I am procrastinating, and that always gets me thinking about all sorts of things. Today’s random thoughts (actually, they’re not so much random as meandering little sidetracks sparked by a couple of things) concern some wishful thinking about skin selling approaches in SL and a little pet peeve about something resulting from the many recent virtual copyright cases (and no, its not no-mod hair this time, though I still dislike that).

The skins business first, then. I am not much of a makeup girl. I always by a makeup-free version (or at least eye-makeup free version) as my first skin of a new line, and then I may add a few more makeups later on if they really appeal to me. However, since makeups aren’t such a big deal for me, I find it really hard to spend my lindens on buying the same face and body again just to get a different makeup unless the price is quite low by skin standards. If there’s a new face available that I like and a new makeup that I also like but for an old face, I will always end up buying the new face.

So, that got me thinking. The only place I know that sort of gets around this is Pixel Deep. You buy the skin for a medium-high price (actually, considering that the skin includes several makeups, several eyebrow options and several pubic hair options, its a very low per item price), and then you buy add-on makeups in the form of head textures for a much lower price. From a customer point of view, I love this solution. However, I can understand if most skin makers don’t want to give out even just the head texture.

But could not the same solution be achieved in a different way? I think it could, though it would involve a scripted system and the need for some sort of customer record. The idea that popped into my head was a system where you buy the first skin from a specific line at a comparatively high price. It could either be setup so you buy any makeup from the line as your first skin, or it could be a specific base skin (perhaps a makeup-free skin). The first option would probably appeal to the most customers, but may possibly be a little harder to setup (but I am no scripter). With the first purchase, the customer would get some sort of scripted token (and they’d be placed in some sort of customer database, in the event of inventory loss), which they would then wear as they return to the store to buy more makeups and any purchase made with the token worn would sell them a whole skin at a markedly reduced cost compared to the initial purchase. They would get the whole skin, so no need for textures to be given out, but they would basically only pay for the makeup. The same could, of course, apply to facial hair options for male skins. Or female, if there’s any call for that. ;P

Whether there’s actually any interest from skin makers in doing something like this, I don’t know. But I do know that if I woke up tomorrow with the ability to make skins, I would definitely try this approach myself.

Now, for that pet peeve. I have noticed that more and more creators today point out that everything in a new release is hand-drawn and made entirely by themselves. Given the rather virulent backlash against photosourcing anything at all, I understand why they do it, but I think its sad that its necessary. Why should creators have to stress this, almost as if they’re concerned that otherwise people will assume they didn’t make their items themselves? Moreover, I don’t personally care if something is photosourced (or, in the case of jewellery, had the prims placed using that linking script) as long as a) the photosourcing is legal and b) the result is good-looking.

I can very well understand someone wanting to point out a hand-drawn texture as a point of pride, and I don’t have an issue with that at all, but I am not sure that is the reason that so many creators have started pointing this out of late. I may be wrong about that assumption, though. :)