Trying to sell a Custom Retropie powered case

[herb_fargus]

@jamesbeat not to beat the dead horse any more... but I have my cricket bat out so may as well. Anyways want to know who the customers go to when they need support? I'll give you a hint. It's not the seller- they are too busy laughing their way to the bank.

[jamesbeat]

@herb_fargus said in Trying to sell a Custom Retropie powered case:

@jamesbeat not to beat the dead horse any more... but I have my cricket bat out so may as well. Anyways want to know who the customers go to when they need support? I'll give you a hint. It's not the seller- they are too busy laughing their way to the bank.

Oh, I'm sure they would come to you too, but I do have some experience in a similar field.
Years ago, I used to have a small 'business' (actually just a hobby really) converting digital cameras to infrared.
If you're interested in why, Google IR photography - it's pretty cool.

Anyway, as I said, it was more like a hobby. I used to buy cameras, convert them, and then sell them for about $30 more than they cost me to make. The conversion took quite a while to do, and was very risky, so sometimes I would lose a camera to breakage.
All in, I made about $20-$25 per camera.

Now, most of my customers knew exactly what they wanted and were very pleased with the transaction, but it turned out that two of them didn't know how to use an IR camera.
In fact, they didn't know how to use ANY camera.
One of them emailed me every day for over a week, and the other was sending me several emails a day, sometimes even every hour or two.
These were basic non-IR photography related questions about basic camera use, which was all in the manual I provided.
To keep my 100% feedback, I had no choice but to pander to them.
At one point, I even offered to refund the second guy's money just to get him to stop emailing me.

In the end, it put me off doing it at all because the hassle just was not worth it for the small amount of money I was making.

If you sell something, hardware or software, bear in mind that sooner or later, you're going to sell it to a half-wit, and they will expect you to provide support because you're the one who sold it to them.

What I'm saying is, even if it wasn't a violation of the license agreement, I still wouldn't sell a system with Retropie installed, because it would probably be too much of a hassle.

I say make your cases (they are very nice by the way) and leave the software side of things to the customer.

[Floob]

Saw this posted recently on another forum

What sort of price should I be looking at for Pi3 machine, with two controllers, memory card, hdmi cable and retro pie fully configured? Was looking on eBay and I really don't want to faff about building/setting up. Just want to put roms on it and play.

I think that's an all too common sentiment and is why there is a market for pre-built (roms or not). Many buyers and sellers will care little about copyright (emulators and/or roms) which is a shame, but no doubt the reality of the situation.

A not too dissimilar conversation is happening here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37474595

[footwo]

@Floob said in Trying to sell a Custom Retropie powered case:

What sort of price should I be looking at for Pi3 machine, with two controllers, memory card, hdmi cable and retro pie fully configured? Was looking on eBay and I really don't want to faff about building/setting up. Just want to put roms on it and play.

I've made several consoles for friend's and relative's birthdays with a fully configured retropie setup that I've spent many hours perfecting and tweaking. I've had multiple colleagues and other buddies say they would definitely be willing to purchase these machines to avoid having to do any setup.

I have to disagree with @jamesbeat sentiment that it's ridiculously easy to setup. It isn't if you want it to be as idiot proof and less prone to breaking/getting stuck as possible. There is most definitely a market for it.

Hell I was thinking about hoping to sell them myself after being encouraged to, with the caveat that I don't care how many copies you make of the image, whether you give it to your friends, as I don't own it, I just spent a long time making it a little more consumer friendly. To my mind, that's the only thing I would be selling - cost of materials plus labour doing something that a large portion of people don't want to have to do, i.e. build parts, install, config, tweak, make nice. How is that any different from say, paying someone to build you a PC from various parts and then installing Windows on it, and then shipping it to you in a functional state?

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it seems like there's definitely a grey area there.