Dead or Alive Ero-SFM Doubly Dirty
Flying Witch “Cute But Boring…”
Goddess of 2ch “Another Bathing Beauty!”
Phantasy Star Online 2 Phantastic: “What About the West!?”
Shounen Maid “A Fujoshi Delight”
I've never owned an anime figure before, but I started to make 3D anime models for SL way back in November. As a result, I need a way to see what grabs people's attention. Since I doubt any of you play SL, I'll just use figures as an interest-maintaining bridge.
I started to notice how figure-picky otaku are, when I read the comments for the Kuroneko beach queen figure way back in January. The comments had a snarky, qualm-like aura to them ("This figure looks so bad" "Wtf is this? Did they intentionally want Kirino to sell more than her?" etc). Confused, I took a better look at the figure and thought "It looks a bit off, but I still think it's cute.". It must have left one of the worst aftertastes in recent otaku history though, to the point of traumatizing a few otaku, since one of them made a "take-that" in an article about another Kuroneko figure ("I preordered all the kuroneko figures, except for the beach queen's one").
Normally, I'd just forget those comments. However, they have become relevant to me; my Etna and Raspberyl avatars have been selling poorly, and nobody has really told me why. I only own one store, but it's in a very popular anime-themed region (about 6,000 people visit there per week). The heads can easily make over 2000 possible expressions, I spent 40+ hours on each model, but I'm lucky to nab 10 sales per week. I'm hoping that it's due to the lack of advertising outside that region, but I get the eerie feeling that potential shoppers just dislike them.
Hell, I posted an in-world demo of my Etna avatar on the artist thread here and it got absolutely NO attention. Yup, that totally helped.
Worst of all, I updated my Raspberyl avatar a few days ago, and one of my old customers IMs me with "Oh wow, the head looks so much better!". Thanks for telling me that the old head looked bad, 4 months after its initial release..
So, how do that relate to Kuroneko? I'm sort of like a company, just like Wave. We don't know why something sells so poorly. If it tanks in sales, employees start to point fingers at each other ("It was the bad advertising!" "It was poorly done!").
I know it's company policy to ignore user advice, but I thrive on it. In fact, my direction comes from user feedback. If someone says something bad about a certain model part, I'll try to change it to fit his/her needs. I show wips of my future models to my artist-orientated friends for early feedback. By sending updates of my older models, I address all of the past problems a few kind customers pointed out, and I'm super grateful for that.
That raises the question: what makes you ignore a certain figure? Its low quality, low level of interest, superfluous price/size, or lack of extras? You can choose more than one answer.
Most importantly, what is the most important part of a figure to you? Is it the head, outfit, or the body? If a head looks good but off-model, would you still buy it? What if it had the hottest body ever? I'd love to know.
