Wondering if there had been any effort/thought put into creating a pool of offshore labor to perform basic scripting activities. I haven’t personally scripted any videos, but from what I understand is that it is a time intensive and detail oriented task, making it a bit of a difficult ask for individuals or companies to perform.
In my line of work, we have similar tasks that we have had good luck offshoring to the Philippines and India. I feel that with some training there could be a small team stood up with a labor agency offshore that could execute scripting much more cost effectively. I don’t think that their output would be 100% perfect, but perhaps a final pass or revision direction from some of the more experienced scripters acting as oversight/leadership, it could definitely be effective.
Just mainly been bouncing around in my head, as it seems that demand for scripts is outpacing supply due to labor.
I was also thinking about moving the basic creation of a script to the cheaper countries. In principle, anyone with a PC could do this job. I just don’t see enough financial potential in this area for this organizational effort to pay off.
The market would just become saturated too quickly as not everyone would spend hundreds of dollars (Euro or whatever) per month on this hobby.
Yeah, cheap labor usually gives the same or even better results than expensive countries. Just because you wear a T-shirt from China doesn’t mean it’s worse than the one made e.g. in US.
Moving expenses out of country is common thing nowadays so who knows, maybe we will see some small company from Philipines that will offer scripts in cheap price.
My first thought is to totally agree with you. I do think that this will drive down the per-unit sale price of scripts, but I feel that it could become part of the value proposition for VR sites (much like CzechVR does). If it gets even further commoditized, then it could even be applied to 2D sites or part of like Porhub Premium or something.
I personally just view this a niche hobby, but if you asked me 25 years ago, do you think most males will own a mushy silicon tube and jack off with that instead of their hand - I woulda been like - huh? Having experienced the night and day difference between interactive toys and manual, I can’t help but think we’re just on the start of the next wave.
Totally, I was more referring to the learning curve and a lot of the “tricks” that expert scripters have picked up (like yourself). There is definitely an “art” to the process that it would be a shame if it was lost.
Having worked organizing offshore labor in the past, my experience is that the quality is precisely as good as your ability to check it, and no better. With every contractor I dealt with (China and Eastern Europe), the first results I got were generally unacceptable, and after going through several rounds of revisions I got great quality output. They have the skills, but the economics of how their businesses work incentivize them to take shortcuts and only put in lots of time with the customers that demand it.
The issue is that with funscripts, the only way to check quality is to go through the whole video and watch for synchronization issues, which quickly becomes very time consuming - especially if you have to do it two or three times, providing feedback each time. In fact, I suspect given that the contractor would know this that they would take even more shortcuts than normal.
So my suspicion is that this probably wouldn’t work particularly well - you’d get passable scripts quickly and cheaply, but I doubt the quality would be very good, and by the time you did all the emailing, instructing, checking and providing of feedback, you might as well just do it yourself.
It’s probably worth trying though, if anyone speaks the language of a suitable country! I can definitely imagine the quality level being passable enough for it to be worthwhile.
You just described what slr is today. Every script has to be reviewed by realcumber before it gets released. Once he left Realsync does this mean the scripts will be of lower quality because of lack of supervision from him? I really doubt that, once people get basic knowledge on how the things work it shouldn’t be too hard to get good results anyway.
If studios can’t afford to pay people to make a living in e.g. US they can lower their expenses by paying 1/4th of that to some Filipinos, there is nothing wrong with that. They can even pay for some basic version of the script that gets tuned by someone more experienced, same way that slr works.
I was charged with setting up production of a product in Mexico. The first 2 production runs were trash and thrown out. The third was good enough for us to rework to usable. Then for several months we had continuous production of good (repetitive) product.
Then we had a work stoppage of several weeks and when we restarted we had the same experience we originally had with bad product until the new workers learned.
If you can put up with the hit or miss of a site and the quality checking then most things can be cheap.
Having experienced the night and day difference between interactive toys and manual, I can’t help but think we’re just on the start of the next wave.