Why does VisuStella MZ cost more than RPG Maker MZ

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This is an article written by Yanfly. The Question This question has been asked for a while now. I figured we should touch upon it. The question is: "Why does VisuStella MZ's All Waves Collection library cost $100 when RPG Maker MZ itself costs $80?" Or some variation of it. Usually something along the lines of it costing more than RPG Maker MZ itself. The Answer Short Answer That's because you're looking at the cost of an entire plugin library versus the individual plugins that come along with it. Don't look at it as one product. Instead, look at it as 50+ products (or more specifically, 62 plugins as of Wave 8). The Long Answer That's because we've made plugins over time for the All Waves Collection library. In this library, there are 62 paid plugins (not including the 10 free cores) as of Wave 8. Each plugin that is made has its own individual cost. We have projected that there would be around 8 waves worth of plugins to be made, which is why we gave it the max cost of $100. Buying the All Waves Collection is entirely optional and you could easily buy the plugins individually for $3 to $15 each or by the waves they are a part of for $25 each. Individually, each plugin costs $1.60 each (rounded) if we're going by the $100 All Waves Collection bundle or $2 to $3 each (rounded) if we're going by the Waves format (of 8 to 10 plugins each). If we're to compare the total cost of all the plugins inside of the library (as of Wave 8) by their individual costs, we would get the following: Savings How much money does buying a Wave save versus buying the plugins individually? Wave Total Individual Purchase Cost Saved By Purchasing Wave 2 $85 70% 3 $71 64% 4 $69 63% 5 $79 68% 6 $73 65% 7 $82 69% 8 $72 65% By the way, buying each plugin individually costs $494 assuming you purchase every plugin from Waves 2 through 8. That's nearly 5x the price of the All Waves Bundle collection cost. How much money does buying a the All Waves Collection versus buying all Waves separately? Waves Bought Total Cost of Buying Multiple Waves Saved by Purchasing All Waves Bundle 4 Waves $100 Break Even 5 Waves $125 20% 6 Waves $150 33% 7 Waves $175 42% The purchase of the All Waves Collection is equivalent to the purchase of 4 waves. The purchase of the All Waves Collection means you have saved 42% of the money you would have spent otherwise buying the individual waves separately. Keep in mind, this is assuming that we don't have the 25% per wave discount system going on. For clarity on what the 25% per wave discount system is, it means that for each wave you own, the total purchase price of the All Waves Collection will cost $25 less up to a cap of $100, which means you essentially get the All Waves Collection for free if you were to buy 4 of any combination of wave bundles. The discounts are cumulative. If you own one wave, the All Waves Collection costs $75. If you own two waves, it costs $50. If you own three waves, it costs $25. If you own four or more, it's free. This means if you are unsure if you want to commit to buying the All Waves Collection bundle, you can safely purchase them by waves instead until you are sure the All Waves Bundle has met the value for $100. Unfair Comparison That said, we want to make mention that the comparison of the entire VisuStella MZ All Waves Bundle collection library cost to the cost of RPG Maker MZ is unfair. Once again, because you are not purchasing one product, you are purchasing many. Instead, it would be better to compare it to the total cost of the DLC's. Let's take a look at the DLC's and their costs by the way: RPG Maker DLC Let's take a look at all of the available DLC for RPG Maker MZ by checking RPG Maker MZ on the compatibility list. Let's compare it to the cost of RPG Maker MZ. No discounts will be used since the cost of RPG Maker MZ is not discounted here either for the base price of $80. As of the date this article is written (April 24, 2021), Category Total Results Total Cost Relative Cost to RMMZ's $80 Animations 5 $76 95% Battlebacks 23 $344 430% Characters 77 $1236 1545% Enemies and Battlers 60 $886 1107% Event Backgrounds 12 $154 192% Generator Parts 4 $70 87% Music and Sound 197 $2167 2708% Recommended 11 $239 298% Tileset 85 $1373 1716% User Interface 11 $185 231% Voice Pack 34 $693 866% Some people are saying the comparison is unfair because the DLC products aren't necessary and that the plugins are. However, this is far from true. The RPG Maker MZ software by itself is capable of creating games without the assistance of plugins. The plugins we have provided in our library are luxuries, not necessities. Furthermore, 10 of our best plugins are also free and cost $0. Now, some people have made mention that it's unfair to compare entire sets of DLC categories to the entire cost of the All Waves Bundle collection library. My question is, why? There are a total of 62 plugins (as of Wave 8) being sold as a part of it. In the table above, some of the DLC categories don't even reach 60+ results and still cost way over RPG Maker MZ's $80 cost. To which, some have mentioned that it should not count because a library should be counted as a single entity to be sold. This is how we will respond: if that's how you see our library (as a single entity), then that also means you do not acknowledge individual plugins as their own. In that scenario, we have nothing else to offer to you. All we can recommend that you do is, find a programmer to commission, ask them to code you an entire plugin library of 60+ plugins, and to have it cost $80 tops because that's how much RPG Maker MZ costs and it shouldn't cost anything more than that. We also wish you the best of luck finding such a lucky person to work with. You can find a link to the RPG Maker Web forum's classifieds here. End of Article