Pricing: Food for thought!

[Ivy Norsk]

I thought the article was a good one. I see 2 main issues.

The first is supply and demand as Jennifer has already gone through. Although, here we need to tackle 2 types of cats separately: regular cats, which are of unlimited supply and Limited Edition Collection cats. The supply there is by definition limited, though while some cats are certainly rare, even the rarest do seem to pop up on the market every now and then. Right now many of the LE cats are selling around $1500. This price ought to rise over time and the cats from the very beginning do seem to be priced higher, but not as high as one might suppose given their limited availability. So I think they run into the "What the Market Will Bear" issue. Most Second Life hobbyists don't want to spend the lindens over a certain level for even a very rare cat. (Especially for an item made of pixels in a Virtual World that may not stick around.)

The other thing I see though as I walk around marketplaces is that while the markets are stuffed, they're often stuffed with mediocre cats. I generally (but not always) end up buying from a few breeders whose names I have known for a long time. That's not favoritism or by accident. The truth is that while many people are charmed by the darling cats, relatively few people breed them by design. If you were to put KittyCatS participants on a bell curve of intent, the vast majority are happy to bop cats together who have their favorite furs or eyes and hope for the best and stick the kittens out for sale. The breeders who really know how to line up a breed by design are waaaay out on one end of the bell curve. And their cats are better. Truth. Coordinated showns and hiddens, and my goodness it takes a lot of kibble and patience to get those results. And the market simply doesn't support that. Because people who do shop don't seem to be particularly picky either. They just don't care. Or they just don't buy that many cats. And all the cats ARE cute. You don't need to buy a 9T super cat to have fun with it.

Also, breeding is so full of hits and misses. When I consider the cats out at my own shop, a lot of them missed. They are hiding a great whisker but showing a stupid mysterious whisker, or something like that. I could menagerie all my misses, and who knows, maybe some day I will.

How do we move forward? I don't really know. The Confettis were meant to suck up the extra cats, but as a system/game the reward rate is too low, and people who don't care all that much about the fine points of breeding are scared of them. They just steer clear. And I can't blame them.

Pushing better breeding expectations might help. Featuring really well-designed cats (not just most recessive) might help. What do I mean by "featuring"? I don't exactly know. Auctions feature such cats. But auction attendance isn't that great either and I, myself haven't done auctions in a while. Something to brainstorm...