anonrerising | Happy Valentine's!

I feel this a lot as someone who is regularly commissioned by people who profit off of my customs. I can definitely tell who commissions me because they enjoy my art and who commissions me for a quick buck.

Some ways you can prevent this:
- Charge more in FRC than RLC (eg 15kg or $100usd). You might think nobody wants to pay real money but you would be surprised. If you don’t really need FRC, close FRC entirely and only open when you need.
- Keep 2-3 copies per 5-print, have some sort of pinglist/generate regulars who look to buy directly from artist. There are people who would much rather buy direct from artist than from commissioner copies. This is the most successful method I’ve seen, personally.
- Less popular from what I’ve seen, but implement resale rules. I know someone who has a 1.5x max markup rule on their customs.
- I have seen some people test price per copy (eg. 10kg fee for the art, +blueprint +4kg per copy), but those tend to end up getting a lot of 1 prints and you tend to get paid less overall with this method I think.
- Public customs/sponsored customs are an option but generally those get less hype than the shiny 5ps so overall less money in it I believe.

I’m a big fan of limiting custom recolors to 1-2 prints (or 1-5 comm-artist split), artist recolor prices tend to be much lower than base commission fee and the general UMA base views original and recolor the same value wise.

I also want to note that I am 100% supportive of people profiting off of RLC commissions. I actively encourage it, as it’s more likely for the commissioner to return if they make big bank off of me. Gems are cool but money pays rent. I know it’s hard to differentiate as the buyer, but some artists only do RLC slots, some artists maintain separate lists for RLC/FRC.

OP/AYRT- I think the only issue I have with the profiting off RLC coms is the fact that it ends up feeling like I'm a substitute for gem conversion at a better rate. Why pay the site 100$ USD when you can pay an artist 80/100$ USD and get 40,000-50,000G back from 2 20,000-25,000G AB auctions rather than the 10,000G the site would give you? Even if you're just auctioning off one copy for 20,000G, you're getting a better rate than what the website would give you.

I think that's where the hiccup falls feelings-wise, personally. The vibe that you're just being used as a cash cow or replacement profit system of sorts. I know this is unavoidable, as people profiting off customs is a big reason why customs are so popular in-game and allow a rich marketing system between players. It just feels weird when I look at the conversion of things, even if it's not fair to 1:1 USD to gems in comparison.

Again, completely different vibes if it's the artist who is selling their spare copies; that's their choice, but ugh, I'm definitely not comfy with the idea of being used as a bank for others. Of course, that's something that I personally need to work on getting over, but it's not helped by the culture people have around using skinmakers for profit as we're seeing right this moment with some users. I don't want to be a bank or moneybag for people, I just want to make nice things for people and enjoy creating while still being able to fund myself and not feel used.

NAYRT

I'd honestly at that point just kind of stick to making 1-2 prints only if you don't want people using you as a bank- it's a valid thing not to want! but with the extra copies a 5p custom provides, people are going to want to buy copies- if the commissioner sells them at a lower rate, the people who buy them from them only buy them to mark up. That's why most extra copies are 5-6kg, or they're auctioned off. I'd much prefer my customer to get that instead of some rando buying it for low just to profit hugely off of.

(nayrt) I think buying gems from FR itself and paying an artist directly are apples and oranges. The site makes way more than $100 a day from gem sales but I know that if I’m paying an artist $80 it has direct impact on their life. Meanwhile I can’t use 40kg in fake money to buy groceries.

AYRT

While this is true, I’d still rather be paid $200 than having the money go into FR for gems. I guess this depends on how different artists feel, and why different artists have different TOS! You are totally in your right to have your opinions, I just wanted to throw my opinion out there as well so people don’t hate on all of my customers lol (I’ve been in a bit of a financial pickle lately and really need the profiting ones to keep paying me real life dollars)

Charge more in FRC than RLC (eg 15kg or $100usd) - the problem here is for some highly in demand artists like Sucrose, 888, or Asmo, a single copy of their custom being sold could exceed 15kg.

"e.g." means example, so they're not saying it's a hard or fast rule to do it for that much; just an idea of what you could be charging as a gem to RLC ratio. every artist has to decide for themselves how much to charge and at what ratio based on their feelings and business interests.

There's one person I keep getting auction pings from who's been repeatedly commissioning Asmo and selling 1-2 copies at 25-30kg each—they've probably gotten like 200kg from doing this.

Asmoo the cash cow

i keep coming back to this comment and laughing. thank u nonny

Happy Valentine's!

Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions

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Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions

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Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions

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Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions

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Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions

Re: Custom skin/recolor auctions