20 lunes per audio is quite a lot of lunes for someone like me as I want to make lots of little tunes and upload them for free use on the developer store, I don’t want to spend almost any lunes on uploads if I’m listing them up for free.
I just feel like 20 is a lot, I’d be happy with like 5 but if I’m listing an audio for free, especially if I went and actually MADE the audio from scratch with my imagination like i do!! i dont see why it should cost really anything?
All I’m asking is why exactly is there a 20 lune cost to uploading audio? especially because audio is often mass uploaded (what if i have 4 separate similar swing sounds?)
Maybe uploading could be a Cadet only feature or you only get 5 uploads a month as a free user, 20 lunes per audio is just steep in my opinion.
Thanks, I want to generate open and respectful discussion and this comes from a place of wanting to provide Music and Sound effects to fellow dev Luduvians!!
Audio is free if you are using it for your own game, but everything is 20 lunes if you try to sell it on the developer store. Not just audio, but everything. That is their balance. It’s nothing personal. And I’m sure you’ve heard the rest of this story before (financially unsustainable, moderation costs, barrier to entry for quality, more regurgitated talking points). Take a look at the announcement here.
If you want to continue giving your sounds for free without paying an upload fee, I suggest YouTube or a Google Drive. Put the handles in your descriptions/bio. Maybe also make some forum posts about it in Community > Showcase. If you still want to post to the Luduvo developer store specifically, you’ll probably have to make some of your assets paid to cover the costs of the free ones. My condolences, but at the end of the day Luduvo can’t go into the red for being too generous and allowing people to upload unlimited assets to their servers with no financial return because they are being given out for free.
That does confuse me a little. Why is putting it up on the store 20 lunes if we’re selling it for free?
My best guess is quality control, but I feel like that’s stretching it a bit when we can just as easily just do as you suggested and list it on the forums. Maybe we’re paying for the ease of accessibility- sort of an advertising thing?
I’m assuming that’s because putting anything up on the store means it has to be uploaded/stored to Luduvo’s main servers, snapshotted into Luduvo’s (hopefully multiple) backup servers, and go through manual moderation checks and whatnot. It also doesn’t help that free items will never “earn back” anything for the time/resources required to handle and serve them on their servers, which was probably why everything (games, marketplace, and all) used to have a blanket upload fee regardless of context. As for why everything’s 20 lunes in the marketplace right now, it’s probably because they are using the dev and player marketplaces to pick up the financial slack from creators uploading assets for free for use in their games
I see. But… wouldn’t just uploading the assets wind up doing the same thing? I.E. being snapshotted, moderatated, duplicated across different servers, ect?
Yep, it will. Luduvo just made the conscious choice to make it free anyway because it results in more people being happy about Luduvo. In marketing, that’s basically called a “loss leader”. In return though something needs to make up for uploading game assets being free, and they chose to move the costs to the marketplace instead (which might be why its 20 instead of the usual 5)