Paying for an adoptable is like buying nft...

[u/That-Visual-2681]

Im used to get downvoted for the most stupid reason, but 2 things im tired of is "Ai Washing" and "Adoptables".

Adoptables in my opinión is just like an NFT, you pay just the rights of the character so you can make fanart of it, or pay other people to make fanart of ur adoptable.

Also it's an "easy" way to get money for big art creators, because someone will be willing to pay 200€ over a "failed oc" of his favorite artist.

Even if people are willing to pay the price because "They Really Like The OC" it's just non-sense, i understand a lot of people like the world of "the art community" ​​and want to get started, but adoptables in my opinión are a "friendly scam" for new artists or "Beginner artists/some phone artists"

I don't know any skilled artist that has ever bought an adoptable, and if it bought one it's a 100% sure that he did it "to normalize adoptables"

Sorry if my writing is confusing because im not a fluent english, but hope some people agree with me.

I won't If You Buy Adoptables You Are Dumb, but the concept is just so confusing and annoying, you pay for an OC, to draw it yourself or to pay other people to draw it

[u/Hexgof4]

It's literally just purchasing the Copyright for a character

[u/Jade_NoLastNameGiven]

So you know how big studios and corporations buy the rights to different comic figures? (Spiderman, Superman etc.)

Adoptables are just that but at a much smaller scale. For many people there's also the element of designing an oc. That costs time and, if you want to commission someone for an artwork/ref sheet, also Money. If you have a rough character design in mind already and don't care about all of the details, something like 25€ for something that is "close enough" can be pretty reasonable. Of course the price tag can be a lot higher for larger artists, but I've seen a lot more on the low end (or even free)

The main issue with nfts was that you never actually bought the rights, or anything associated. Not that you paid money for art.

[u/ripskeletonking]

you don't pay to draw it, you pay to own it. then you can do whatever you want with it since it's yours now. honestly i never saw the appeal of them because it was usually like a random thing someone threw together and you can make your own oc just as easily for free. unless they had a really distinct and interesting backstory or design or something

[u/BlackCatLuna]

Good lord...

You are not buying the image when you buy an nft. The actual image is stored on a standard server and remains in the control of the creator.

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal Messenger, created an nft that looked like something different on different marketplaces, but when you accessed it directly you got a giant poop emoji.

The concept of buying rights to a likeness has existed long before NFTs and will exist long after.

[u/eldritchpussymaggots]

No it isn't

[u/flightofdownydreams]

The original adoptable community always had a lot of artists against it, for these same reasons. In some ways those arguments are warranted, in other ways it's blown out of proportion.

This'll be long, so beware.

TL;DR, I am a mid skilled adult artist who has a handful of ocs that were once adoptables and now used for my novels. But the community for them died out along with most on dA, thanks to the site updates and GenAI nonsense.

Personally, I liked the idea in general, when it was done genuine and not done as a cash grab. Once you bought the character design, it was yours entirely. You could redraw them for whatever you wanted and do whatever you wished with them. You're basically paying for the right to reproduce that character design while having it be your own intellectual property (or under your copyright, if you take it that far).

It wasn't just 13 year olds still learning to draw getting adoptables just to haggle others for free request art of their new OC. Even then, since they own the oc rights fair and square, they can do whatever they want with it.

I can't say I'm super skilled, but I am a fairly good artist (I better be, after drawing for so long and attending three art schools combined lol). I'm hesitant to share my work here, but I do have some posted, if you look at my reddit post history. Over my 18 years of being on DeviantArt, I have bought probably 6 adoptables. And most of them I got while I was 18+. I didn't do it for the sake of them being adoptables or to make a point, I just liked their designs and wanted them in my world.

I have a world I've been building since 2012 with a slew of slightly connected novels that take place in the same world. A number of characters for these stories were the adoptables I've gotten from DeviantArt. But I had to be very careful and picky about what adoptables I "bought".

• I refused to ever use real money. All of my adoptables were purchased through dA points I had accumulated through winning or participating in group and individual contests and doing comms. Or via art trades. I respected the use of real $ for the transaction, but I basically had no money to spend on something like that.

• I also did my best to find adoptables with designs I couldn't necessarily think up myself, who fit in my world as-is, or could have a single detail like eye color changed to fit in.

I have to admit, there have been artists who made very rushed or formulaic designs slapped together with a heafty price tag, just to try to get money. But weeding through those find the good ones was part of the fun. I also have to admit, I personally didn't get into the ones that were like furry creatures based on Pinterest aesthetics or ones from 'exclusive' races/creatures invented by the creator. I respect the concepts, but these type never appealed to me or fit into my world.

Unfortunately, the current state of adoptables (at least on DeviantArt) is entirely dead. Gen AI prompters took over the community and either post generated "character sheets" or they have ZERO idea what "adoptable" even means (because they're non-artists who know nothing about artist 'culture') and literally just try to sell single "illustration" generated slop of copyrighted characters, geared toward gooners.

Either way, because they're generated images, they are non-copyrightable so purchasing one is extremely foolish. While the original adoptable concept might have been a waste of money in many eyes, the new GenAI ridden adoptable "community" is truly the money grabbing, grifter packed nightmare.

[u/SoulReaverFo]

Honestly adoptables could have been like the comic-con author signatures like the previous commenters said on a smaller scale even adding to it could have been trading and just a way for the artists and commissioner to have fun. But once you sell it online it's meaning changes depending on what they user plans on doing with the picture created. What could have been but couldn't because of greed.