sybercode

Except it's not a "tiny" cost and while I didn't say it was nasty, I did state how LL did things was BS. Because if you read the message in entirety you will notice that I mentioned other costs involved not just fees. Fees are a small part of it. And I don't believe they are "entitled" to 5%. So that one line you quoted is a small part of much bigger picture. So my point in no way sympathizes with LL in receiving the percentages in fees they do, while when I read your statement, it appears you do.

Look here's the thing, Creators provide all the content. In other games, the game industry would pay the user for the designs not charge them a fee. SL is getting a lot already, as they never have to pay a dime for content to include programming and mesh design, that those running gaming companies would have to pay salaries or wages to have developed. In fact, their company isn't even providing a decent design program to create mesh, the creator has to use an outside source like blender or Maya or 3ds max etc. They just allow and charge for it to be imported into the engine. And on top of that unlike other companies, they give themselves rights to exploit all the user's content any way they want, that they never were part of developing aside from providing the engine to import most items today because most items are mesh. They get away with all of this because the users will pay for the creator's product and that money is attractive enough that people tolerate the fees. But really if all the content providers left SL would have nothing new because LL doesn't do any development of content. So it's a nice little thing SL has going where they don't have to pay developers to create content, they don't have to provide means to create the content (i.e. mesh, textures etc.), and they take a cut of whatever people put in their engine through the cost of importing it, the fees for selling it to include content of stores where people pay for digital real estate as well a the actual product. Not only do they get "free" content that they never paid for, they get additional money for anything pertaining to the content. So yeah the 5% and any percent is annoying. no, I'm not grateful. It's a means to an end and it's put up with it because it's a write off as a business cost but really it's utter BS. Also in app development for android or apple you get charged around 40% to "distribute" the app, which is completely different from SL in which you are getting charged to "add" content to there engine, which would be basically just an empty environment otherwise. And they use that content to attract new users to get an account, in some cases subscription based.