Check out this dev blog for more information on the latest contest - designing propaganda posters for your alliances and corporations! With all manner of prizes to be won, including PLEX and EVE swag, this is one you don’t want to miss out on!
So basically you’re licensing my poster design and compensating me with $180 of in-game credits that can be used for SKINs and merchandise (not including shipping, which means the merchandise portion is virtually worthless if not redeemed in-person). And if you sell hundreds of posters @$50 a pop I get, well… nothing. Sorry, I forgot - you get a book. And mention my name. Unless the prizes change (why would they, oh wait…)
The title should really read “baited on a free contest for an EVE Vegas plug”.
Upon submission, you waive all rights you may have to the submitted design and grant CCP an irrevocable right to own, use, or edit the design without further compensation to you.
All designs submitted become the property of CCP and can be used in any way the company wants, forever, across all known and yet-to-be-invented media.
Prizes are subject to change and will be awarded at CCP’s sole discretion.
5 Likes
They probably fired the art guy and haven’t told us yet.
2 Likes
Can I safely assume that this “prize” doesn’t include any actual profit to the artist?
So this is basically a contest with zero monetary compensation to the artist who’s creating revenue generating content for you?
thx no thx
3 Likes
Correct. And don’t forget:
”Prizes are subject to change.”
1 Like
I think you’re getting this wrong.
Upon submission, you waive all rights you may have to the submitted design and grant CCP an irrevocable right to own, use, or edit the design without further compensation to you. All designs submitted become the property of CCP and can be used in any way the company wants, forever, across all known and yet-to-be-invented media.
You’re not being compensated at all, you are granting all rights to your content (possibly using CCPs copyrighted materials) for free.
Now this is important: Only after that, after CCP already owns the design, they can decide to grant you a prize coming from the EVE ecosystem. It’s not to be misunderstood as payment. You can’t fit payment for goods and the nature of a contest together, without getting in trouble with the applicable laws.
That being said, I’m not sure this contest would be entirely legal in my country. Asking participants to hand over ownership of their intellectual property with the promise of maybe being compensated, could be seen as gambling. Then again, the possible price being a good bit lower than any normal payment for a design, could make it clear enough that no one is lead into giving up value for the hopes to making bank.
Printing posters in low amounts is expensive and I can’t see CCP selling them for $50. Take into account the man-hours to run the content, sell the stuff and all of that: CCP is not going to profit from the contest, they’ll just break even.
Edit: but yeah, if it turns out they’re selling them for $50 a pop, I’ll join the rage. Not sooner though.
Sorry, I was in the publishing industry for a decade. They’ll have no problem turning a tidy profit on these. Based on the size I can’t see these selling for less than $50 but maybe I’ll be surprised. Meanwhile, the artist may get some prizes at some point (nothing officially laid in stone).
If CCP does a reprint for FanFest 2019 (EVE Down Under, etc.) the artist again gets… nothing. If CCP gives the posters to say the first x number of EVE Vegas attendees that would be altogether entirely different. However, “without further compensation to you” would seem to imply the exact opposite.
They’re looking for plate-ready printing specs so they can dump these electronically to any print shop in Vegas or anywhere else (thus saving on shipping costs).
3 Likes
Getting number 1 would be an amazing recruitment opportunity. Who cares about the prizes!
2 Likes
No need to be sorry dude, everyone has some job. Feel free to explain to me in detail how you think they can “turn a tidy profit” on these. Really, please do. My experience tells me otherwise.
I worked in advertisement campaigns for a while and I can tell you that CCP will not be printing 10k copies, so the production price per poster will be high. They have a limited amount of people who will buy it, they can’t drive up the price too much or people won’t buy and they have a bunch of man-hours for running the contest (writing the Dev Blog, looking at submissions, having a lawyer take a look at it, ordering the prints, selling the stuff etc.). The only one in this chain who really makes a bit of profit is the print shop. CCP could use their ressources more efficiently, if they wanted just the dough.
Feel free to explain why you think this is wrong.
Again, look at what I wrote before. It’s not legal to combine payment for a service with the nature of how a contest works. That’s why you have to give it to them for free. There is no payment. I still think in my specific country this could be challenged as gambling - maybe.
They could absolutely not offer higher compensation or even long-term compensation, because that would not count as a classic contest anymore.
Two or your largest costs are production and distribution. In this case, both are zero (other than perhaps the pne-time delivery cost from the printer in Vegas to the convention center). The time to administer and run the contest is minimal. CCP has inhouse staff and counsel for the aspects you indicated. Any excess posters can easily accompany CCP staff or display equipment back to Iceland for the next event.
The size is geared to fit as many posters on a single sheet as possible, and they’re only printing one poster to make it as cost effective as possible. Without knowing the final CMYK/spot color, paper stock, ink or final print run it’s hard to speculate costs. That being said, all you need to do is look at the shipping costs in the merchandise store to make a determination if CCP is offering anything at a break even.
I am not disagreeing that the printing cost per poster will be high. But to say that because of a small print run it won’t be profitable disregards a pattern of behaviour that CCP has demonstrated for years. We won’t know for sure until EVE Vegas, but by that time everyone will have already forgotten and will be gleefully parting with their hard-earnes dollars for whatever CCP is offering up at EVE Vegas.
Just a side note - they’re already alluding to this on r/Eve.
Calling All Designers: Give us free Advertising Material, we fired all people that could create stuff like that.
That’s plain and simply wrong.
Production cost are not zero, as CCP will have to pay the printshop and their CCP employee to use paid office hours to deal with the printshop.
Distribution is also not zero, as at the very least you have to account for taxes. Ignore the man-hours for he sale, as they would have their merchandise booth without the posters as well.
Third, you forgot that this is a contest. Pay their lawyer an hour to look at the stuff, pay whoever wrote the Dev Blog, pay the processing of the incoming designs, including people looking at the stuff, checking for possible copyright issues and so on.
You forget that a business is not a bunch of bored friends. An hour of work is paid, whatever that hour includes. They are not “paid anyway”, it doesn’t work like that.
All I’m saying is that there are far better ways for a company like CCP to use their ressources than trying a side-stint in the publishing business. Posters are anyway one of the worst ways to make money there, unless you are the printshop.
I’m really more concerned that they ask people to hand over their ownership of the design, because that means that the designer can’t even use their own work later on and this is highly questionable.
TL;DR i don’t think CCP makes dough with this, but I do think the mandatory handing over of intellectual property sucks.
1 Like
I’m talking about production costs as in graphic design - which is zero. The actual manufacturing cost (something seperate) is something I never alluded to being free. Yes, you don’t have staff sitting around but my point was they don’t need to contract out the administration aspect. So yes, while there is an associated cost - it’s not an additional cost. Taxes are not a distribution cost - these are just something collected for remittance. A distribution cost would be shipping the posters to individuals which is something they probably won’t offer.
I agree with you on the intellectual property rights aspect and most of your points in general. The way everything is worded and CCP’s track record, however, lead me to believe this is another opportunity to increase the profitability of EVE Vegas.
2 Likes
Yeah it’s true, the design itself is free and they’ll probably have some neat way of accounting for the PLEX they give out. If they had the oppotunity to contract the entire contest out, I think they’d do it. For things that are far from your usual business, it’s often better to outsource, the cost is more controllable and so on. But it’s hard to speculate on that, because maybe CCP employees are literally sitting around not having anything to do - in which case giving them a task does not produce additional cost. Since it is a business, I’d rather assume they have a schedule and you have to account for those hours in any calculation of the contest.
Anyhow, let’s see for how much they are selling the posters. If it is $50 I promise to join the rage.
Until then I’ll see the entire thing as an attempt to have a relatively cost-efficient customer-relation event, which employs very unfavorable terms.
I mean, even Youtube can do better.
CCP
All designs submitted become the property of CCP …
YouTube
7.2 You retain all of your ownership rights in your Content…
Which, by the way is not only bad, but way more risky for CCP, regarding possible 3rd party claims on the content.
1 Like
Well, just ask Rixx Javixx about his adventures designing stuff with/for/against CCP…
(Anyway, these contests are not intended for professionals. They count as “exposure” for amateurs, quite literally)
Well, I am a graphic designer, and when I work freelance, it is specified in the contract with the client that they get the full rights to the finished product. When I do work for my job as a graphic designer, everything I do while working is automatically the property for the company that I work for. And that also includes all websites I develop. And technically, if you use anything that is copyrighted by CCP it is their property anyway, because you could not use it without their permission to begin with. And this is actually status quo with any design contest.
So why don’t you all just STFU and not give them a free poster at your expense.
Problem solved.
While I can understand the argument against the legal disclaimer and working for free to potentially win something while giving away rights to something that will make profit.
Nobody is asking people against it to enter and the more I think about it the more I realize, ■■■■, I am 99% sure I’ve done more for less, be it Reddit karma or a simple “thank you” for spending countless hours trying to make members of my corp/alliance feel excited and hyped.
I will personally try to submit posters I’ve previously created for those corps and alliances and probably make new ones just because I can really get creative with things and share them with others hopefully in their full printed glory.
1 Like
Sorry, even amateurs refuse to work for “exposure”.
2 Likes
Google “work for exposure” or maybe “Yog’s Law”, and you’ll find every working artist on earth telling you not to enter this contest. If you like anybody’s art, of any sort, maybe listen to them.
1 Like