Question to builders I suppose

Hiya people,
In my unstoppable quest for expansion, I will open an animation store soon, with full perm erotic animations for builders. Quite the timing with the adult thing coming up

Now my main question is: packs or no packs?

I could put down vendors that sell the individual animations (well, per 2 or 3, depending the number of people involved in the action), or simply put down packs of animations, which is much cheaper in the end. I know as a builder I rather put down 10K for a set of 70 animations, then pay 500 linden per animation for example. But I am clueless about my colleagues. Any idea's? Or should I conduct a survey

For building beds, you mean?

Main concern would be permissions on the packs.

Why not let people assemble their own packs? Often do not want everything in a clothing pack for example or would like to mix and match for same number of items at same prices.

Why not just put "ten for this amount" instead of pre packaged? Just an idea.

I don't often like packs in anything, I'd usually much prefer to buy a individual texture, animation or sculpty.

I don't generally include animations in my builds because they tend to be rather expensive and I could never hope to recover my costs; but if I did, I would like to see bulk-rate discounts on individual animations, say, "ten for the price of eight", or something to that effect. I would prefer this over packages of different animations.

I assume we are talking about trans/no-copy anims here?

Hiya,
Thanks for your quick replies!

The packs will be full perm, or rather copy-trans (not much to modify with an animation), which answers part of Melita's and Katheryne's question. So bulk discounts for the same animation are not relevant, they already are copyable and transferable.

Of course it would be nice to have people assemble their own packs, but the problem there lies in the technical limitations (or my limitations ). Lets say I put each animation down for sale, how would I have someone creating their own package? The only construction I could think of, is a refund of 2 animations after someone purchased 10, for example.

@Ian: But let's say you want to build a sex bed/couch/kitchen/whatever. You will definitely need quite some animations in those.
Let's have an example of 50 animations, resulting in 25 sets. For a price of 500 linden per animation set, we talk about 25K worth of animations. The same number of animations in a pack would cost you let's say 9K (I am pulling those prices out of my thumb, to set some examples).
Now the benefit of buying individual animations is that you get exactly those animations you want. But if you pay less then half of the price for a set, would you think the benefit of individual picks are worth that difference?

The prices I mentioned are not even the prices you pay for full perm animations, often you pay 1k per full perm animation, or 1500 for a couple one. Which makes releasing a good sexbed near impossible. My intention is to make it a bit better affordable by offering those packs, but if there is more interest in individual ones I might decide different.

Some clothing stores do this already. I do not know how they manage the technical side of it.

Another option is to offer a discount card.

The details are yours to work out. You asked what we'd like and we told you. Hope it helped. (FWIW I am not planning on building beds any time soon and the main reason is the high price of animations.)

Anim packs in that context would make more sense if the packs were of closely-related animations, such as, for example, a pack of poolside animations (swimming, dangle feet in pool, sunbathe, etc.), or a pack of bathroom animations (bathe, play in tub, shower, wash hands, use toilet [male and female], check look in mirror, etc.). Packs like these would make sense. Likewise, too, would packs of animations meant to go together in a piece of furniture such as a couch or a bed. In cases such as these, packs are good. But also be sure to offer your animations ala carte as well.

Most of the things I made were for personal use, so I prefer the single animations, to handpick each pose. But I'll send you a little notecard with an idea that some builders would REALLY appreciate in a few minutes

@Melita: Of course it helped I will try and find out how the clothing stores do it, I never heard of the option so maybe there are tools available I do not know about yet.

@Katheryne: It only is about adult animations and cuddles, so the packs will all be themed. Reading the reactions, an a-la-carte option as well seems like a good idea indeed.

@Marcush: Looking forward to that notecard! If you make personal items, however, I do not think you would not choose for copy-transfer animations? In general those are way more expensive then non-transfer or non-copy, and not really needed for personal stuff.

Thanks again all for your input, really appreciated!

Should be in your inventory now

Always interested in fresh new animations but I too would not buy in packs- even if cheaper in the long run -the cost at first would be daunting - plus there is never any guarantee the thing u make with them will be a big seller and reall recoup ur investment.
And @ Marcush- you said you have made anims for yourself- do u sell any? Not looking for any one thing but again new and different is always of itnerest-

Nah, I just made some 1-person animations to experiment with QAvimator, but do have quite a collection from all over the place (Bits & Bobs, JB, Risque, etc.) that I use to make custom furniture for my friends' club and house

Hiya Ama,
The main reason I think packs are useful, is because sex/cuddle items are always packed with animations. So as soon as you want to create a sexbed, a minimum of about 50 animations is quite realistic. Purchasing 50 animations when not in a pack costs a fortne in general.
When I started my line of sexbeds/rugs, I payed 20k for a pretty huge pack of animations, and of course it takes a hell of a time to recoup that. But if you want to get into the erotic market, you have not much of a choice, you simply need a big variety. But from the reactions here, I feel more and more inclined to indeed put down vendors for the individual versions as well!

My recommendation is a bit of a repeat of previous posts but I'll say it anyway, maybe it will help you come to a decision.

Absolutely offer people the opportunity to buy the animations singly. There is no compelling reason not to, and plenty of compelling reason to do so.

Packs though are also acceptable and wise. Organize them well. For example don't just offer a sex animations pack. If you have multiple animations that are solo animations, for example, put them all together in a pack. All your threesomes could be another pack if you don't have an outrageous number of those like 500 or something. For couples, try to organize them according to types. One pack of cuddles. One pack of positions similar to missionary. One pack for animations that come from behind. etc.

Then if you wanted to you could also offer the mega-pack that includes everything for those who want to buy out the entire store.

Well, I'd like my own, it's more on the feeling that there's some poses I find degrade the experience rather than enhance it, be that because they are to cartoonish or not quite as I would like them... so I wouldn't want them sitting there in the menu for others to access...

I am making a fireplace and had a builder I admire here in the forums review it for me, he offered a advice for a good compromise for a similar problem with my chimney, make 2 chimneys one scripted with smoke and one not and make them mod. I have one chimney I have made that smokes from the top of the prim, (normally chimneys are 2 prim) but it can't extend more than 5 meters, so I'll make another that is able to extend 10 meters high and has a smoke ball and pop both in the pack. Granted it is cost free and your issue is around effective pricing for you and the customer, have you thought of making a sofa with or with out a very basic set of poses and putting the packs as extra accessories/products for the sofa, maybe 2 or 3 different "moods" to choose from.

All this said, i am bit funny about poses, I like some of them, but very understated ones. So take the slight aversion into account too.

See I have never made anything like that, Marcel, so yes- I suppose those wd have better chance at selling. I do know I made a very nifty hot tub i spent like 3k in anims for and have sold exactly one!

hi Marcel

you know how long and hard we looked for animations for our soon to be relased furniture...we searched literally dozens & dozens of animators stores, eventually we came across some we realy loved but they were all sold in packs, and we didnt like some in one pack, some in another etc..so we contacted the creator and over the course of 3 evenings (hard work but hey someones gotta do it lol) we tried every single animation in every pack...and wrote down exactly which ones we wanted...the creator then made a custom *pack* for us of those we wanted...buying them from other animators in singles wouldve not been cost effective..but as the creator was so helpful...we bought a LOAD in a pack...at a better price...

thats not really helping with the pack or no pack question but to have that option of selecting a certain amount for a better price is cool.

Fai

i dont like packs myself.
and i think if you sold a pack you would increase the chance of your anis becoming a BIAB.

I'm sorry, I might be in a goofy mood, but *tee hee* just one vowel different from...a funny mental image. I think that would be one business in a box I wouldn't want.

packs can be good imo. I have purchased animations full perms @600 on avg for a single animations and a couple animation avg's 1600 from this one person I tend to use. This seller also offers packs, which I haven't looked at yet in detail. It seems maybe different levels of packs would be nice and single purchase. I didn't look at those packs because I didn't want to invest in buying all lets say, Erotic or Sitting. So maybe a choice of single half pack and full pack... that is something I would think twice on.

I would offer them individually, but also offer packs of related animations at a slight bundle discount. For example, all the girl/girl poses in one package, all the M/F cuddles in one package, etc..

You'll probably find most people will want to choose which specific animations they want, but some will want "All of the _fill in the blank_ poses!", and will be glad for bundles grouped by type.

The one time I bought a huge batch of animations, al at once, was when I was doing a huge build for a client. I ended up negotiating with a well-known animator for three full sets of all their animations, transferrable but no-copy, at a discount from teh individually-purchased price.

Why just sell full-perm anims?

Here's a thought which you may find either disappointing or a business opportunity:

I bet that some folks now no longer use sex furniture at all - it's much more flexible to use an Intan that's dedicated to 'intimate' anims. You can adjust the position of individual anims, and if you have multiple copies of mod anims, you can use the same anims on differently shaped pieces of furniture, if you want to fiddle around some resetting the anim positions in the Intan.

Place your Intan remotes correctly, and you can have multiple sex beds or chairs with your favorite anims, anywhere on your property, buying/building unscripted furniture that fits your various decors. Or, DON'T reposition the anims, the configuration cards that anim creators provide generally position them to work correctly on the floor.

A household like this will have some furniture with a nice sits and cuddles built in, a bed with a nice sleep position, and Intan remote scripts tucked away in innocent-looking prims. The Intan will be restricted to a private group. That way, folks can even have their outdoor shenanigans on Mature or PG land when there's no one else around, without pose balls or sex furniture in evidence.

So, you may also want to sell individual non-full-perm anims with an Intan configuration card included, adjusted to work on the ground.

And, here's a market opportunity, I think: I haven't seen anyone selling a piece of furniture with a prim designated to use as the Intan remote, and anims calibrated to fit the furniture.
.

Ewww! What a crappy deal THAT would be!

I've done this in my own builds for a couple of years now. I don't use Intan, of course, but my own anim server script, for which I've also hacked a custom version of MLPV2 (so switching among anims is a menu operation, not a different set of poseballs; don't know if Intan has that or not).

But that's for my own builds. For stuff that one would sell, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: first you need an anim server to get any anim-served furniture to work, but no reason to get an anim server unless you have a bunch of anim-served furniture. Even then, whoever's selling the furniture would want to distribute the anims with it, even if they end up in the server instead of the furniture, so I think the full-perm anim market is still valid in that model.

By the way, I'm not so sure that Modify is a permission one should deny buyers of resale anims. That means it's impossible to rename them, which may be the intent, but can be frustrating for folks who don't quite understand how to use some of the configuration options of menu-driven animation systems.

I admire your scripting prowess! I notice that the last few Intan minireleases have all been dinking with the positioning logic, and I find that sort of thing sooooo tedious that I'm very happy not to be able to look at the script

Yes, Intans are menu driven, and fthe latest releases seem to have made transitions both smooth and swifter. The menu system, imho, is their biggest weakness. She allows you to tag individual anims (or sets), and then lets you 'filter' by tags, to create a merged menu. Very flexible, but also very unintuitive. I much prefer the simple hierarchical menus that most MLP devices offer.

About furniture: You can do this very well with the Intan as it is, but it's tricky and too long to explain here. To accommodate furniture more easily, I imagine she could easily enhance the script to rez an object along with the chosen anim, but that has obvious disadvantages (tho, for risque play in a PG sim when no-one else is around, also has obvious advantages).

Being of more pedestrian tastes, I incline more toward making an anim server that communicates with already rezzed well-known furniture, and positions the anims accordingly. I don't have the time for that, tho I'll be happy to alpha test anything you come up with!