As the project was nearing completion, the question of "how to sell it" came up again.
This is a question I hate dealing with. I'm not some master capitalist, or super sales-woman.. I'm a builder, and I enjoy building. But when it comes down to brass tacks, I do kind of need to get something back for the work that I do. The land that my store is on, those mall rentals, etc.. they all cost money, so I've gotta make some money to keep things going. That's just the way things are.
When I pour a lot of work into a updating a product, or making a new version, it's always a struggle to figure out how I'm gonna get paid for that work. I can't just spend weeks working on stuff that I'm giving away for free, and I can't keep raising the price on things and making new buyers pay for everyone else's free updates either. Sadly, SL doesn't really lend itself to any sort of "discount for existing owners" either.. I wish it did, but even if I came up with such a system, there's 8 years of missing sales records that wouldn't be in the database.
And so, the question has come up in the past, of what does, or does not, constitute a 'new product' at ER, and what will, or won't be released as a free update? If I were independently wealthy, everything at ER would be free. I'm not.. so.. I can't give everything away, as nice as it would be. As such, I'm going to try and explain exactly what I think constitutes a new product, versus an update I'd normally give out to existing owners.
What constitutes a "Free Update?"
- Bug Fixes. Pretty clear here.. if I did something wrong with the coding, and the old product isn't working as expected, I'll definitely do my best to fix that for free. If Linden Lab changes something about the way SL works, and it breaks the item, I'll do what I can to fix it, or to patch the bevahior, or replace it with something that works better.
- Incremental features. Every once in a while, I'm playing with an old product, and I think "wow it would be cool if I added color change to this" (for example). Assuming the feature is optional, and doesn't change the look of the product so significantly that the original look/behaviour can't be made anymore, this will probably be a free update.
What constitutes a "New Product"?
- Difference. Obviously, if two products are wholly different, I'm going to consider that a new product. No one would expect me to give them a free chartreuse catsuit when they bought the green stocking set. Also, new colors, if the colors are being sold separately, are generally going to be a new item.
- Rebuilds. If I redesign a product so that it looks different from the original, I'll probably release that as a new product.
- Significant Changes. If I add one or two new features, I may consider that for an update. If the features of the product change remarkably, either by adding features, or taking them away, to the point that I feel customers may complain about the changes in the new version, I will probably release those as an entirely new product, retiring the old one.
- Significant Effort. This needs to be mentioned as well. If I spend weeks tearing a script apart and rebuilding it from the ground up, the chances of it being a free update start dropping, the more work I have to do.
Edge Cases
- More Colors. The question of what to do about updates that increase the number of colors available in a color changing item. If I were to add new latex colors to the catsuit line, I'd want to add those colors to the color-changing attachments as well. This is an issue I'm struggling with deciding how to solve, but so far it hasn't been a major issue... yet. The number of colors or new textures involved might be a deciding factor.
- Appliers. I'm still on the fence about how to deal with the applier situation, but
that's a topic for another time. What it's really going to come down to
is "how much work was it?".. sadly, appliers are a lot of work when
you're doing 80 or more of them, and the way third party products have
recently had a habit of disappearing from the grid (see WowMeh, Phat
Azz), well it's difficult to decide which brands are reputable enough to
spend a bunch of time investing in making appliers to support their products.
- Clothing Items, Eyes, and Skins. There's no way to put a script inside a 'system layer'.. so there's no way for your ER Catsuit to check if a new version is available. Similarly, I really don't have 8 years of sales records. Some vendor systems (Hippovend, Caspervend, the SL Marketplace) do keep sales records for longer than 30 days, but unless you purchased through these options, after 30 days, I probably don't have records of the sale. So if new versions of catsuits or whatever come out, they'll be "New Products".. though in future I'll probably include an "update checker" with new clothing sets.. how that will be implemented remains to be seen, depending in part on what I decide to do with appliers.
So how does this all relate to real ER products, and how I've updated/replaced them in the past? Well in the past, I've been pretty sloppy about it. I'm still only one person, and I'm human. I make mistakes. But there is a general pattern to what I've done... and it does mostly line up with the above.
The ER Isolation Pod. This product received several incremental updates, and at some point, a complete change in it's appearance. Heck, at some point, I changed the permissions too! Each of these incremental changes were given for free. At the point where the actual appearance of the product changed, I probably should have begun selling it as a new product, but I didn't. Thankfully, I didn't receive much pushback from people who didn't like the new design... I dodged a bullet there.
The ER Action Jetpack. Originally I offered two jetpacks, one with a "G.I. Joe" theme, and one with a "Cobra" theme. At some point, I decided to tear the whole product apart and rebuild it.. pulling the 'flight assist' script out of the pack itself and moving it into a separate hud. I combined both packs by adding a color and texture changer, so the pack could change to any of several different designs. As I recall, I released this as a "New Product" because it was so radically different from the originals, and added a lot of new features. I also changed the price.
The ER Ares Penis. The original product that this replaced was the ER "Deluxe" Penis, and it was anything but deluxe. Back in 2006 it was pretty awesome for the price, but in 2012, no way. Yet people still kept buying it. The Ares was a complete rebuild from the ground up.. new model, new textures, new scripts, new hud, etc. This was released as a new product with a different price.
The ER Fetish Doll Hood. The product that this replaced was the ER Isolation Hood. outwardly, the two products had a similar look, but the Fetish Doll Hood added the ability to color change, and added a lot of new controls for laces and straps visibility, added a 'mouth' hole, and a text label on the front of the hood. This, in combination with the multitude of included hood skins earned this product a "New Product" status.
Which brings us to the most recent case:
The ER Mesh Doll Cabinet. This product replaced the older ER Doll Display Case. Being reworked from the ground up as a mesh model instead of sculpties, the land impact was cut in half, and the whole posing system was switched to use nPose and 9 new animations had to be created to give the box some fresh doll poses. A new core script had to be written from the ground up, to enable RLV trapping features and optional door lock modes. The tinting color changer of the older box was replaced with a smaller selection of wood and fabric textures, but the ability to select custom colors was preserved through the inclusion of greyscale textures, at the cost of forcing people to manually apply their own tints using the SL editing tools.
I know that this decision won't please everyone. However, I hope that the amount of new features, and the quality of the new design, new textures, and so on, will make people want to own the new product.
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