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Why Are Avatar Artists So Expensive? |
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Trick question: they're not. A couple of times I've seen people asking for professional-quality work but want to complain about prices.
From This Post:
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Quote: I was wondering why, no offense to any artists, all of the really good people make you pay through the nose for decent avatar art. It allways struck me as a little obscene and vaugly well dissapointing. I understand that alot of artists get swamped by people beggin for free avi art but, do you have to make the rest of us pay for it.
If you meant mediocre artists in the first place perhaps you should amend your first post where it says, "all of the really good people make you pay through the nose".
Anyway. Let me give you an idea of how just Gaia gold (and eventally cash) translates to IRL at professional rates, seeing as some of us here could easily charge such. Though this is a graphic design example, it should suffice.
Quote:
45 Gaia gold = 1 unit of Gaia cash = $0.01 USD.
So, in this case:
$1.00 USD = 4,500 Gaia gold.
I pulled out my Graphic Artists Guild Handbook (12th edition, the current one, I believe) which is industry-standard pricing for all art fields, looked under "digital art" (graphic design section) and priced a single comp, picking the low-end of the pricing range. This is $7,750 USD per piece, if you are a company or individual that makes less than one million dollars in revenue a year, allowing for global distribution rights (which is essentially what happens if the work is intended to be posted online). Let's say it takes anywhere from eight to twenty hours (being extremely liberal with this, here) to produce this comp. So,
20 hours (of work on the low-end of the pricing spectrum) = $7,750.
1 hour of work at the low-end of the professional level = $387.50
So,
1 hour of work on a professional level = 1,743,750 Gaia gold.
Okay, but you can also find places that charge around $65 - $100 an hour. So,
1 hour of work = 292,500 - 450,000 Gaia gold per hour based on these calculations.
So, the point? Yeah, it's likely nobody's going to pay under 2 million Gaia gold per hour of work for a drawing, but when someone's drawing for what seems to be a ton of Gaia gold it's still like working for peanuts. If someone's willing to pay you as much as you ask in gold, why would you NOT take it?
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If you pay Gaia gold for good art, you're getting a damned good deal.
 Pink · Sun Mar 22, 2009 @ 08:17am · 0 Comments |
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