Textures sold as no transfer?

I had an interesting meeting last night with a builder. She had purchased some absolutely beautuful texture packs and pre-fab buildings from someone else, intending to use them in a sim building project that she was doing for a client. But the textures in the texture packs were no-transfer, which makes it impossible to hand over anything made with them to the client!

Apparently, the person who sells these no-transfer textures primarily makes pre-fab tropical huts, and sells these textures so end-users can make matching bits and pieces for their personal use. The textures themselves were well-made, nice and sharp. They were boxed in a very professional manner, and were very clearly marked on the box as being +Copy / +Mod / NO transfer.

But there were no warnings to buyers that anything made with them would also not be transferrable.

The lady who bought the textures hadn't realized that using these textures would make her build impossible to transfer. She contacted the seller, and tried to either get a set that was transferrable, or to get a refund. The seller of the textures refused both requests. Not very customer-oriented, apparently.

So, the builder bought my tropical texture set, and became my customer. She wanted a higher resolution than what my set is at, and I am working with her on that. Hopefully, she'll be very happy with the results.

She also asked if I could capture the other lady's texture if she would place it on a prim, in order to make her a transferrable copy. I told her that while this was possible, I refused to do it. I explained patiently to her that I will not rip off some other texture artist's work, even if that artist has crippled the texture as this one has. I offered instead to create a new, original texture that will meet her needs, and am working on that request now.

I am amazed that the other texture seller refused to help her customer. And I wanted to warn people to be careful about buying no-transfer textures like that. Such texture packs have their place, as a means of maintaining or customizing a custom build. But buyers should be clearly warned of the limitations to using them!

Since textures were originally sold with copy permission, return/refund would be rather impossible to do unless you can trust the other person they indeed delete items from their inventory (they can't hand them back and even if they could, they can still have a copy) And aparently the seller already has made decision to not sell their textures with transfer permission in order to protect their main pre-fab business, there wasn't much they'd do about it, either...

Joannah, all textures are normally sold with full perms. (+copy, +mod, + transfer). If you don't, the textures are useless to anyone other than the person who bought them, and then only for their own personal use.

If it had been my customer, I would have offered to sell them a transferrable set at a higher price, and would have credited them with the difference from the previous sale. Or, since I knew the customer COULD NOT USE the textures in the non-transferrable form, I would have just given the refund, in full. Who cares if they let it sit in their inventory? (Then again, I can see very few reasons why I would even consider selling non-transferrable textures in the first place.)

A happy customer is worth far more to me than a few individual texture sales. Provide good customer service, and that customer will be back for more, and will bring their friends shopping too. Give poor customer service, and they don't come back, and they tell their friends not to buy from you. To me, the choice is a no-brainer. But then, I have a strong orientation to customer service, and I'm in this for the long haul, and not just to make a quick buck.

If the other texture seller wants to protect their textures that tightly, it's their choice. But I would never treat my customrs that way. That's my choice.

I understand, but as you said in the OP -- in this particular case the textures were intended exactly for that, personal use, and clearly marked as such.

So if someone buys such textures and then comes to you saying they were unaware that lack of permissions would have such effect, you can just believe them or not. And seeing the number of very popular shops that choose to run strict "no transfer = no refund" policy... would say the faith in honesty of average customer isn't very widespread ^^;

And your own example doesn't help to support it either. since if am reading it right, your customer basically asked you to rip another creator off when they couldn't get it their way... it doesn't tell positive things about their integrity, does it...


That's very nice of you, but it looks you are simply in different business branch than the other person -- you sell _textures_ so people can build houses and whatnot, and then sell them to others. The other person is selling _ready-made houses_ and the textures are provided as additional service to their customers, who buy these houses.

In other words, you don't undercut your business if you sell the building components, so you have no incentive to not do that. On the other hand, the other person does -- if their textures are strong selling point of their houses, then by allowing the competition use them freely, they're shooting themselves in the foot.

Apples, and oranges ^^

Actually, I do both building and texture sales. I create whole sims, complete with custom-built homes, and using textures that I produce especially for the projects.

The textures in question were marked "No transfer", not "Personal use only". The buyer had no intention of transfering or selling the raw textures. But they were new enough to building that they didn't understand that they couldn't use those textures on builds that they intended to transfer.

Yes, it was wrong for the builder to ask me to rip the texture. But she was getting desperate, with a deadline to complete her build, and was facing either finding some way to make the textured add-on items resellable, or having to retexture the entire build, including all the prefabricated parts. Again, she was fairly new to building, and when I explained why I wouldn't do as she asked, she understood.