The last line of my previous blog read "Or maybe it's just me?" in regard to Reallusion's Content Store and the prices therein. After Ken's and Killian's comments (and some pondering on my own), I thought that maybe it really is a matter of perspective.
When you boil it all down, I want to buy all the content there is to buy. I WANT IT ALL. But I simply can't afford it. That same argument doesn't apply to others who CAN.
Having come from TMO where we all held hands, singing songs, dancing naked in the wilderness, it was a real shock to find the fresh fruit no longer appearing magically on the table in the mornings and being forced to venture out into the harsh neon light of the Real World and deal with the perils of a different, harsher land. :)
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Let me tell you briefly what I did recently: I tried submitting some content for sale at the Reallusion Content Store. First of all, you don't have to prove you have any skills in modding or art or anything like that. You simply need to have registered a product with Reallusion and that qualifies you to sell "stuff".
The submission process isn't very hard, but you need to prep some things to do so, such as having images ready of the EXACT SIZE they require, and being ready to make up some fancy wording for your Ad.
My plan was submit an item for sale, and charge next to nothing for it. With this strategy I was hoping to prove that you COULD make a profit by selling something really cheap, but at a higher volume (I seem to remember hearing that in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon..."Mass prooooduction")
I made a stupid mistake, though. I took a Google 3D Warehouse item (a Skeleton) and was attempting to sell that as a CloneBone character. It didn't occur to me until after I'd submitted it that I technically didn't own it. I DID spend a lot of time fiddling it, resizing it, changing parts, etc to make it into a usable (and quite cool, I might say ) CloneBone actor (for more details on what a CloneBone actor is, read THIS.)
Naturally and quite rightly, Reallusion informed me that I'd have to contact the original modellers (there were two, one for the body, another for the skull) before they could put it up on the site.
But the real funny bit (the one that ruined my plans) was they said I would have to charge WAY more for it. You see, I wanted to charge $1.00 for my SkeletonMan.
Just fyi: Reallusion take a significant chunk of the profit (up to 50%) and they only give you money back when your cut reaches $100. In other words, I'd have to sell about 200 SkeletonMen before I'd see a dime. Not a problem for me, but obviously one for them.
My Reallusion contact suggested a charge of $5.00 for SkeletonMan (once I had permission from the initial modellers), which I guess isn't too bad. Certainly a lot better than $96.00 *cough* (that one item really irks me, sorry).
So one day I might try again, but with something of my own (100%) creation. In the meantime, I'll just give SkeletonMan away for nothing, dreaming of the good old days when I used to hug trees, sing meaningless songs, and run around in my underpants, thinking I was a hero...
:)
So.. you create an item you want to sell, but you effectively can't really charge what you want, as the creators of the software you used to make it want upto 50% of your takings and won't even give you anything back until you make at least $200 (factoring in the 50% cut)?
ReplyDeleteIs it just me that thinks there's something fundementally wrong with this picture? I'm not surprised, then, that prices for iclone stuff are so high (having said that, if Reallusion are taking 50% of whatever you make, you would probably try to push the price up until you are making a substantial profit on the item to begin with in order to actually get your hands on the loot faster). But, again, that just seems to me to be an attempt to cash in on the efforts of other, talented individuals without having to make any more effort after initially creating the software.
Ok; you could argue "well, if they hadn't made the software, no one would be able to create content to sell, anyway". Fair point, but I see it more like this: that's like saying Microsoft should charge a cut for every Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentation or Access database that gets created, or (more in line with what we're talking about), Lionhead charging everyone for every movie that got made with The Movies and put online.
The initial pricing of the software should take into account the likely "shelf life" of the product, with additional content priced to a reasonable level to keep adding to what's available. Now, as it stands, I'm given to understand there's a LOT of Reallusion stuff required to even BEGIN to approach what TM provided "out of the box";
Bare Minimum (bearing in mind with this you are extremely limited to what you can produce):
iClone 3.2 (($79.95 electronic download); CrazyTalk for lipsynching ($49.95)
Total: $129.90
Then add in $69.95 for 3dExchange (to enable you to add your own models and avoid having to spend bundles of cash on the ones premade and for sale) and you have a passable, barely adequate amount of stuff to make movies with ($199.85).
But, wait! You can't make new costumes? Ok, then you need Clonecloth as a bare minimum (which is a whopping $129.95 for the base human package!). That bumps the price up to $329.80 (which is £228.74 at current exchange rates).
Now, call me a skin-flint, but that's hardly what I'd call a "pocket friendly" package for anyone to swallow, especially someone starting out in the hobby...
Ok; I get the fact that they're a business but, seriously... do Microsoft charge over £200.00 for a plugin to make their product self contained? Did Bethesda charge $70.00 for their G.E.C.K Toolkit download for Fallout 3, so people could add their own user made content? You see where I'm heading, here?
Call me an old cynic but I just can't reconcile running a business with "making a buck off the crowd" in this instance, I'm afraid. I'd be happy for someone to make the math add up for me, cos I'm struggling here, to be frank...
As an addendum here, don't think I'm down on iClone; it's a good product, but still has a long way to go for me to be happy with it as it stands at the moment (especially at those prices...); maybe I HAVE been spoilt by what the Movies was able to produce and the time and effort shovelled into it by the amazingly talented modders who did it all (and still do) for FREE without making a single red cent off their efforts. But I really don't see that a company can expect to produce something which is effectively a tool for a niche market, slap a price on it and expect it to be swallowed up by a large enough majority to enable it to be self-sustaining without someone (i.e. the consumer) getting stiffed on the deal.
ReplyDelete