Cost to Create Marvelous Designer Fashion for Sansar's "Democratic" Platform: $50/Month or $300/Year

Above: Marvelous Designer's license prices

Back when Linden Lab beta launched Sansar last year, CEO Ebbe Altberg said this:

“Sansar democratizes social VR. Until now, complexity and cost [have] limited who could create and publish in this medium, and Sansar dramatically changes that."

And while it's definitely more democratic than some social VR platforms, reader Pulsar recently pointed out that the cost of creating high end, physics-enabled virtual fashion in Sansar with the integrated Marvelous Designer software raises questions about the price of democracy: 

Marvelous Designer is also US $ 50/month and a tool not really meant for the masses. You may remember those slogans: "Sansar democratizes social VR", and comparisons to WordPress, which "opened online publishing to the masses with a simple creation tool". Now imagine if you are going to get a pro software for $50/month to publish something for WordPress (and the result has even issues). As for creation tools, an importer for MD is an extra, at most, that may target a few pro and semi-pro designers. I doubt it would attract the crowds or people looking for a simple and inexpensive tools for their creative hobby (that sometimes becomes a job, not everyone started as professionals).

To be more precise, you can get a Marvelous Designer account for $25/month if you pay for a one year option, and it's even cheaper if you get a lifetime account. In contrast, however, an actual "Premium" account for WordPress ("Best for Entrepreneurs & Freelancers") is $8 a month. Maybe Sansar is planning to work out a better pricing deal with MD, but the current price of entry seems pretty high -- most Second Life content creators only net a few hundred dollars a year at most from their virtual fashion sales, so what incentive would they have to invest time and money in a new, unproven platform with a much smaller userbase?

Speaking of Marvelous Designer, some readers pointed out, contrary to my implication, that it enables easier fashion fitting for avatars than Second Life.  As Ryan Shultz puts it:

As has been said before, you only have to press one button (Simulate Cloth) to get a Marvelous-Designer-created garment to fit properly. That's a great improvement over having to fiddle with alphas to get an SL garment to look good. Also, you can adjust the garment by tugging on it with your mouse, to adjust the sleeves, the collar, etc. to your taste and your style.

Fair enough -- though to be sure, even requiring that extra one step makes the UX less intuitive than most MMO users are used to. What's more, the simulate cloth feature seems to be significantly limited, at least now -- these important footnotes from Linden Lab's Sansar help portal:

• At this time, cloth simulation is limited to the appearance editor. This means that you can use cloth simulation to adjust the fit of your clothing, but the final result will be "baked" into your avatar and the cloth will not continue to simulate while visiting a scene.
• Marvelous Designer clothing cannot currently be resized. This means that while a large avatar can technically squeeze into a small shirt using cloth simulation, the shirt will merely stretch (but not re-size) accordingly.

Which gives credence to another point Pulsar made:

As for Sansar promoted as a fashion platform, the way clothes work is interesting, but in the current state it's a fashion for inexpressive mannequins that move around like robots. Not so exciting. Maybe in future it would be better, but now it sounds like they put the cart before the horse.

Get the intuitive fitting right and make the pricing options more affordable, and then maybe we can start using words like "democratize" and "WordPress" with less controversy.

Comments

[Susan]

Marvelous Designer is not the only way to create clothing for Second Life. There are already clothes for sale in Sansar that are not made with Marvelous Designer.

New World Notes comes across as very anti-Sansar. Why is that?

[What]

The perversion of the word 'democratize' is corporate-clown-speak for 'get-freely-screwed-dummy'.

-Dr What.

[vwfan]

Not everyone makes clothing for profit. Some just like to do it for free. And the cost of using MD just to do things for free is not ideal, which is why I use Blender. But, I can't use Blender because the Simulate Cloth option within Sansar is proprietary to MD imported clothing. If the price was more along the lines the cost of a Creative Cloud Photography plan ($10/month), I would more likely consider it. Otherwise, maybe LL should consider developing their own clothing simulation solution that any 3D program could work with. And then maybe, just maybe, they could implement their universal solution into SL as well.

@Susan - Correct, but you lack the "Simulate Cloth" option available because it was not made in MD. You can see from the following example that Medhue demonstrated.
https://youtu.be/UxLzA-yQ60k?t=1008

[Wagner J Au]

"very anti-Sansar."

I'm actually very pro-Sansar as it was presented by Linden Lab -- as a democratic platform like WordPress!

[Skygirl Kline]

I think in fairness what they meant is that normal everyday users could buy items from marketplace and create experiences without complicated learning or paying for software subscriptions.

[Kate Miranda]

I'm reserving judgement but doubt I'll be participating.

Without social and cultural experiences in Sansar, no one will be there long to buy furnishings or clothing. As one of the longtime live music event organizers in Second Life I'm not aware of any attempt to reach out to folks like me or events like I organize. I was passed up as a beta-tester as apparently soft content like music events wasn't "content creation" in their minds.

After bringing people inworld weekly since 2007 I'm getting more than a little tired of having the importance of events and their organizers ignored. If you chart the decline of rich content offerings of music, visual arts, live music, and concurrent log ins on SL, I suspect you'll find a parallel and while that doesn't prove that it is causative, I believe it is one factor for declining interest. Every week-end when I don't have something organized and I'm inworld, people log in ask me if anything is happening on our series.... and log off when the answer is "no". Multiply that by all the music venues that have closed over the years.

[Clara Seller]

Calling Wagner J Au "anti-Sansar" is pretty disingenuous. I think he's kind and generous about the subject of Sansar. I'm glad he isn't just a LL propagandist. Sansar has in-your-face problems that are way beyond a good coat of paint and a slick sales job. If you're going to make Sansar an "either you're with us or against us" argument, then the tribe has spoken.

Kate Miranda brings up some great points that highlights the big elephant in the Sansar room. There's a small group of tone deaf people invested in Sansar who seem only concerned with serving their own narcissism. This isn't "Field of Dreams". People aren't coming just because you built it.

[vwfan]

@Kate - There have been discussions made using music events or DJ'ing as an example case scenario. Things such as where someone is DJ'ing, but there's a max capacity of users. People were wondering how LL plans to deal with max capacities and perhaps spill the extra users into additionally created instances. Also, Torley Linden has become more visible on the team for the past several months. At first, he wasn't there, but he has been for a while now. Torley is dealing with audio related things and he's a super cool person to talk to and is passionate about it. He's fairly active in #sansar Discord channel and loves to hear audio related questions.