I bought the Extended Text plugin from the marketplace and that too doesn’t work in a content only packaged game. 
[MENTION=1345]Ben Marsh[/MENTION]
So it’s been a while, but I don’t suppose there’s been any further steps in this direction recently? It’d be so good to shed the compiling requirement completely for plugins.
I recently released a game on Steam and needed some plugins to fill the Steamworks void in the stock BP nodes. It’s good that you only need VS installed for the plugins to work, but for me it meant I now technically had a “code project” (in that I could no longer deploy to iOS without acquiring a Mac, and having to build from a Mac meant I ended up having to compile from full source, meaning if I need to upgrade engines for updated SDK support or something, I’ll have to merge code without really knowing what I’m doing)…
Afraid not; we did put some more work into hybrid monolithic builds, but ran into a limit of 65,535 exported symbols from a single binary on Windows (yes, that is a lot. :)). The alternative would be to use non-monolithic games, which is what UT does for mod support. It comes with a performance penalty though, so I’m not sure it’s something we’d want to enable by default.
Hi Ben, how much performance penalty we’re talking here? I always like to try monolithic build since I noticed that’s UT is using.
I don’t actually have any hard numbers, it’s just an assumption on my part. It’s definitely something we should measure.
So just want to make sure - it is impossible to deploy to device from windows on a bp-only project if you are using a plugin, correct?
So I have published a plugin recently and got somebody coming back to me complaining exactly about this issue. They can only package for mobile if the plugin is in the project’s folder, doesn’t matter if the project is blueprint or C++.
I can see that this is from 2014 and just wanted to confirm, is this still really a limitation of plugins in Unreal?
So, it’s year 2021 and we are in version 4.26. I am guessing this is still not a thing? 
2023 here. I got a plugin from Marketplace and after a few hours of fighting with it I finally managed to get it included in the packaked game. This was in UE 5.2 built from source. I did the following:
- Copy the plugin folder to Engine/Plugins/Marketplace
- Create a C++ class to convert the project from BP to C++
- Rebuild the Engine
- Go to ProjectName/Source/ProjectName/
- Open ProjectName.build.cs
- Add plugin names PublicDependencies. In my case it was like this: “PublicDependencyModuleNames.AddRange(new string[] { “Core”, “CoreUObject”, “Engine”, “InputCore”, “UINavigation”, “NiagaraUIRenderer” });”
NOTE: You can find the plugin name by navigating to the plugin folder and opening the .uplugin file in your IDE - Rebuild the project in your IDE
After these steps I packaked the game and plugins got included.
For UE4.x ONLY there’s another trick, not as easy as adding dummy cpp files but if you insist of not adding files manully…
first create an dummy blueprint.
now,
On Project Settings → Packaging → Blueprints →
set Blueprint Nativization Method to Exclusive.
next add the empty blueprint to the List of blueprint assets to nativize.
it will nativize your empty pb to empty cpp files which in turn force project compilation and therefor plugin compilation.
UE5 has dropped this feature so the only possibility as of now seems like adding dummy cpp files at stated above.
10 years later… still a problem. 
Just ran into the issue and took me hours to figure out that the project needs to be c++ in order to include plugins. Why bother even having blueprint only projects as an option if it is impossible to use plugins with them in packaged builds.
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