Cost and prices

I want to know what value other people in Second Life place on their time, effort, and creativity. I recently made an avatar for another person and had no earthly (or vituallly no) idea as how to price it. Before I could ever guess a price my parton said she would pay me 500LD which I thought was generous. How much is an hour worth to you. I spent one hour+/- and made a good conscious effort with a fair heap of creativity thrown in to boot. The avatar came boxed with eyes, skin, body shape, hair, makeup,jacket, shirt, pants and boots.

-tooth

One way you could figure out the value of a model or script is to put a few of them up for Auction on Your2ndLife.com. After some auctions are run, we'll all be able to see what people are willing to pay for various things.

I'm really curious about what will go for high amounts, and what will go for low amounts. For example, right now I have a high roller ticket on auction, and nobody is bidding. That really surprised me.

But you could have an avatar that you think no one would pay more than $100 for, and it turns out people really like it and get in a bidding war, and you end up getting thousands of dollars.

I wonder how much Val's helicopter would go for....


Kerstin

heh, I've just been making up prices - and I'm always suprised when people will pay them. One thing I find myself doing is pricing things based on wheter I really want others to be able to afford them. For instance, I just put a security system in my store for sale, but at $2000, because while its a fiarly simple object, I like the fact that only people who can pay $2k can forcibly eject me from thier land.

BBC

I honestly don't know what to charge people, either. I usually just judge by how complex a texture will be and how long it'll take me. One thing that gets to me is how people complain that they can't do anything in the game because they don't know how to model or script or do textures, but they're also not willing to pay to have someone else do it for them.
Maybe I should put up an auction for a custom outfit and see what it goes for.

It sure couldn't hurt, and right now the auctions are still free. You can also set a reserve price if you want, which means no one can bid below that, so you're guaranteed to at least get a minimum amount.

Kerstin

another thing to think of while you are pricing is "will you be able to make more money off of it"...if i make a gun that costs me 300 $SL to make and someone wants exclusive rights to that gun (meaning i can't sell it again)...the price goes up drastically...if i can make more money off of it by putting it in a shop then the price stays around 400 $SL or so

but I also use BBC's thought process too...my wings are on sale for around 900...Didn't want everyone flying around with them so i made the price a little steeper...if i decide to sell my Brak Avatar he's gonna be up around 2k, Just because I don't want too many of him around

The way I pondered lastnight on how to price my new texture and gun pic displays is this.

Textures cost $10 to upload, and theoreticly and quite possably will happen, people will copy the textures after in circulation for a bit. So I price them each high enough to pay for the upload I did to get em here. Now with textures I added a little so that my time and costs involved may over time and hopefully future sales will recoup. I get the standard idea that if someone tries to recoup everything in one sale by pricing items accordingly resulting in one very high priced item, it wont sell at all and become a total loss. I set it so that the thought of overtime it will be recouped.

Now with gun pics, I set it a bit higher then textures, because these also can be copied but good money can be made from taking a pic and designing a gun from it and selling the gun.

Most all of everything else I keep low like these for the same reasons unless I dont want to see certain items plastered all over.

Well let's see. Costs are pretty hard to figure out. I'm pretty sure what people have said already are good guidelines.

With no underlying 'game' to second life (you're not out collecting commodities from nature, killing mosters for loot, or crafting from in game commodites) we're pretty much left with a sort of service industry feel to to things, if not white collar. Plus, there is no charge for energy... any script can make an object move at 50m/s without it costing more than going walking speed, any sensor can work as good as any other. That about sums it up... no energy or commodity costs.... paying mainly only for people's skills.

Let's see what happens

and there are those of us who don't fiddle with prices, and work on a strictly barter system