Yeah actually that's a really old photo (over a year old now!) that we've been meaning to update for some time. We've been working hard to refine the cutting process and DO actually use much heavier paper now.
I also think it's interesting that this was brought up immediately following a post I made containing DS covers for download.
This is funny as I just watch some of your video's on youtube about you claiming they made the actual covers for there games, which I high doubt.
Also the price they charge is down right stupid, who in the right mind is buying this stuff. I guess there able to cash in on peoples laziness or people are just uninformed. Take these for example
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NO-GAMES-New-Game-Cases-Gameboy-Gameboy-Color-GBA-Pokemon-Super-Bundle-/280874134656?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4165672c80
Makes me want to start up my own site and just undercut these guys for the hell of it, I understand it's a service your providing. It seems this so called "service" comes at a premium cost, which to me is a joke.
That's exactly how I feel.
Materials:Doing the math, we come up with $7.70 for the cases (let's figure 8.00 to include shipping costs). If he's printing on legal size, then he can easily get 3 covers per sheet. Looks like the cheapest "photo" paper that you can get at ol' Staples to me. So, based on what I can find, it would be about 12 bucks for 100 sheets. That comes out to .04 per cover for the paper. Let's be REALLY generous and say he's using a pricey 7 color inkjet (he's not), so the price of ink per page is .40.
So we're at
$8.44 for materials.
Labor:Open print-ready files, load paper, select 'print'. This would take me about 1 minute, tops. Maybe he's running a Windows ME machine with 512MB of RAM and Photoshop 4. Let's give him about 5 minutes to open each file (there should be 4 total for the Pokemon covers). Five minutes to remember where he left the pack of paper and then load it. Then we'll figure another 5 minutes of spool time for the prints (we'll count this as labor).
I'd spend about 2-3 minutes cutting those 11 covers out, even less if they're all properly aligned on the page so that I could cut all three with just 6 cuts instead of 8, 10, or 12 if they're scattered about the page. Again, I'll be generous and assume he and his wife are cutting them with a pair of old, dull, left-handed scissors (which seems accurate based on the images). Using that method I could see it easily taking about 25 minutes or so to cut them all out. Then we'll allot 5 minutes to squish them all into the DS cases.
So we're at about
1 hour for labor, and that's EXTREMELY generous.
He includes free shipping. Let's give him
$7.00 in shipping fees.
I calculate about
$10.00 of eBay/paypal fees per sale.
With all of that figured in, he's making about 50 bucks for each one of those sets he sells. Even if we assume that it does indeed take him an hour to produce each of those sets, then he's STILL making a killing. Realistically, it probably takes half that. So, he's making about 100 bucks an hour selling that shit.
I hope I don't see any of my covers pop up on his page. I would absolutely ruin his monopoly on the market with a price point that is entirely unprofitable.
