anonrerising | Love, Drama, Dragons.

The other responses to this thread sadden me. To think that there could be some real competition in this genre if other sites were even halfway competent, but other sites' owners either refuse to pay site artists, site operations people, or both, or just behave so unprofessionally that FR staff treating their jobs like an actual job comes as a breath of fresh air. You'd think FR devs making questionable game design decisions as frequently as they do would hurt them more, but it's not like players have better choices when the whole "industry" is a circus.

It's very hard to create a successful petsite, especially in this current climate where non-browser pet sims are far more popular. They are often labours of love as opposed to an actual job, and then it's considered the culture to be unpaid workers for these sites. Flight Rising is probably the only steadily successful site now that actually takes care of their own staff as they should.

it's considered the culture to be unpaid workers for these sites

That's shady as hell and I hope it changes. Why is it this way? Is it because all of the would-be applicants are young or come from fannish environments where they don't expect compensation for (technically copyright infringing) fan art, so they don't know they should demand payment for artwork on an original IP?

Here I thought FR using UMAs as a way of driving gem purchases was shady too, since the community artists who submit UMA designs can't use them for anything else (since they are on proprietary bases) and never see a cent of that revenue, but other sites not paying "official" artists is so much worse.

You mostly hit the nail on the head.

A lot of petsites are passion projects that originate from the idea of trying and capturing the nostalgia and success of what Neopets was. Neopets went sideways in terms of owners who care relatively early in, but they had investors to pay people who loved the site well to work in a corporate environment and develop it in their stead. Unfortunately, not everyone:

1. considers the size and scope of what they want their project to end up being for the long-term, nor plans for its success in the long-term
2. has the money to maintain a site like that
3. has the pitch-perfect luck that Donna and Adam of Neopets fame, wherein they get early investors and support that allow them to carry their goals
4. fails to interest an audience who will pay to support the site in the stead of investors (investors are typically seen as a hindrance to petsite development, due to Neopets' past)

This ends up with petsites not properly planning for the success needed to expand properly to keep interest and money flowing. Your typical petsite owner is just some person with extra money at the time to buy some server space, pay for/know a coder to make their site, and an artist to make their vision. They're a handful of people who like an idea so much that they'll moderate for free because they want to see it flourish.

And then, if it exists long enough to get a playerbase, you'll get people who will want to keep it running as long as possible because they love the game and have invested enough time and love to want it to keep going.

I wouldn't even consider Flight Rising's UMA system predatory at all. You're using their base to make custom art that only works for their site. You can still use it to advertise the quality of your art elsewhere, even if the base isn't yours by copyright law. If you want something shadier to hate, Aywas and Furvilla allow you to upload pet art that is 100% custom and NOT created on any of their bases, pay THEM to upload it, and if anyone would want to use THOSE bases YOU created to create their OWN pets, you cannot profit off of them with RLC because you consented to it being site property the moment you upload it.

Derivative work copyright law, baby. You may own the art itself, but you lose the right to profit from that exact artwork the moment you let the site host it, even if they didn't make it in any capacity.

SA *succeeds to interest an audience. God I'm so damn tired.

The copyright thing isn't true for furvilla at least. Their ToS says you retain ownership, and they explicitly allow you to still sell any uploaded art for RLC. The game villagers wearing the art can't be sold for RLC, but the art can.

"Upon submitting your user-generated content to Furvilla, for the sole purpose of making your content available to other Furvilla players on Furvilla, you grant Furvilla a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, change, transmit, alter, redistribute, re-format, store, create derivative works from, publicly display and perform your content in any media known or hereafter created." - right from the ToS.

As I said, you own the artwork and concept itself, but they get a license to use that art however they see fit without compensation to you. This is essentially the same as what FR does with their UMAs.

Now, I don't see anything in the ToS about whether they allow RLC trading for Painties or other content you upload, but that was DEFINITELY a major point of contention early in that whatever you upload, it becomes part of the site, and you can no longer trade RLC for whatever was uploaded to the site without the site's consent explicitly given. If that's since changed, that's rad! But it was DEFINITELY an issue at the start of the site because it was the same clause that Aywas had and currently still has.

DA
the sentence you quote is standard to most (all?) sites that allow you to upload images as resizing your image from, for example, 350x350 dragon image to 50x50 lair view, falls under that sentence; there should be a separate point about who owns the intellectual property, ie who and where and how someone is allowed to sell the image. example: tumblr tos https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/terms-of-service

AYRT
"Players retain full ownership to the content they submit." -the sentence literally right before the one you quoted.

As the other anon said, what you quoted is the standard legalese for 'you give us permission to host this image.' It doesn't give them the right to use it however they want, because the granted rights are only "for the sole purpose of making your content available to other Furvilla players on Furvilla"

I also don't remember it being an issue before, and I'd been there since beta. I do remember people similarly misunderstanding the hosting clause though, and them clarifying multiple times that you retain all rights. I've also seen this exact conversation happen with regards to Tumblr, Twitter, and DeviantArt's ToS

Which non browser pet sims are popular?

Considering that pet sims are typically just a more casual variation of the monster-collecting/raising genre, you could consider pretty much anything pokemon-esque to be competition, even if it's not the exact same thing. Monster Rancher comes to mind, especially.

Isn’t Momster Rancher pretty dead though? A new game hasn’t come out in years. And I thought we were talking about online games

Monster Rancher very recently got a remaster with online features that let you battle monsters.

Tamagotchi/Digimon still puts out keychain-sized hardware V-pets from time to time, though aside from DM20 none of the modern Digimon ones ever see a NA release.

Pokemon Go is the juggernaut in mobile space ever since they added the "Buddy Adventure" stuff. I don't know of any other popular games with "pet" mechanics, though, since I don't play mobile games and don't pay much attention to what's happening in mobile space.

On console/PC, pet games are considered a bit of a shovelware genre but they definitely exist and have players, even if they never reach the point of being considered "popular". There was a "horse game" blogger I was following for a while who would review specifically games about raising, training, breeding, and racing horses. Unfortunately, all of these games are pretty bad, as their audience isn't taken seriously enough by publishers to treat them with respect, so the games are made as cheaply and with as many corners cut as possible, with the goal of getting a new product on physical store shelves every holiday cycle. Pet games appear to be an untapped, under-served market, but established game dev studios don't appear to consider this market worth the risk developing for.

Then you occasionally see an indie game which is at least adjacent to the genre. Your Slime Rancher, or Niche. A single-player experience on the PC has to be designed very differently to hold people's attention, so there's way more to do in the game itself but less of a social/economy experience that the petsites have. There are so many cool ideas and abandoned genres that indies attempt to use and revive, but, the problem is that indie devs as a group are largely not experienced enough or lack the resources to execute them properly (the exceptions, the "indie hits", are so uncommon that they prove the rule here). Still, I think out of all the groups mentioned, an indie dev is most likely to figure out a good, popular pet game eventually.

Horrifically, games on Roblox, despite being some of the ugliest graphis I've seen in ages. It's just conveniently on mobile. Things like Adopt Me. It's crazy. Also lots of little kids tho.

Yeah, it would be.

First you have to have a concept that people will want to play. Sure, you can go CS route and just do adoptibles, but many players won't want to play it unless you have extremely good art, which brings us to the next issue:

You need someone who is willing to create the art that people want to actually stare at for periods of time. While art is subjective, you want to appeal to a broad userbase.

Good art can only go so far, even with doing an adoptibles site. You have to know how to code various aspects of a site and bring it together so it can handle a lot of traffic (hopefully), and how to code mechanics that people will want to engage with. (even CS has other aspects that people can engage with, such as the drawing issue, and dressing up your pets, and creating scenes)

But, even if you have those aspects down, you still need a server, and that takes money, and a domain.

Then, websites tend to have issues balancing the free to play vs pay to play model (which is where I do think FR does well). If you get too much pay to play, then you drive people away who can't, if you get too free to play, then no one has incentive to actually pay.

Add in many players are lower income/minors and they CAN'T often toss a lot of money at a site often and the competition from existing site, it can be extremely difficult (not impossible).

I would love to create my own pet site, because there are so many things I would love to have and know that none of the petsites I play will have them, or they won't do them like I want. Sadly, it isn't in the cards

Love, Drama, Dragons.

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