannot be transferred to xenForo or sold to a third party. I have not used vBulletin since the launch of xenForo and I am happy I jumped off the sinking Titanic into the small yacht KAM had waiting for me. You are welcome aboard, but be more considerate of others opinions, whether it is positive or a negative about DB-Tech.

 

[Luxus]

@DragonByte I think everyone can easily see that at this point it's more profitable to do coding work for IPB. I'm not sure about vB though as it's slowly dying. I dunno, obviously most commercial forums are still running vB, but my gut tells me that it's wise to invest in a growing business like XF. As I said, communities always change over time. New members are making their first steps in the forum admin world which some of them never heard anything about DragonBike or similar companies before (I know I didn't). If they don't know anything about you, obviously they will choose other developers over you. Look for example at Waindigo and Chris Deeming. Both are dedicated XenForo developers and very popular here. Last time I heard no developers were free for custom work. Just thought I could point that out.

 

[0ptima]

That was my suspicion, and I expect the other coders and such on here would say the same (that they're not making $30k a year from their xF work) That's why the other aspects of the decision become so important - because it's almost certainly NOT profitable just now, or for the forseeable future. Going through a lot of hassle and hostility to lose money for probably at least a year or two is why it's hard to convince our coders to give xF a shot. Not, as some have implied, because they can't code "properly".

Have you thought about the long term and VB5? Are you going to be porting all your mods to VB5 in hopes that people embrace VB 5 like they did in the past? VB5 is far from prime time and will take years for it to be a suitable upgrade from VB 3/4.

In the meantime people (including some of your customers) are jumping ship to IPB and XF and will probably never return to VB. Just look at how many familiar names their are on here that stem from VBs glory days.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Ian, we sunk a lot of the community's hard earned donations into buying a DB-Tech vBulletin add-ons, and one was a card game. Instead of paying the server bill, we decided to buy a unique game. Then the announcement came, due to, lack of demand on one of our scripts, the DB-Tech team has decide not to support this script. Be professional and fix the script before discontinuing.

Also, it was stated that DB-Tech had no interest in xenForo and whatever scripts we bought cannot be transferred to xenForo or sold to a third party. I have not used vBulletin since the launch of xenForo and I am happy I jumped off the sinking Titanic into the small yacht KAM had waiting for me. You are welcome aboard, but be more considerate of others opinions, whether it is positive or a negative about DB-Tech.

It wasn't discontinued due to lack of demand - it was discontinued because we couldn't verify that licensing work for various pieces of content had been handled properly by the people who should have done it. We discontinued it to protect ourselves legally. Support was still provided for it and bugfixes were still made - still are to this day if anyone reported any.

@DragonByte I think everyone can easily see that at this point it's more profitable to do coding work for IPB. I'm not sure about vB though as it's slowly dying. I dunno, obviously most commercial forums are still running vB, but my gut tells me that it's wise to invest in a growing business like XF. As I said, communities always change over time. New members are making their first steps in the forum admin world which some of them never heard anything about DragonBike or similar companies before (I know I didn't). If they don't know anything about you, obviously they will choose other developers over you. Look for example at Waindigo and Chris Deeming. Both are dedicated XenForo developers and very popular here. Last time I heard no developers were free for custom work. Just thought I could point that out.

Trust me, I know for an absolute fact the paid vBulletin market is worth several times more than the IPB Market.

For everything I hear about vBulletin dying, our numbers disagree. The number of people newly using vBulletin and buying mods for the first time is still growing, and we actually had our most profitable week of all time 4 weeks ago. Being free for custom work and there being custom work at a price-point suitable for us are two very different propositions. If Chris or Waindigo are making $30 per hour+ for their xenForo work i'd be very surprised (that's the basic wage for a PHP programmer job). If they're willing to share details of their xenForo income i'd be very grateful and interested in hearing those. Data like that is crucial in making proper decisions from a fiscal perspective.

 

[Mouth]

Firstly the coders really don't like doing support in hostile environments. It wears them down and if they have the choice of not walking into that environment they'll generally choose not to. It's harder for me to convince the guys bringing their work to xF is a good idea if they think they're going to have to deal with... difficult people when they do.

You already discounted this yourself, by saying it was a very small minority. Great, resolved, lets move on.

To get xF to be profitable would basically mean being able to have a receptive market to the pricing structures required to maintain profitability.

We'll come back to this shortly

That's fine for someone doing it as a hobby, but the truth is those people and their work won't be around long, because they're simply not making enough money to make this a full time job.

But they're doing it as a hobby, not a full time job, so the correlation and extrapolation is both incorrect and irrelevant.

That conditioning is really hard to do when there is an extremely vocal minority trying to push resistance to it.

Coming back to this ... Who? Where? I don't see it. In fact, many posts in here have demonstrated that people will pay good money for good products/solutions. I even saw $1,500 for a shop. And again, you already said that it's a small minority and the same small minority who are ... difficult, likely. Sounds like the same minority % that dogma any business really, not peculiar to community software. Jeez, I'm sure MS and Bannana have a much larger dogma against their receptive marketable pricing structures.

The truth is that dealing with difficult people saps motivation and takes it out of you - no matter how used to it you are. Getting up every day and releasing things to people that they will use on their sites, often for free, then come to you and try to make your life difficult is hard to do when you know you're LOSING money on it.

I know ... I hate it when I have to visit the bank branch and speak to the teller (oh, "customer liaison office") who's paid to talk down to me because I want something that is good quality, doesn't rip me off, and won't make me fill out forms that tell them how many times my niece's brother's best friend's groundhog pet does a doo-doo each day every single time I want to make an account change. If only we all didn't have customers (direct or indirect, external or internal) at all, eh?

Doing it for people who are appreciative, friendly and understanding is a LOT easier.

Oh, our mistake. I didn't realise that utopia world was waiting for you back there at bV.org? Stupid is as stupid does .. WTF are you doing here then when it's so good there? Why are you telling people to suggest to KAM to make core changes to to make it easier for you, when it's the clients that are just so difficult?

The truth is that we don't have to deal with any of that stuff in the vB community any more. It's very VERY rare for us to get a negative comment or post either on our site of on vbulletin.org anymore.

So your expecting us to dance around the campfire singing biblical praise on a company that doesn't have a product for our community, comes in here calling us all hostile and self-imploding, and lavish presidential feasting with much graciousness and thankfulness when you visit once in a blue moon to see if we've yet been conditioned to pay enough money that you feel your product is worth? Yeah, I'm taking it to the extreme level, but I'm also failing to see what it is you really expect us to say or do?

What is the response or reaction you are hoping to see for an unannounced product that, by your own admission, is so unlikely to ever eventuate anytime soon? I'm not trying to be hostile, seriously, as I'm sure you'll claim me to be. But I generally bewildered at trying to forsee the expectation and/or response that would make you happy and give you what you are hear to see? That we have all been conditioned by really bad hobbyist code that has caused massive crashes and data loss of some high profile XF installations, and will pay whatever you deem is the market rate just to get some quality code?

When there's no guarantee of profitability in that market it becomes a serious consideration.

What business growth into new markets ever had that guarantee?

Come to XF or not come to XF, in my mind. We'll be better off with you, and better off without you. This thread was WOFTAM 3 pages ago and is even bigger now. I don't think you'll get the conditioned response and guarantees you seek that are equal to the utopia ivory tower you tell us you have now, regardless of what we say or do. Your in for the opportunity and growth, or your by the sidelines and watching every now and again, hoping like crazy that some upstart doesn't come along and steal your entry point leaving you with no growth opportunity at all. In all honesty, stick your toe in and give us the quality code with outstanding functionality and receive your lavish praise and hippie-love here too, or tell us we haven't evolved yet enough for you and come back in another 6 months to see if the playthings have been conditioned and your entry door hasn't been filled yet? No hostility, just calling a spade a shovel and be content with your decision.

 

[0ptima]

For everything I hear about vBulletin dying, our numbers disagree. The number of people newly using vBulletin and buying mods for the first time is still growing, and we actually had our most profitable week of all time 4 weeks ago.

For how much longer do you predict your VB sales will be increasing?

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Have you thought about the long term and VB5? Are you going to be porting all your mods to VB5 in hopes that people embrace VB 5 like they did in the past? VB5 is far from prime time and will take years for it to be a suitable upgrade from VB 3/4.

In the meantime people (including some of your customers) are jumping ship to IPB and XF and will probably never return to VB. Just look at how many familiar names their are on here that stem from VBs glory days.

We've ported several of our mods to vB5 already, the market there is still definitely in its infancy though. The vB4 market is still growing at this point and my personal projections have it stalling early next year, with slow shrinking for about 18 months after that. At that point I anticipate a sharper decline, and soon after xenForo and vB5 will both be about the same size as vB4's market and any one market on its own is likely to be difficult to extract a profit from at that point for a year or so until they expand. Fortunately the vB4 market will continue to supply SOME income for a while beyond that, much as the vB3 market still has some value today.

Basically vB4 will still be the most profitable market for a good 2 years or so. Beyond that is where the interesting decision comes in - vB5/6 or xF. xF is probably the better software, vB5 will likely have more marketing behind it and despite xF having the backing of the vocal forum owners community larger businesses and companies, especially those in places like Germany etc are still very much vBulletin centric. It can seem in a bubble that xF is overtaking vB - the truth is that if the current growth rate of both systems stays linear it would take xF about 8 years to catch up to vBulletin - that's if my figures are correct of course, and most of them are inferred and extrapolated.

Bear in mind that xF doesn't need to be as big/bigger than vBulletin to be successful btw, especially since they only have a team of 3, so don't take any of this as a knock on xF.

Long term we're examining various things, we don't have all of our eggs in the vBulletin basket by any means and are building a sideline and reputation in B2B non-forum work in case vB5 (or xF if we go in that direction) doesn't pan our long term

 

[Russ]

As the market exists just now there are lots of cheap mods and cheap/free branding free initiatives. That's fine for someone doing it as a hobby, but the truth is those people and their work won't be around long, because they're simply not making enough money to make this a full time job. What that means is for profitability to be possible the market has to be "conditioned" to realise that a certain price level is required to get professional work that will be supported and updated long term without people vanishing into the night.

I'm sorry but I don't appreciate this comment as it's coming off extremely arrogant. It sounds like to me you're saying all the work from the style devs and plugin makers from XenForo won't be here in the long run. There's some of us who have been here since day one and haven't waited for the right "profit time" to hop on board. You say it's easier to work with folks who are appreciative of your work but you should consider your tone yourself.

Take a step off your high horse eh?

 

[Sheldon]

Just wanted to cover the image of the community "attacking" everyone, etc.

I don't see that as the case. Sure, I have issues with Mike Edge (well documented), some have issues with say Waidigo, some with Adam Howard, some with Brogan, some with KAM. In the end though, I am certain we are all on the same page as far as supporting developers, supporting add-ons, offering suggestions, etc. Everyone has good days and bad. Most here have forums as a huge part of their life.

If you wanted to talk about a bad community feel, try being here about 8 months ago. It was like a bad dream. At this time, I don't have issues with anyone any longer. I personally don't need, nor want it. I still feel strongly about my opinion, as it is just that, my opinion. Heck, Mike Edge can even host my 27million post forum . At the end of the day, EVERY single person on this forum yearns for XF to be successful. It is what we have all bought into, and what we all have decided will carry our hobbies/livelihood on for however long we can keep the run going.

You can look at XF as a family. We are very tight knit, regardless of the bickering amongst ourselves. We come here every day, offering what support we can, what information we can, for no other reason than to just help out. Yes, our posts towards each other seem harsh, but to me, I see it more like a family battle. We have all stuck through this, we all have had our issues, but yet we are all here. Their will always be those vocal about not needing or wanting an add-on, those that are vocal about DEMANDING an add-on. That is just part of it. I have seen that at any place I have went. Support for developers will grow as the community will grow, and make no mistake, it will grow.

I honestly hope you consider developing one of your widely popular add-ons to see how the XF member base reacts to it. Don't judge the entire member base because of me acting like a tool, or others bickering. Sometimes is just reaction and inability to move on.

I do wish you the best of luck in your decision.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

I'm sorry but I don't appreciate this comment as it's coming off extremely arrogant. It sounds like to me you're saying all the work from the style devs and plugin makers from XenForo won't be here in the long run. There's some of us who have been here since day one and haven't waited for the right "profit time" to hop on board. You say it's easier to work with folks who are appreciative of your work but you should consider your tone yourself.

Take a step off your high horse eh?

We were actually here on day one as well, we left after a lack of profitability and people attacking us for the contents of our FREE mods made the coders not want to stay and lose money here just to deal with those people. My post was trying to explain the reasoning in a factual way, if it came across as cold or aloof please accept my apologies. I was going for clarity rather than warmth.

It's great that there are people who have enough free time to do this for free, but in every other market, from vB to IPB to phpBB eventually those people stop. And it's not because they're bad people, it's because it needs more and more time and they get more and more abuse as things take longer and longer to do, and eventually something happens in their life that means they need to cut time from SOMEWHERE, and it's an easy decision to cut the thing causing you headaches and giving you nothing in return. The people who do it as a job, for a living, are the ones who can't choose to cut it, unless they want to lose their house and starve.

 

[0ptima]

We've ported several of our mods to vB5 already, the market there is still definitely in its infancy though. The vB4 market is still growing at this point and my personal projections have it stalling early next year, with slow shrinking for about 18 months after that. At that point I anticipate a sharper decline, and soon after xenForo and vB5 will both be about the same size as vB4's market and any one market on its own is likely to be difficult to extract a profit from at that point for a year or so until they expand. Fortunately the vB4 market will continue to supply SOME income for a while beyond that, much as the vB3 market still has some value today.

Basically vB4 will still be the most profitable market for a good 2 years or so. Beyond that is where the interesting decision comes in - vB5/6 or xF. xF is probably the better software, vB5 will likely have more marketing behind it and despite xF having the backing of the vocal forum owners community larger businesses and companies, especially those in places like Germany etc are still very much vBulletin centric. It can seem in a bubble that xF is overtaking vB - the truth is that if the current growth rate of both systems stays linear it would take xF about 8 years to catch up to vBulletin - that's if my figures are correct of course, and most of them are inferred and extrapolated.

Bear in mind that xF doesn't need to be as big/bigger than vBulletin to be successful btw, especially since they only have a team of 3, so don't take any of this as a knock on xF.

Long term we're examining various things, we don't have all of our eggs in the vBulletin basket by any means and are building a sideline and reputation in B2B non-forum work in case vB5 (or xF if we go in that direction) doesn't pan our long term

It would be much easier to get into the XF game now while there are less addon developers and ample opportunities to create that killer premium addon. You guys a have a trusted name, are financially successful, so why not take the plunge?

If it works out, it will snowball into even more success. If it does not, you write off your losses and go back to your VB addons.

 

[Luxus]

If Chris or Waindigo are making $30 per hour+ for their xenForo work i'd be very surprised (that's the basic wage for a PHP programmer job).

Well, all I can say on this matter is that I payed more than $60 for a small one-hour add-on and I didn't regret it.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

It would be much easier to get into the XF game now while there are less addon developers and ample opportunities to create that killer premium addon. You guys a have a trusted name, are financially successful, so why not take the plunge?

If it works out, it will snowball into even more success. If it does not, you write off your losses and go back to your VB addons.

Mostly because taking the plunge into xF means NOT taking a plunge in another market instead. Time is a (very) limited resource. And if we DO give xF a try it'll be a drain on us forever because we'll feel obligated to support whatever we release forever, we wouldn't just abandon it, even if it didn't work out

For as few xF developers as there are for instance, there are even less for vB and we have a much more direct line over at vB to getting the changes we would like made to vB5 to make modding easier/better. (Before that causes an uproar, i'm not saying KAM don't do enough, i'm not saying we should be getting special treatment, i'm not saying ANYTHING, i'm just making a statement of fact - as things stand at vB we have good lines of communication with the dev team of vB5. We haven't built anything like that up with KAM, that's not an xf "flaw").

That being said, we're definitely considering giving a crowdsourced mod a shot for xF in the not-too-distant future. I still have some more research to do, and some more data points I hope to get so I can make a few projections and such, and I still need to see how comfortable the guys would be with dealing with the xF community again, so please don't take this as "DBTech are coming back". DBTech are looking at it and considering it (which is part of the reason i'm here participating in this thread).

 

[0ptima]

We were actually here on day one as well, we left after a lack of profitability and people attacking us for the contents of our FREE mods made the coders not want to stay and lose money here just to deal with those people. My post was trying to explain the reasoning in a factual way, if it came across as cold or aloof please accept my apologies. I was going for clarity rather than warmth.

You simply cant satisfy everyone. I run a coffee club on my floor and offer all kinds of varieties of coffee for a fraction of the price that you will pay elsewhere. I spend time negotiating with suppliers, paid for the coffee up front when I first started the club, maintain the machine, etc. Lots of people appreciate this service as it saves them lots of time and money. Yet, some people complain that it is still too expensive, that I dont have some exotic flavor that my supplier does not even carry, etc. Do I let this bother me? No, as you simply cant satisfy everyone.

It's great that there are people who have enough free time to do this for free, but in every other market, from vB to IPB to phpBB eventually those people stop. And it's not because they're bad people, it's because it needs more and more time and they get more and more abuse as things take longer and longer to do, and eventually something happens in their life that means they need to cut time from SOMEWHERE, and it's an easy decision to cut the thing causing you headaches and giving you nothing in return. The people who do it as a job, for a living, are the ones who can't choose to cut it, unless they want to lose their house and starve.

No one said you need to release free addons.

 

[0ptima]

Mostly because taking the plunge into xF means NOT taking a plunge in another market instead. Time is a (very) limited resource. And if we DO give xF a try it'll be a drain on us forever because we'll feel obligated to support whatever we release forever, we wouldn't just abandon it, even if it didn't work out

Like I said earlier, now is the time to create that killer addon. If you release some lackluster addon that fails, you only will have yourselves to blame and you will kick yourselves having to support it.

For as few xF developers as there are for instance, there are even less for vB and we have a much more direct line over at vB to getting the changes we would like made to vB5 to make modding easier/better. (Before that causes an uproar, i'm not saying KAM don't do enough, i'm not saying we should be getting special treatment, i'm not saying ANYTHING, i'm just making a statement of fact - as things stand at vB we have good lines of communication with the dev team of vB5. We haven't built anything like that up with KAM, that's not an xf "flaw").

This direct line with IB certainly did not occur over night. The sooner you get in the XF game, the sooner you will have a voice of reason. You cant expect to parachute into the XF world and start calling the shots.

That being said, we're definitely considering giving a crowdsourced mod a shot for xF in the not-too-distant future. I still have some more research to do, and some more data points I hope to get so I can make a few projections and such, and I still need to see how comfortable the guys would be with dealing with the xF community again, so please don't take this as "DBTech are coming back". DBTech are looking at it and considering it (which is part of the reason i'm here participating in this thread).

Dont think about it too long. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. You guys should start off on something small to get a good understanding of the XF framework before jumping into something bigger.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

You simply cant satisfy everyone. I run a coffee club on my floor and offer all kinds of varieties of coffee for a fraction of the price that you will pay elsewhere. I spend time negotiating with suppliers, paid for the coffee up front when I first started the club, maintain the machine, etc. Lots of people appreciate this service as it saves them lots of time and money. Yet, some people complain that it is still too expensive, that I dont have some exotic flavor that my supplier does not even carry, etc. Do I let this bother me? No, as you simply cant satisfy everyone.



No one said you need to release free addons.

It's a point of principle with us that we release Lite versions with 70%+ the features of the pro versions for people who can't afford the pro versions or who want to properly demo the product before purchasing.

Regarding the first part, it's not just about letting it bother us - I tried to explain in detail how the community attitudes has a large effect from a business standpoint on a growing market. If it was a waaah that hurts our feelings thing it wouldn't even be an issue.