THREE Marketplace

It would be nice if we could offer paid THREE related modules, engines / systems, templates and resources in a official manner so the market is linked to the site. There are few generic marketplaces related to HTML5, but they are way too mixed and unknown. It should be more smilar to Unity or Unreal. If i might missed a THREE dedicated one please tell me, but that also means it is just as unrelated/hidden as those i mentioned. At the moment we only have the Resources category for i presume, only non-paid things. But anway the presentation and tag-search based pot of topics isn’t as nice as a asset store.

It could also make the available libs/tools for THREE grow faster, more extensive and cover more specific features like for games. Especially relevant for companies and agencies wich prefer or rely on ready-to-use modules for their projects with support and maintenance, what often can’t be provided for free work.

I won’t present a full and detailed concept, maybe there are even market services to create one just like this forum, if it’s prefered. My question just is: what would you think about it, and of course, what would master @mrdoob think about it. :thinking:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything (commercial) marketed for three.js. Do you think there would be much call for this?

Pretty much everything that’s designed for three.js is open source and free, and personally I’d much rather it stay that way rather than trying to make it commercial like Unity.

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I agree, that is most definitely the way to go, but, Fyrestar, if you want
to develop your own marketplace for such things, since it’s open source,
and free, and not copyrighted, etc, etc. You can.

And I hope you do, the more content that’s available, even if premium, is
still adding to the community in at least a semi-positive way, right?

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Of course, I’m not suggesting that I don’t want people to earn money from their work.

However I don’t think having an official three.js shop front is the right direction for the community. Not that it’s my decision to make of course, just my opinion.

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That’s the point, there are some things i’ve seen, but they aren’t promoted much. It requires a place which is linked to the THREE Hotspots like here and the website or people won’t find it.

For example a agency needs to develop a product presentation, they’ll look for the right toolset and also a toolset which offers as much as ready-to-use as possible. It only gets really saturated by a marketplace developers actually can earn money for their work. If you require anything at Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, Construct etc. there is a well categorized store with pretty pictures you find mostly anything needed.

The fact THREE is a rendering engine makes it a even more attractive market in my opinion, since it’s not tied to a more specific engine structure even different engine concepts can be offered for games and apps.

You can basically put more effort in paid modules, on how extensive and fast it will be done as well as support and maintenance. I don’t want to say open-source isn’t good or good enough, but you know what i mean i guess. Other shops, for example, also offer extensive tutorials and similar. It clearly separates from free work, since you need to offer support and maintance for your products, that’s what a lot companies missing in THREE related work, not THREE itself, since the community is great with Github and the Forum, but the smaller individual modules often lack support, they often end as dead outdated code without any maintainer. You can simply put more serious effort in paid work if you don’t have much freetime.

I was actually looking for such a marketplace and don’t really have the time to start one, at least not alone, and only if it’s related and linked to THREE officially such a marketplace would be relevant.

I don’t imagine shop items jumping in your eyes on the official page, i only mean linked just like the forum, github, docs etc. is on the left side panel, so people interested in THREE will also see there is a store, and very often those will browse such as well as the promoted examples. (like the example with agencies)

But that’s just what counts, it can only happen if the community wants it.

Edit: Since you changed it

I didn’t said to make THREE any kind of commercial as Unity, it’s about a marketplace for developers. UE and other engines are free too, but also offer a marketplace. This also doesn’t mean everything to be premium, at the moment there isn’t even a categorized portal to collect and promote THREE related libraries. You have to dig through the Forum, randomly stumble over on Stackoverflow or find and pick things together with search engines.

I don’t see why there would be a dislike for such a platform, any argumentation?

It would indeed be nice although lots of work I guess to build it. But it would be awesome. Some concerns since the threejs community does not have a consensus when it comes to modules or modern means of sharing re-usable code in general. If that market space has you manage stuff by hand or is held down by outdated practices I’m not sure how it could succeed in scale. The other market places have a clean cut common ground that makes this all straight forward.

As an intermediary milestone, I still wish examples/jsm could be split off the main library and maintained by a team of people looking over contributions, with a little less conservatism. Three doesn’t value it enough, and doesn’t recognize it’s sitting on a treasure trove. Things like Babylon exist because jsm is just a dumping ground that doesn’t receive much love and care. With community access to it these modules and resources would grow and fulfill much more usecases. Perhaps some more involved parts of it could then become monetized.

What threejs is, and does, is already a treasure trove!

It is how it is intended to be by its creators and it is freaking awesome!!

I’m confident the developers who put their hard work into making threejs, appreciate what it is, and I know I sure do!!

Things are not the way they are due to lack of appreciation, if I can put words in the mouths of the developers.

Threejs and the community is open source heaven! I hope is always stays that way.

What threejs does for so many of us is amazing! Which is why so many of us come up with business ideas using threejs. I am working on several commercial tools which utilizes threejs extensively! :slight_smile:

This is a great thing, new businesses being developed! But these new business ideas need to create their own commercial homes, not invade the spirit of open source.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the development of threejs. Your belief in open source has enriched many lives and pushes the web forward for us all!

That is always a double sided sword, the desire to get everything for free yet sell the own based on it while also being against others selling if it is something you need for yourself. Applause and nice words ain’t pay bills unfortunately, not everyone can afford developing open source in their freetime or get sponsored by a big company.

Commercial items do make sense, especially for more complex or larger systems and their support you may rely on. It isn’t specifically about UE store type of business, instead it can be donations or a patreon.

The main issue i originally targeted wasn’t commercial/funding aspects, rather a central portal to share and showcase libs, tools and projects around threejs, as currently it is completely loose and npm is just it’s own command shell bubble without typical presentation. These type of stores aren’t exclusively commercial nor would i even define it as or call it a store.

I’ve setup this platform already, yet there was a huge upgrade in the framework i use for which i had to migrate other projects in the past couple months, luckily according to the devs this will be the last major system change so it’ll be worth doing the migration work.

But just to mention in advance, there is no payment system, if there are projects with items to be purchased external platforms such as patreon or gumroad can be used, i wrote a integration for. Aggressive marketing such as multiple altered submissions won’t be allowed, reviews can be made as well.

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