Hi everyone. Just saw some news that Waves has now been added to PluginBoutique.

This comes not long after IK Multimedia, Brainworx, UAD were added. Seems like almost all companies are going to be moving towards offering their products on PB.

In some ways I think this is a good thing for consumers. PB often has very good sales and a decent money back rewards program. They also have fairly good customer support from my experience. Companies can still sell their products on their own websites.

For the bad aspects, PB takes a pretty large cut from sales which is worse for small devs (but the extra market exposure might be beneficial enough to cancel that out).

Also, PB review system is absolute trash. Just star ratings, no comments or community interaction or posts. I never have any idea how good a product actually is on PB as basically everything has 4 or 5 stars. Not to mention that PB uses shitty marketing labels like "Hot" and "Top Rated" on nearly every single product.

PB is more a hub for redemption codes for products than an actual license or plugin manager, you'll have to end up making accounts on other websites to get the software in most cases.

What do you guys think? Is almost every company going to move to PB in the future? Is that a good or bad thing in your opinion?

Matthew C

 

I like Plugin Boutique. I often peruse their sales (Which can be pretty decent), and while i get a lot of "spam" from them, I don't mind too much. I like that it's kind of a central place for me to look for software. And of course they don't do something annoying like adding in some annoying installer layer. A lot of software I own was bought from them.

The points you make as negative dont matter to me. The star rating isn't super great, as you mention, but you can find that info elsewhere if need be, so it doesn't matter. It would be nice if there were comments though, as you said.

 

It's just another retailer. Don't see how having more access to stuff is a bad thing, its the same company that runs Loopmasters.

 

They will all "price fix" with one another anyway so it doesn't really matter who you buy from. Sweetwater seems to be the exception. Sometimes they will have very short (and very low) sales prices that none of the other websites show. The others would probably match it, but I can't say that because I have never asked one to.

The original post mentioned the "con" about making an account with the actual developer; but that doesn't bother me at all. You will have to do that for any tech support with the product you are buying, the first time you need to use that. Also, you do not want your plugins purchased from some third party retailer like PA or PB and not able to be registered with the actual developer. The more avenues for recourse you have, if you need one; all the better. The developers obviously see the cut they pay to the third party vendor is worth the additional source of revenue, files hosting, marketing, transaction processing, etc; as worth it to them. None of that is the customer's problem.