@ToxSam So, the way I see the overall costs for minting a new item is this:
For the Creator:
- Time, creativity & energy poured into crafting the item
- Network fees (Ethereum or Polygon)
- Wearable publication fee (what is being discussed here)
For the Catalysts:
- Bandwidth costs each time it gets downloaded (hard to estimate)
- Storage costs (negligible, but frequent access adds up over time)
- Risk of logic bugs related to uploading content (super low)
- CPU costs (negligible)
For the Curating Committee:
- Reviewing the item, testing it against all other items (might become quadratically difficult)
- Back-and-forth if the item has bugs/problems
- Support and assistance with getting the item approved
For users of the experience:
- Network cost: download each custom-made item when it needs to be rendered
- CPU/GPU/Memory cost: rendering an avatar with a custom item doesn’t come for free
Because this fee is the only way to keep out low-quality things, that’s why I think $0 is not a good option. I see @SWISS’s argument towards “depreciation of current wearables” and that’s a reasonably good idea to increase that cost, but the #1 reason I listed here, and why I wouldn’t want to go further than 500 MANA is because artists already have a high entry “cost”, which is pouring their knowledge, creativity and effort in to create high quality items.
So I think there has to be a balance here; not really sure where that balance sits, but definitely in the vicinity of a couple hundred dollars to fend off the big aggregated cost that occurs over time over all the users of Decentraland and the servers.