And your ideas for clever "out of the box" solutions for us tickling video producers are?.... Options are quite limited, especially for the smaller players in this business. Most of us don't even have the resources to create pay sites, let alone revolutionize the market.
I've been a musician and have worked with or alongside environs involving media production all of my life so let's just say I do understand and sympathise, and I know it's difficult for the little guy to implement high cost or manpower intensive solutions.
However, there
are things you and other guys on here could potentially do to help you earn more for your work - such as pooling resources and forming a joint venture website to share the burden of overheads and operational costs. I'm certain that removing the cut that the clips4sale middleman system takes and affording each individual producer much more control with respect to how their work is delivered to the customer would both be very welcome. Depending on how much free time you have, learning and taking on some aspect of the web development side of your own site could save you a lot of money in the long run with this too.
Truth be told, I think clips4sale is both the enabler and the main problem for a lot of producers. It effectively allows people to become producers and create a storefront overnight, with very little more than a camera and a ModelMayhem account required, which is great in some respects ...but it's inherently limiting and a lot of innovative possibilities and business models only open up when you have full control over your work. Mobile app developers are often in a similar boat to the producers on here, where they have invested a deal of personal time and money and their work can be ripped off incredibly easily - so many sell their apps for a few dollars each knowing that impulse buying is exponentially more likely this way. It often means comparably higher profits for them even though the individual unit price is markedly lower - 1000x$3 is always going to be more than 10x$30 (no condescension intended
😀). The "freemium" business model is also an option for those with full control over their work, whereby part of the software/website functionality can be accessed for free (say 10% of each clip, only the images section, subscribe to remove ads etc.) and then the rest of the content can be accessed for consumers willing to pay a given fee. I'm sure these ideas can be adapted for producers here and I'm equally sure that there are other potential solutions that would work well for you guys that you can come up with
🙂
Point taken that World of Goo wasn't exactly hurt in the long run, but to be honest, it's just the "you're not going to starve to death so you don't need that extra revenue anyway" argument that was put forth on page two. It's also a matter of fact that regardless of how encrypted the game was or wasn't, given the choice between free shit and paying for shit, people prefer free shit.
Well, lost revenue and units pirated are two very different things... but I agree that people who pirate stuff they would have otherwise bought, under the guise that it isn't hurting anybody's wallet, are kidding themselves. However, like you say, if somebody has the choice of paying or not paying... people will often take the free option and there is
zero point protesting at or trying to change that aspect of human nature. I wasn't talking about SecuROM or any kind of file based encryption when I was referring to World Of Goo by the way, it didn't even require a product key or online registration ...it was simply nothing more than a tiny install and run exe file
😛
That, and I dunno if you've ever explored the various options available for encrypting your game, but I have ... I can see why a developer might opt to not encrypt their game; it limits/inconveniences the market willing to pay for it, while the pirates have no such problems. After all, any encryption method used on a particular title is usually cracked by the second day of release.
Yup, I'm well versed in the plethora of awful DRM encryption methods that can be used - none of them work at doing anything useful in terms of halting piracy and I won't have most of them anywhere near my rig.
Draconian DRM usage does nothing but encourage piracy in my eyes. Ingenious and non-intrusive methods such as Steam, Netflix, iPlayer and some ad-based music streaming services have been incredibly successful - it's all in the implementation and another example of the internet rewarding elegant solutions to problems
🙂
Regardless, very few of these methods would work for video distribution... which leaves incentivizing the customer to pay in other ways - except that the customer base for tickling videos has pretty proven to be a bunch of greedy, petty fucknuts who cry and whine no matter what you give them for their buck... or for free, for that matter.
Well there are certainly options that I believe can help producers here, but I do think there is an element where both producers and consumers are jaded towards each other - sometimes for good reason, other times not.
With respect to the vidclips forum, I think some of the occasional ungrateful/bad attitude and harshness stems from a certain element of "
fuck you for commercialising my fetish", which is something that has cropped up in the past five or so years due of the influx of multi-fetish/porn producers that likely do not have a tickle fetish, nor understand it particularly well and can sometimes appear to be more interested in cynically popping out dollar per minute clips4sale vids with the latest turnstyle "fetish models" and bumping their clips up in the vidclip section with inane replies to months old posts than actually producing anything more than mediocre churn. In short, people tend to be more gracious towards into the guys they perceive as giving a shit about the community here. Of course, there's a vocal minority of both fawns and fools in the vidclip section, as well as the occasional troll - but to put it into perspective, there's over 1200 unique users online right now - the vast majority of which I have never seen conversing in the vidclip section and all of which are potential customers. Producers that get irate about criticism, warranted or otherwise, from that section of the site have to remember that and hopefully with a little hard work, sales will speak for themselves
🙂
