The Cost of Skinning

I understand what you mean, but like you said, the work that is sold is REALLY outstanding quality, there is no one on this site that can do themes like universe metal, toon-xp, orion icons, and there are more of them.

Those suites are of such a good quality that it costs lots of time, and there are people here who made their job of it.

A tip of the fedora to you Styl skinner. Some things are just so good that a ransom has to be paid to get them. And it's a small payment for a job well done. (Crab smiley and a winky here).

Hey, I wasn't asking

Well there are vastly more skins and entire suites available here and elsewhere for free than there are for sale. And of significant quality too. Those that are for sale provide a bit of support for the skinners and the Stardock ones also help support the site here. It really doesn't look to me that there's a significant trend that will reduce the availability of work provided at no cost. And there's some fantastic stuff available for free. Frankly, almost all of my favorite skins are free. I do, however, occasionally buy some to help support the site and skinners. But that's purely one's choice. Not because viable free alternatives aren't available.







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Just take a look at Mike's 'Avenger' and Hippy's 'Prometheus'. That could easily have been purchasing suites (with some more skins) and they would have been sold like hell. But they are giving them away for free. And Pixtudio is still doing many outstanding free skins also. I really don't see the point.

If the people producing those skins only produced skins for pay I would agree with you. But they don't. They continually produce extremely high quality skins for free as well. Let's imagine the following scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Those skinners produce skins for free only. They find that they can't afford the luxury of having a computer/net connection. They stop skinning or cut back drastically.

Result: Everyone loses.

Scenario 2:

Those skinners get a small amount of money ($6 - 10) from those who like their skins enough to be willing to pay for them. They pay for their net connection, software upgrades (software upgrades), hardware with this and as a result don't have to keep trying to work extra hours to make ends meet.

Result: They are still producing quality skins which may be higher quality than before as they have been able to skin for longer than previously, can afford the best tools for the job, have a PC capable of rendering complex images in half the time (freeing up the PC for other use quicker).

Since I started skinning I have bought the following mainly for skinning (rough prices). NOTE: I had no interest in computer graphics before coming across Windowblinds:

1 15 inch TFT monitor with DVI/VGA inputs: £400
Windows 2000 : £40 (student discounts are good!) Bought this mainly so I could use WindowFX.
Windows XP: £120
PSP 6 : £80
PSP 7 upgrade: £40
Photoshop: £300
1GB DDR - £500 - Had 512 SDRAM which moved to the other PC
Coreldraw 11: £300
Extra PC: £200 (used bits and pieces I salvaged from an old PC)

Total: £1980 without all the skinning apps and upgrades and premium skins added on. Yes a lot of those are useful for other things so I'll drop the total by a quarter.

TOTAL = £1485

I am in the fortunate position of being able to do a job that I enjoy which pays enough for me to keep doing my hobby (skinning, a bit of programming and beta testing desktop customisation stuff).

Do I buy every premium skin? No. I buy the ones I like and will use and skip the ones that I don't.

I do understand what you're saying Stephen, but I also think it's a somewhat weak argument. Just because Object Desktop is an all-in-one purchase, doesn't mean that the skins and themes for the contained applications should also be included.

The majority of these skins are created by non-Stardock people who give up their free time to give something for free to the general public out of the kindness of their hearts.

Those skinners who then release the occassional paid-for skin collection are simply hoping to get something back from that public, even if it means selling a particular skin for the low price of $10 (which incidentally is the average price of a single computer games magazine in this country, which is something you'd get far less use out of).

As I said in another thread, it's not so much about paying a small amount for a particular theme, but more about paying a small amount to support the entire workload that goes into creating all of that author's skins, which are generally free to download. The best comparison I could make is when you make a donation in a charity box and they give you a pretty little sticker or badge in return. You're not buying the sticker, but rather supporting the work that charity does as a whole. The skin you're paying for is almost like a little freebie as an incentive for donating some money to the skinner.

I've been considering putting a PayPal 'donate' button on my site for a while now, in the hopes of getting a little money back for the skinning work I've done in the past. However, I think I'm far less likely to get any money that way than I would be to release a premium suite to sell.

I don't see the premium suites going away any time soon, but rather increasing in number. Just so long as the balance is struck between free and paid-for skins, I think things will continue to work just fine. It wouldn't matter how many hundreds of high-quality skins a particular skinner made available for free though, as they'd still get all the unpleasant comments about how that one premium skin they released should be free too.

Skins are still free. Like the posters said above there are still good ones available. You even bought some commercial ones yourself. I think we can see more commercial skins in the future. That is not bad at all. It will be part of the professionalization of a craft that started as a hobby. We also see skinners doing jobs for large companies that use skins to promote their products. That's not bad either. Skinning is finally getting recognized.

BTW I don't recall Stardock ever mentioning on it's advertising that some skins etc may incur further expenditure to acquire.

It is much like a CD player (the skinning software) and the CD itself (the skin). A handfull of skins are not for free. 99.9% of the skins are for free. I would consider your argument if most good skins require payment, but even then Stardock will just be making software to apply skins. Maybe we have an argument if most skins were sold by Stardock. In that case maybe the skinning software should be free. I don't see Stardock moving into that bussiness now or anytime in the near future.

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While I can see a side of Stephen's argument, the bit that annoys me is the way you put it across as you bought OD products, and now other people are required to make the skins.
I bought a car, I don't expect other people to drive me around in it.

On the premium skin matter, Mike and I at Skinplant made 17 or so skins for our first premium suite.
If we hadn't been making it to sell, we would have probably made 5 or 6 skins, and spent about a 3rd the time on it.(I think we spent about just over 2 months in total on Solara)
We sold it for 9.25
BMT Micro get 1.25 from that, and we split the rest 4 each.
Now convert that to UK where I am, that was about £1.70 per sale.
Skinplant is my only source of income right now as I'm unemployed, so when my cheque comes in every month, it goes right in the bank to bank, basically to keep me living.
Now, there's no way I'm gonna give up my only source of income, so people can get a freebie for a program that makes no guarantees of that. They should appreciate the free skins, and not take them for granted.

Hippy.....rather ....you bought the car, but to make use of it you still really have to buy petrol for it....a better analogy...

I buy them all (OD, premium suites, pixtudio suites, icons, etc...) and use none of them. I do it so that this site can continue to function (bandwidth-wise) and to support the extremely talented skinners represented here and elsewhere. In fact, if Paypal wasn't the only donation mechanism used by some of the skinners (I hate paypal, they've ripped me off more than once) - specifically Nicholas (sysmetrix) - use, I would donate to them as well.

I consider it an investment in the future of skinning.

Don't see the problem really. There's plenty of fish in the sea.

And if people think that just because they bought app X they can have all the skins for free, they don't quite understand how thinks work.

I'm all for authors being able to sell their skins, icons, etc.

One problem is that some of the pay suites are lower quality than the free stuff.

A second problem is that I feel the price point is too high. I think that if the price point was lower, you would make up in volume what you lose in dollers per individual sale. The people who would buy ths suites to support the community and the authors will buy anyway, and a micro-price such as $1 for a skin would probably attract a huge number of casual users who would never pay $10 for a skin. There's no need to just take my word for this, run an experiment for one month. Let the numbers decide the future of the store. This is what real world stores do, they adjust prices experimentally until they find the price point in which they are getting the most profit (or in this case, the most income).

As for the suite that was recently released. You could probably get more sales if you offered both the full 4 skin pack, and sold each individual skin at a lower price.

Joshua, one of the realities of internet commerce is certain fixed charges. If an artist or a site uses a "high quality store" to handle purchases there are certain fixed transaction fees. One can try to lower the charges using other stores, but then you run the risk of people complaining of overcharges. You can't accept a $1 payment if you get charged $.99 per transaction.

Indeed, as Larry said.

But also, I am not convinced a whole lot more people would buy a skin for 1$. A lot of  people are opposed to paying for skins, period. No matter the price.

You used to be able to buy music online for 1$ per song. But it didn't work out much, although it was really cheap. So most places now have the subsciption method (so much per month), and it turns out to work better, even though it's more expensive.

Apple seems to be doing quite well with the itunes store selling music for 99 cents per song. They reportedly sold 275,000 songs within the first 18 hours of operation, which equates to one song every four seconds. It's been reported that they are making 36 cents per song. So....you can be successful selling a $1 product, but you would have to do monster volume which is unlikely with skins.

Apple seems to be doing quite well with the itunes store selling music for 99 cents per song

Yeah, because there's no KaZaa for mac lol.

davad: Apple is big enough to have their own online payment store, without having to go through a third party charging a per transaction fee.

sttroopers: actually, there is Limewire for Mac. But indeed, the Mac world seems to be different.  A lot of Mac users have this Mac pride, a sort of adoration for everything that has the name Apple. I'm sure the fact that the store has the Apple name makes a bit of a difference as to why their store work while others have failed doing the same thing.

The reason the music thing didn't work is because there was a very limited selection, huge restrictions on what you could do with it, and you couldn't transfer the songs to your mp3 player etc.

Apple has taken a very different direction and seems to be quite successful. It's simply a matter of people wanting to be able to use what they purchase, which they couldn't do with the older music stores.

Perhaps, but Mac users are indeed ready to fork out money for the Apple name. I don't think I know a single Mac user that uses a different MP3 player than iPod.
Heck, I thik that if Apple made ovens, refrigerators and furniture, everything in their house would have the Apple brand.

I don't see the problem.......... buy if you want, don't if you don't want. If you don't have the 10 bucks (or less) to spare, I can sympathized with you, often I don't have any spare cash, but it's the same in stores, they have all sorts of things, I would love to have.............. I can't afford them, so I don't get them. I don't ask the saleperson to give it to me for free. I don't think the argument  "I bought this computer from you, so all the software you have available, should be free" would get anything other than a blank stare. As for this suggestion that maybe the price should be lowered to $1 a skin....... pu-leeze........ my skins might only be worth a dollar (collectively), but Pixstudio, SkinPlant, Mormegil, these guys are way beyond that. And, as many have already pointed out, most of their stuff is free.

Music comparing to skins is like comparing apples and oranges.

Besides CD's usually have about 15 songs on it for 16.99; or somwhere in those where abouts... so 99 cents a song kinda makes sense.

There is also mass appeal for music, while skins are sort of in another category right now. Anybody can play music, but not everybody can use the skins (some have to purchase a program to use it)

I could see a dollar a skin but I'll bet you that there will be 8 skins in the pack sold for 8 dollars

at any rate, I wouldn't worry about payfor-skins ruining the skin community just yet. I do think though we should be careful and mindful of the ethics and basis of the community.

Koasati, I believe I also suggested that WC experiment with different prices until they find the one that brings in the most money.

My $1 was an example. Another example, I'd pay (at most) $1 for that cursor pack that just came out, but I'd spend $5 for PixOS.

You just need to experiment until you find the best price. The goal here is to bring in the most money, not to squeeze more money out of fewer buyers for a resultant smaller profit.

My 2 cents on the subject....

Selling skins is a very new thing, people for the last...oh 4 or 5 years have been loving all the FREE skins, now that skinning is becoming more popular, ofcourse the natural direction for it to take is to sell them. Money makes the world go 'round. Now you got these super-talented artists, like Pixtudio and Mormegil, and Skinplant that make the best skins around...bar none. They see it as a viable source of income. Look at it through their eyes, if you were the best basketball player, wouldn't you want to try for the NBA and make lots of money? Yes, you would. So the best skinners want to sell their skins for money! How can people complain? If you were as good as they were, you too would sell your skins. If things keep going the way they are, skinning will become a very mainstream thing. Five years from now, I wouldn't be suprised to see a site like DAPrints.com selling skins in the same fashion. Hell, even three years from now that could be very possible. It's just natural for people to bitch about it, they are so used to getting skins for free, they take it for granted. In my opinion, skins for sale is here to stay and I think it's a good thing.