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So, the question below was asked about the extremely high real life price of some cash shop items. Below that is the response.

I agree that $700 is absurd for a pixel / pretend item you can not even use off this site. And half of absurd is still absurd.

Yes, it costs artist / programmer etc time to create an item.
But you are not getting the original oil painting in an expensive frame.
You are not even getting a print rolled up and stuck in a paper bag so you can take it some place to have it framed.
You get to look at the item when you are on the site and if you somehow fall out of favor with Gaia they can take it away forever.

This seems a bit like going to the zoo and being charged $500 to get in the gate.
"But that costs too much!"
"Well, it costs a lot to buy and feed an elephant and $500 is only half of $1,000!"

But of course the zoo doesn't do that.
Instead they sell a lot of $10 tickets.

I would love to see actual sales figures for these super high price items.
I wonder how many of them are actually purchased.
And I'm a tad envious of anyone with so much spare cash they can feel free to drop that kind of money on pixels.

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(from the April 25, 2017 ATS

Question:
When are cash shop items going to be more reasonably priced? 700 dollars for a PRT is pure insanity gaia. You are coming off as being money hungry which isn't what gaia is about.

Response:
Unfortunately, Gaia needs money to survive. We are money hungry because our tank is empty, but that's a different subject, actually.

But, if you were to purchase 70,000 Gaia Cash at the 50% bonus it's $467 at the lowest without any other purchasing assistance. That's pretty low when you figure the majority of said purchases are used to pay the artists that produce them

I was unaware this particular item was a ticket but the fact still remains the item created is not something you can keep or take with you. It is something Gaia owns and can do what they want with.

But the general concept still stands.
I have seen Gaia selling already made items for $1,000 real cash money.
It was something rare (maybe it was the halo?) but never the less it was something they made a long time ago and was still pretend pixels you do not own and can not use off the site.

If you are the wealthy philanthropist who can afford to donate a new wing or exhibit to the zoo then good for you.
But most of the time zoo exhibits are added from the cumulative money of many ticket sales and sometimes also grants which are typically paid by many taxpayers.

Your first paragraph supports what I was trying to say.
You don't own the elephant so it should be paid for by lots of gate tickets, not one donor - unless someone happens to be very rich and wants to toss money their way.

But to keep it more grounded in actual art examples -
I own quite a few pieces of original art. paintings, wood carvings, carved ivory (legal) and so on.
I own them, can touch them, sell them, do whatever I want.
I didn't pay that much money for any of them.

And if you are talking digital art - I have purchased that as well. My current sig is an example. Granted that is a bit different than a statue in my home but if I want I still have the rights / permission to print it out and frame it and put it on my wall.

I agree it is not a crime to have a few high priced items.
I suppose my concern comes from:

1. There have been quite a few absurdly priced (not ticket) items and it just makes Gaia look cash greedy. Which for some time they have been.

2. I have some concerns it might take advantage of people who obsess too much over Gaia stuff and play into their "addiction". I realize it is not Gaia's fault if someone is overly obsessed. But I do think some items play into the "gotta catch them all" mentality that some people have. For example I have seen some folks comment they feel obsessed with getting (some thing) in every color it comes out in. So when there is a new release they feel they have to buy it.

As and example of people who (probably) spend too much -
A few years ago I was at a con and attended a Gaia panel.
There was a young woman (youngish teen as best I could tell) with spent Gaia cash cards pinned all over her body. She said she had purchased - I forget - but it was well over $2,000 in cash.

Now, maybe she has rich parents or something and this was in no way a hardship for her. But my impression from listening to her talk was overly obsessed fan who should probably be saving most of that money for - college, car, whatever "real life" stuff that would be coming her way down the road.

TLDR: I agree Gaia has the right to have some super high priced items.
It just doesn't sit well with me because it feels like it sends the wrong message.

I... don't think we're exactly disagreeing on my first point. My point with the zoo example is that it's like donating to put your name on something that possibly wouldn't exist without you. It's not supposed to be a super accessible thing. Not everyone can give a lot of money to a city and get a park bench with their name on it, or donate to a zoo and get a plaque next to the exhibit they funded. It also doesn't make that bench or exhibit theirs, unlike buying a piece of art; they get acknowledgement that their funding made that happen. That's what direct sale tickets are, paying for your idea to be made available, not made just for you. It's more like commissioning an art piece from someone with the caveat that they're allowed to sell prints of it too, rather than buying a painting.

GC spending in other, smaller areas are accessible to more people, and gold purchases are accessible to everyone (with the caveat that higher priced purchases require a lot of work for them). There are tiers of availability, and while it'd be nice for everyone to be able to afford tickets, that's not feasible with the amount of work that goes into them. Like we saw under old management, when tickets are dirt cheap, everyone and their mother wants one, and it both creates far more demand than Gaia can keep up with and devalues the work of the artists.

As for the absurdly priced items in the past, that was all under a very money-hungry management that was essentially bleeding Gaia dry. They're gone, and they did ridiculous amounts of damage to the site's economy, built up a huge queue for tickets, devalued both gold and GC, and more. Problems from them still remain, but I'm certainly hopeful that we won't see as much very obvious money-grubbing from the current management. The tickets, in an ideal world, would be the premium item, and sales of things like the bundles with 03 collectibles for ridiculous amounts wouldn't come back. I wasn't a fan of those, and I didn't like the money-grubbing old management. I'm just trying to explain what Gaia's PoV on the ticket prices is, because when you consider the effort making the item plus loss of being able to directly sell it, it does make sense price-wise (again, imagine revenue differences between recolors that are released for 599 GC as LQIs that sell hundreds of units, versus recolors that can't be directly purchased and are released alongside many other items).

I can't afford tickets with GC. I probably couldn't have at their lowest with old management's sales and GC incentives, because I have other things that take priority. I wish I could get tickets for super cheap, because I have a lot of things I want to recolor. But they started out as a super premium item, got devalued to dirt with a messed up system that was exploited, and now they're back to premium again to smooth things over. It makes sense. Not everyone can get a ticket, much less with real money, but it makes sense. And they most certainly aren't intended for people who can't actually afford it; I can't imagine Gaia actually wants people to bankrupt themselves buying tickets. I'd worry more about RIGs with highly desirable but rare items as a worse offender for impulse spending than tickets.

Each ticket has its own rules built into it about how the resulting item can be released; for the recolor tickets at least, no, they aren't directly released into the cash shop; the user who submitted the ticket gets 25 copies, and the item is released into a RIG as a possible prize. No direct sales. I believe Golden Ticket items (completely custom items, not recolors or repixeling of older items) are released into the cash shop as LQIs. What happens with each release is in the rules and guidelines for each ticket type in the Project Custom forum.