Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26213067-20150704223025/@comment-53539-20150707130008

This is the problem with the current situation.


 * I don't think Syo is in any position to really impact Ruby at this point. Anders said once the contract was signed Ruby became PowerFX, this is why Anders kept warning Syo about PowerFX having the last say.  PowerFX has already sent the files to Yamaha.  Its out of Syo's hands and I doubt he can do much at this stage... :-/
 * If Syo hadn't mentioned Misha, the fans would have been more accepting of the design and wouldn't have reacted. Based on the spceulation from Anders, the message that PowerFX had the last say wasn't handed to Misha by Syo.

I'd be careful even if I was Syo even if I was to ask the fans how to act. The result could reflect badly on him. Even down to the minium wage thing... This is the problem with certain types of contract, you're paid "X amount" per vocal. I kinda was in this position myself last summer when I had a job for 4 weeks as a caravan cleaner. I was paid £6 per caravan, £8 if I did it alone. You had 6-8 caravans a day... If you finish yours you could do extra or nick someone else's caravan if they were being too slow. Since art is my area of expertise, I also know that for anime frames, its something like 300 yen per frame on average or was in the 2000s when I was an anime fan. Which isn't actually a lot, so a animator has to do a lot of frames per day to make up a salary. Quite a number of jobs work by commision style payment and vocaloid is likely very much one of them.

That money Syo's been offered is just for 1 voicebank I beat, working by the same theory. But he has worked on at least 3 we know of.... The V3 version, the Japanese version and the V4 version. He isn't being paid for the vocals not being released yet. To make sure he get his money, Ruby must sell and the Japanese vocal must be released, or he won't get the money for it. With the added bonus if both vocals sell, it should make up for the money amount to cover the cost of working that 18 months or so time. So while what he has been paid so far is indeed less then minium wage, over the course of Ruby being successful, he would likely end up earning more then that, in my experience of these things. I earnt more then average salary during those 4 weeks as a cleaner, I just had to work damn hard. :-/

This is kinda the problem at hand... :-/

As for the "design matters" thing... Well... The fans shouldn't be too upset if the design isn't important. Thats the point with that comment, soime made it clear that they will support Misha's art as the "real" design no matter what it looked like. If the design isn't what the fans what, they reject it fair enough and we get drama... This kinda happened with the previous incident when Taiwan Ann and Al were used for placeholder art when PowerFX renewed their site. I kinda was a part of that protest and even alerted everyone to Penguin Al's existence then. Actually this was the first time we saw that PowerFX can often bungle.

And many, sadly, base their views on a vocaloid on the boxart. :-/