How much do scripters get paid?

Someone wants to pay me to make some scripts, actually of course modify publicly available scripts with special features. I did some of this just for fun and he likes them. He will put them in attachments or gadgets and sell them retail for some small number of hundreds of Lindens.

Do scripters for retail objects get paid by the script? A percent of the price? Or do they usually do it the other way around -- pay a builder to make them an object (or make one themselves) and sell it? I would like to earn something, (tho I realize that many people give away their scripts, I WOULD like my AV to be self-sustaining someday) but have no clue how much I can fairly charge.

I've been a software contractor RL, and if I were to charge US$/hour for these, it would be say 250-500$ per script US. I'm thinking that's not happening

Scripters out there, please IM me with some hints! Or post a response if you are comfortable. Thanks.

I do odd-job scripting when I need a break from my own (typically massive in programing depth) projects. When I hire out my services as a scripter I charge $400L-$600L an hour (and I've been told that I underprice my services by a large marigin), with an estimated work time given ahead of time, and half-payment upon beta edition, and full payment when the final product is delivered, as well as garaunteeing life-time support for any issues or problems that crop up with what I have made. If I go significanly over my estimated time frame I cut off the final price at the estimated price + 25%

This is of course for creating a script from scratch, and while the creator has full perms and full rights (do whatever the hell they want with it) to their version of what I produced I still retain the right to re-use, re-sell, or re-publish the script, maybe even adding the script open-source to the library free for everyone if I feel it would be useful there.

The only time I take a percentage of the sales of an item that uses a script I made is when my creative partner and I team up for a project, and then we split the sales equally for that product via special vendor I cooked up.

I found that when I decided to make my focus in SL to center around the programming aspect of our environment, it was financially best for me to create a few proprietary and unique gadgets that I could sell for my income (original design/concept games are my bread and butter right now, earning about $300L daily from my $1L arcade). This frees me up to do my pet projects for fun without having to worry about "how can I market this to sell?"

One of the hardest things to do from a customer's stand-point is sort out the quality scripters from the less than optimal ones when you advertise for a needed script or do a search. I found the best way for myself to build up my odd-job scripting resume was word of mouth from my regular customers. People I have worked with know that I am easy to communicate with, and I am always able to get some kind of a swift response back with support, new parameters for my current contract, and critique on progress made so far.


I could delve further into how I run myself as a scripter for hire, but it essentially evolves around the basic RL business practices of being cost effective for the service provided as well as making my customers feel like the want to come back for another rendition of my services.

Let's talk about this in terms of actual dollars. The guy above is talking about working for $1.5-$2.25 per hour. I think you'll find that's quite an optimistic sum so expect to get less for your own work. I dunno about you but my free time is worth a hell of a lot more than that and if I was scripting because I needed the money I'd find a real job.

As a result, my advice is to only code things you want to code and to do it for free because you enjoy it. Working for $2 an hour is a miserable miserable way to spend your time. Just throw $25 a month into the game and relax.

While I agree putting a sum into the game and relaxing is a good idea, there's nothing quite like having that extra "income" from things you've made which will continue to sell in the future, and you get the satisfaction of knowing something you've done is considered worth the L$ to someone else.

I enjoy scripting (assuming it's an interesting idea) and do it for nothing in my own time, so why not get that little extra by doing it for someone else?

As Senuka says, if you retain IP rights on your scripts you will not only be creating things for other people for a one-time payment, but essentially being paid to create a library of resources and experience for yourself. Nothing can compare to a portfolio of work when being considered for a job.

Edit: Back on the main topic, for projects with close friends we usually discuss the matter and usually decide on a split profit from the end-item as a good idea. Nobody pays anything up front, and nobody loses any money before any is made.

For private contracts I would generally charge in the region of 2000L$ per solid hour of scripting time. Considering 4 hours of work would be worth 8000 L$ at that rate - enough to keep me going for a long while - it's not bad at all.

It depends on the client and the project. It's not impossible to get real life rates for Second Life work. I go for a mid ground personally, about half what I'd charge for real life programming work.

On a recent small project that I quoted L$10,000 for, I know for a fact that my client shopped around and had another quote for L$4,000. He went with me because he knows he can trust the quality of my work.

Remember that in a lot of cases, what you are doing is helping someone develop a residual income, money that comes in from sales whether they work or not. Take an object that sells one a day for L$100. That's L$36,500 over a year. Using an annual rate of 5% that's equivalent to having L$730,000 ( over US$2500 ) in the bank earning interest. Considering a L$100 item would probably have at most 2 hours scripting work (say ~US$50) I don't think quoting sensible rates is unreasonable.

I don't really script, but my husband (in RL and SL) does. He charges $4000L an hour for custom work, and he gets it in most cases. He came to that price range after considering it for a while. Since he codes all day long in RL for his job, he knew he could do good work. He actually just got done with a huge project that took three or 4 months. For that project, he gets a third of an island and a third of all sales I believe.

He doesn't only do custom scripting. In his free time, he makes his own gadgets to sell in his shop. I think all scripters should do this, even if you do only custom work. It gives customers a chance to see the quality of your work before hiring you on for a big project.

My final peice of advice, don't work for pennies and don't work for free. Scripters are always in demand here in SL and not just anyone can do the work. Make the custom scripting worth your time or don't do it at all.

Best of luck.

i own a gadget shop that is fairly popular, only making original products. This particular company of mine is releasing a dozen new products a month, using a compartmentalized production business model. I conceived my business based on working with a pool of builders, scripters, writers, designers, that work for me, using my product concepts and marketing. I myself am also a scripter, but am able to create much more revenue using this team approach.

I have two basic methods for compensating my employees. Depending on the product, and the scripter, I may provide them with a project design, code snippets, and let them create the scripts, buying the finished product outright, with a non-compete agreement. The second method is that I again provide them with a project design, code snippets, and when the product is created, finished and polished...I will set them up to receive a share of the compensation, as the product is sold.

I normally leave this up to the employee to choose which method they prefer...

As for the level of compensation, I NEVER pay by the hour, but by the project, allowing the employee to review the project plan, and quote me a price, if I am buying it outright. Paying by the hour, there is no way to accurately tell if the coder is padding his time or not, no way of telling that he is working on YOUR project the four hours he stands motionless in your sandbox that he is not working on three other projects for three other customers on your nickle...

In my opinion, there can be no expectation that a scripter in SL will make the same US dollar equivilant they would, coding software in the real world, for several very important reasons. Reliability, Accountability and Sustainability.

Reliability...I have several times, come up with a great concept for a product, things that are entirely new, or are a quantum leap forward in methodology for how a product works. I have vetted the product, made sure it is possible within the limitations of LSL, and hired a scripter to create the code....only to pay...and pay...and then have them up and disappear...with my money, my concept...and strangely enough...have then seen other, NEW residents names show up marketing products remarkably like my concept.

Accountability...In the real world, if I hire a software coder to create say a word processor, and after paying for it, discover that he infringed on another coders copyright, or took open source software and repackaged it...essentially defrauding me by providing product that he did not create, I have legal recourse to recover my investment. I can sue them. In game, if I hire a scripter to create a product, and he gives me not original work, but a repackaged freebie script, I cant recover my investment. They can disappear overnight, and this happens more often than you would imagine...just go out and take a look at some of the so called "script shops" out there...most are just selling repackaged open source stuff and things they found on forums and calling it their own work.

Lastly is sustainability...I pay a scripter to create a product...perhaps a temp-on-rez rezzer, that because of a change in the SL platform, no longer works a week after delivery...now this is not my fault, nor the fault of the scripter...since we are both at the mercy of Linden Labs when it comes to the lifespan of any script, there is no way that I would ever pay real world prices for code, when I have no guarantee that it will continue to work past the next platform "enhancement". So for this reason, I am happy to give a portion of the product sales as compensation, but seldom pay good money to buy the product outright.

Finally, the numbers I have seen here, for the profitability of a product are totally skewed...



There is not a product created in sl that will sell without a lot more work than slapping it in a vendor someplace and sitting back and raking in the L$..."whether they work or not"???...believe me...if you dont spend money and work to market the product, even a L$100 product, no one knows it is available..and you have no sales...



I dont see how you get from a L$100 linden product with GROSS sales of L$36,500 (127.62 US Dollars) to a "Using an annual rate of 5% that's equivalent to having L$730,000 ( over US$2500 ) in the bank earning interest"...who is paying you the 5% annual rate...and for how long?...how do you jump from L$36,500 to L$730,000???, that looks more like a 5% DAILY interest rate...since in the real world, if you bank money at 5% annual interest, it takes almost ten years to double your money...if you have a reliable, safe, regulated way of investing 127 US bucks and getting a return of over 2500 US bucks, I am sure all of us would love to hear it....and so would most of the money managers on wall street.

and that L$36,500 does not take into account the cost of tier for the shop to sell the product in...marketing costs on billboards or linden classifieds, the commission you pay to slexchange to sell on their site, the other costs of marketing...such as graphics, writing the docs, packaging the scripts in the product...(ie...a surfboard script is useless without a surfboard being built for it to go into...etc)...not to mention the real world taxes you will pay when you take the money out of the game...real profitablity on that L$36500, will be closer to around ten percent (12.76 US dollars a year)...so the return on your $50.00 US dollar investment for the code is about four years...or if you consider the 250-500 US dollar investment that the original poster asked about...between 20-40 YEARS to recover your investment in that script...for a script that may not work beyond the next platform revision...not a wise investment...

In response to your comments, Temporal - I think perhaps what you pay is somewhat related to what you can expect. I know personally, if I am paid pennys on the dollar for a job, with an "SL Budget" - I will treat it similar, and it gets rather reduced in priorities in my life. However, for contracts where the gain is significant, there is motivation to 1) Actually do the project in a timely manner, 2) have accountability since you would want to have repeat business.

Most of the complexities you express can be as easily enforced in SL as in RL. For most "significant" project I take, I end up having RW contact and sometimes RW contracts. With the amount of actual companies coming into SL and the evolution of SL's economy past that of just "in world", scriptors need to re-evaluate their worth. You hear stories of Indian and Chinese programmers working for a $1 an hour - should the residence of SL make similar? Why should a scriptor take $L400-600 an hour for someone to make that back in a day through the sale of the end product? I just don't get it. It seems more like exploitation than anything.

While SL's economy cannot support $250 US/hour at this point, I think conversely scriptors should not support the wages of a third world nation.

How in the world can you justify allowing someone to pay you good money for a product, and then going into competition with them...or even worse, releasing the code you created for them, as open source. If they paid you good money for the code, it belongs to them. You do NOT have the right to sell it to others, in the same form, and you most certainly do not have the right to give it away for free to the general public.

People contract with a scripter to create code for a product they wish to make a profit on themselves, but may not have the skills or the time to create. For you to sell them something, and then release the same code as open source is reprehensible, because you are stealing their CONCEPT....they came to you with an idea for a product...you didn't conceive of it yourself...but you are willing to give their concept to everyone for free?...do you then refund their money, since they no longer have sole rights to the code, and cant make a profit from it?

This would be like a writer ghost writing a book for a publisher....which the publisher has an expectation of being able to sell...and then the writer posting the entire contents of the book on the internet for anyone to read...so no one buys the book... Try doing that in real life...and you will be sued into poverty.

It is called "Intelectual Property"..and like all property, may be bought or sold...and once you have sold it, to the original customer, you no longer have the right to use it...or sell it...or give it away...it is simply NOT YOURS anymore...

This depends on the contract you have with the customer. See the difference in copyright law between normal authorship and work-for-hire projects.

Which brings up a follow-on topic. Many (I would speculate most) scripting projects done here are not done under any kind of well-formed contract, leaving some of these issues up in the air (or even in conflict, depending on the defaults and assumptions in different locations and countries).

A few rebuttals Temporal.

1. $400-600L is not "good money".

2. As long as he informs his customers that he retains ownership to the Intellectual Property after the scripts creation, then there is nothing wrong with what he is doing. He is basically just selling them one full permission copy of the script, nothing more.

3. If his clients wish to have ownership of the IP, then his rates should increase to reflect that and then yes, he should not reuse it again.

It all comes down to the communication and "contract" he has with that client.

It makes perfect sense...in the real world, a software package can sell for hundreds of dollars to millions of people...in sl...a gadget sells for pennies to thousands of people...

There may be 7.5 million total registered residents, but less than ten percent of them have payment info on their profiles...which is the only indicator that they are a member of the SL economy...so the potential customer pool for a product that may sell for under 1 US dollar in many cases, is less than a million people, and can only be used in world. When you consider that after all the actual costs of bringing a product to market in sl, and keeping it there, the profit is reduced to under a dime, so the the revenue opportunities are just too low to make it profitable to pay real world scripting prices....there are a few notable exceptions to this...the sexgen systems...the xcite systems..but how many of those are there out there? And did they pay a scripter to create them...or were they written on spec, hoping the would sell?

Certainly, if the customer pool was real world...you could sell a product for a buck and make a dime on each one and do very well...but not in game...

My reference to "good money" was not in reference to the amount..but the fact that they paid money at all...if you pay any amount for a product, based on YOUR idea, that is YOUR product...because just like the code that you are buying...for whatever amount...the CONCEPT has value too. The fact that the scripter puts your concept into a usable code form, does not give them the right to sell your concept themself, or to give your idea, your concept away for free. As for the client having ownership of the IP, they already do...they are the one that came to the scripter with the IDEA...to your way of thinking...if an author writes a book...and a printer sets it to type, and prints it....the printer owns the book?...or does the author own the book?...does the printer have the right to slap another cover on it and sell it as his own?...does the printer have the right to give it away for free?

Yes, the printer does have that right, if the contract (or lack of one) gives him that right. Under U.S. copyright law, for an independent contractor, the default ownership goes to the person who wrote the program, not to the person who hired the person. UNLESS the contract says otherwise, and says its a work for hire. (And there are other gray areas that a well-formed contract can help to clarify...)

Here's a starting point for research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

When I was first learning to script, I did a bunch of custom scripting and sold the IP with the script (though retained the right to re-use sections of the code for unrelated purposes, since "cleanroom" scripting would be pretty hard to claim). That was fine for learning to script, but at this point, the few hundred thousand L$s a scripter might earn from a moderately complex project is just chickenfeed when converted to RL currency. So now, I'll do a free script now and then for a friend or somebody with an interesting project, and will write some serious scripts for a cut of the product revenue, but there's no way I'd take L$s in exchange for exclusive IP rights anymore unless I, too, have a compensated interest in the product's success. I mean, in-world IP *is* RL IP, and--believe me--you can't afford my RL rates.

Hiring a scripter to create a script for you most certainly falls under the "Work for Hire" rule for copyright and ownership of the Intelectual Property....I quote from the WIKI:

"A work made for hire (sometimes abbreviated to work for hire) is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally-recognized author of that work. According to copyright law in most countries, if a work is "made for hire", the employer—not the employee—is considered the legal author. In some countries, this is known as corporate authorship. The employer may be a corporation or an individual.

The actual creator may or may not be publicly credited for the work, and this credit does not affect its legal status. For example, Microsoft hired many programmers to develop the Windows operating system, which is credited simply to Microsoft Corporation. By contrast, Adobe Systems lists many of the developers of Photoshop in its credits. In both cases, the software is the property of the employing company. Similarly, newspapers routinely credit news articles written by their staff, and publishers credit the writers and illustrators who produce comics featuring characters such as Batman or Spider-Man, but the publishers claim legal authorship of the work."

Which pretty much confirms exactly what I have been saying...if you HIRE A SCRIPTER TO MAKE A SCRIPT TO YOUR SPECIFICATIONS, THE SCRIPTER DOES NOT OWN IT...But I also see that the relationship between the buyer and the seller of the script is key to determining if the particular job is indeed "work for hire"...if the person doing the coding is an employee of the buyer, then it is considered work for hire, without having to state it specifically in the contract, if they are a casual employee, or a sub contractor, then it must be specifically stated...most scripting jobs, especially short term ones, are not mandated by formal contracts, but by agreements in IM's...but you can certainly be sure that any future jobs i give to contract scripters will be under the auspices of a work for hire contract.

Keep reading: You missed a spot:

"If a work is created by an independent contractor or freelancer (that is, someone who is not an employee), the work can be created as a work made for hire, or not. In order for it to be a work made for hire, all of the following conditions are required: i) the work must be specially ordered or commissioned; ii) the work must come within one of the nine categories of works listed in the definition above; and iii) there must be a written agreement in advance between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire."

So see how it depends on the contract? It is not a work-for-hire unless there is "a written agreement in advance between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire."

yeah, I read it...and went back and amended my original post to include it...

That's wise. In RL, "work for hire" is a pretty explicit arrangement, as witness the complexity of consulting contracts and employment agreements regarding ownership of IP developed by the contractor or employee. A scripter would not expect to be under any obligation to protect the IP of someone who hires them unless that were made explicit as part of the agreement. And, practically, it's important to identify in advance just what IP is being protected (which is almost surely not simple copyright to the scripts themselves, but I think that's already apparent from the discussion).

I don't understand Scripters and their mindsets on getting paid what they get paid in Real Life. Architects get paid tens of thousands of dollars for their designs, but when you ask one to design something for you in SL, they don't launch into how much they get paid in Real Life. I always laugh to myself when talking to a Scripter in SL. I ask how much a custom script will cost me, and invariably they say "In real life, I make 400 dollars an hour."

I always want to reply, "No shit! Well, in Real Life I get paid in coconuts."

By the way, I make animals. Other than God I don't know who else does that in Real Life. Maybe I should charge a little more for my animals, huh?

then I do have a question concering the concept of the original idea, which certainly has value, and could be construed to fall under the protection of intellectual property, as much as the code that it implements...the concept for the product most certainly did not come from the scripter, it came from the person that hired them. So, what right would the scripter have to use this original concept...the idea for the product the script implements, without the permission of the individual that thought it up...?

I work with scripters quite a little bit, and I can't stop them from selling a script I have commissioned to someone else, but my scripts are kind of subject specific. I do guard their names, and ask for full permissions on what I have bought.

I pay my scripters well, and they haven't seemed to want to back bite me.

Oh, indeed, the code is the least of it, almost always. And that's why it's so very important to make explicit what IP is being protected. In RL business, valuable concepts are just not revealed without a non-disclosure agreement in place--something else to consider, perhaps, before telling a prospective scripter what you have in mind, if the secrecy of the concept has business value.

There's a major difference between architects building in SL, and programmers scripting in SL.

All an architect has to do is take existing designs of theirs and make them into prims and he's done with maybe a few minor modifications when the buyer sees it as well as to account for SL issues. They don't have to cost material or plan out what's made out of what. In essence, they get to play at doing their RL job. Some can take it further than others, but really they're playing with blocks by comparison. It's the same concepts, but there's a lot less involved for a building in SL than in RL.

Code is code whether it's in a virtual world or not. The main difference is that usually people want code that is a lot more simplified than what a programmer would be asked to produce IRL, but certainly code in SL can be almost just as complicated and perhaps more depending on what you're doing.

Well, I'm not so sure about that; perhaps I don't know the right architects. But anyway, I'd just mention that, as with the design of most structures, the vast majority of scripts running in-world were produced for no compensation at all. And if one has a scripter friend and a really interesting project, those scripts will probably be free, too (well, unless tier is due ). But if one asks an architect to "design" the umpteen-zillionth shiny-floor club in SL, it's unlikely there's enough L$s in the SL economy to get her to do it.