why i'll never make my sims 4 cc paywalled in any way whatsoever
+ the importance of hobbies
so, first some personal context. afk i have one steady pay-roll part time job, one steady part-time freelance job, and my own art practice is a freelance practice in its own (although more unreliable as an income source). as such, i am a bit of a "hustler" when it comes to earning money, gathering enough to live a decent life from different income sources. i don't earn a lot but also i don't have a lot of expenses, and i'm lucky to be living in a country that gives me a lot of protection. i mention all this because i know everyone in the sims community's experience with living is super different, depending on location, health, etc. so of course this is all coming from my own situated perspective. i really acknowledge that for some, making cc for financial profit might be their one and only way to earn money and, as such, i am not strictly against early access content creators as long as i can see their love for the game and the community is put into it!
since i am a creative, i knew from the beginning of coming back to simblr (as a fully adult) that it would be very important for me to distinguish my art/cultural practice from my "sims" practice, since both of these practices are about creation and about a visual outcome. this became even more pressing once i started making cc that i share.
sometimes i have thought about making hair commissions. in fact, i have also made one already. at that moment i realised that, although i loved making the commission, i found the whole transaction part very awkward, struggling to translate my "labour" into a currency. and here's the thing, as a freelancer in my freelance job afk, i make 25€/hour (29$) for task in which i do not have an education. so if i were to see my sims cc making practice as a professional practice, naturally, i would compare this job to my freelance job since there is no contract, no protection, only my labour, delivering a product. making a hair from scratch, without breaks, probably takes me a full day of work, which means, if i were to see hair cc making as a job, i would expect my income to be 25x8=200€ for a hair. and i am quite certain that no one would ever accept this price in any sims community, probably not even half.
i want to make collabs, i want to open up for requests (eventually), and i want to make cc that make people happy, but i do it all because creativity in any form is my language of showing love and care, and it also makes me happy to do it. my creations, whether afk or here, are super close to my heart; they are quite frankly my babies, so sharing them is already an über vulnerable act for me. i literally feel hollow after having shared cc, it feels like a part of me is ripped out. i am sure that if i ever were to see my sims cc making as a job, this part of the procedure would accentuate drastically and all the joy of making content would seep away, making me a very frustrated, confused person.
but already sharing cc, even if always free, means that i much more actively have to remind myself quite often that i, most of all, make all the things i make to satisfy my own needs, whims and desires, that cc making, for me, is a hobby.
sadly, and this is a general tendency, having a hobby, and keeping it a hobby, is becoming very hard in times where we feel the need to share everything with the world. and capitalism, fully flourishing in its totalitarian form (and totalitarianism's biggest weapon is the lie that no other way of life is possible), teaches us to consider the word "hobby" with contempt--a waste of time, unserious, and amateurish--because capitalism cannot profit from a hobby. i see it with my own stuff i post here, the moments of need to make it more professional looking, more coherent, more catered to be likable for a wide audience, like a sellable product. but whenever consicous of it, i try to resist that feeling, trying to maintain the priority of stimulating my own creative and visual obsessions, where time spent is not translated to a currency.
and that's it; when we enjoy a hobby we visit a world beyond the logic of capitalism and that's so important to maintain because it is one small but powerful resistance to dominant captitalist structures.
