"I hope you do not take my questioning Zygote's pricing as an attack..." Don't worry, Storm. I noticed and appreciated that you specifically stated a couple of times that you weren't attacking Zygote, so I knew you didn't want anything to be taken in the wrong way. Thanks. Also, I appreciate your concerns. Like I said, others have also raised public and private criticism about our pricing many times. "You rightly point out that Poser users are "demographically unique" with the greatest proportion being non-commercial users. Price comparisons with other non-Poser model markets (which are aimed at mainly commercial and industry users) do not work because they are completely different markets." Now that you mention it, how many high-quality computer models are marketed toward a primarily non-commercial consumer-base? I'm not trying to be facetious here; the point is that at Zygote we aren't comparing our marketing to specifically anything else we know of. We are actually very excited to see "how low we can go" in this market without shooting ourselves in the foot. It is, of course, a gradual decent at this point. We have in the past - and still do - experiment with selling some models for less than others, and we have also had some products that never made back Zygote's investment in development. (And I mean real investment: what we pay employees to do the work, and not what we need to make to break even with what we would have made working for a different market.) "If any commercial producer were to charge 100s of dollars for single Poser Models they will earn very little from the vast majority of Poser users and consequently have a tiny market share percentage and penetration." I agree, and believe that this is why very few companies are concerned with making their products Poser-compatible. "This has implications for the market's awareness of the products of those companies and their influence on the market. It also usually entails higher marketing costs for products (Zygote currently enjoys a very high profile among Poser users which probably equals low marketing costs for their Poser products). And despite having to balance the internal production economies of Zygote there is more to business than sales and profit. There is also goodwill, market share maintenance and even dominance, all of which have a real dollar price tag when estimating the value of a company." You've made some excellent points here, Storm. I think you must have some good business experience, and I couldn't agree more. Zygote does value and consider these issues when deciding marketing strategies. On the other hand, these products do take a fixed amount of development and equipment which can only be subsidized so much by a company as small as Zygote. (In fact, our Poser products are considerably more development-intensive than are our custom projects. You'll notice that our regular models don't come with templates, morphs, materials or set up for animation in any package, despite costing 10 times as much as our Poser models.) "Looking at the Victoria downloads page here it is possible to get some idea of the number of Victoria units sold. The downloads vary but peak on some items at around 1,800. Taking into account factors such as failed downloads and curiosity, I would estimate you have sold around 1200 units to users of these forums with maximum sales of about 2000 in general, less than 10% of this 15,000-strong-market." Again, I'm quite impressed with the thought you've put into this. (I don't think most people would have factored in the failed downloads and Zygote Poser customers outside of the Poser online community. I would add a few illegally passed around copies as a factor, too.) I have to admit, I was a little surprised to see Vicki add-ons downloaded hundreds of times more than actual Victorias sold. "Perhaps if Vicky were around $50 and all her accessories in a pack costing $20 you might have had a significantly greater market percentage which would have given you equal profit but a much stronger leverage on future sales of Vicky developments and products. It would have also generated much greater goodwill (in the business sense of the word)." Again valid points, and ones which were considered at the time. As it was, our introductory price for Victoria was $10 higher than your suggested $50, and her clothing pack is only $.97 higher than your suggested $20 with the 40% off coupon Zygote gave to Vicki purchasers. Many people here at Zygote preferred to have Victoria's introductory special price as $99, regular $150. Dan and I (the ones more involved with the Poser community) pushed for lowering the price in order to make this figure the new "standard" for Poser, which obviously requires mass purchasing. Our compromise was to price in the middle, and to have the introductory pricing be 40% lower. I hope we did OK. The problem with marketing is that even in retrospect we'll never know how well this specific model would have done if marketed in another way. "In addition to all of this there is a large and growing skills pool among very talented Poser users who are pushing the models far beyond what Metacreations envisaged for Poser 4 and this has future consequences for the market." Zygote knows this, although probably not as well as you full-tiome members of this community, and we're very glad of it. We think this will push Poser to new heights. As is demonstrated in Victoria, we are trying to build more sophisticated and versatile products for an increasingly talented group of users. "When I look at Victoria I am reminded of the "eyes" developed by Bushi, Nerd and Bloodsong; by the changed body structure developed by Torino (Eve); and by the transparency mapped hair developed by Grey (I think he was the first) and further developed by Kozaburo and then Allerleirauh and many others. How much was Victoria and Zygote influenced by these developments?" Good question. As far as the eyes go, we have still never checked out any of the eyes you mention. However, we were told by our beta-testers how they worked theoretically, and this is what we based our work on. It's a good work-around for what I basically consider a Poser limitation. As for the modified grouping and geometry, we did have the Eve figure sent to us by one of our beta-testers. This was after we had roughly decided how to group, which we did over a year ago when we first discussed creating a "next-generation" Poser figure, but was still before we had finished grouping the model. So, yes, we were influenced by the Eve figure, which I think was very well done. At the same time, Torino and Zygote were both facing the same challenges and I don't think it surprising that we would come up with similar results independently. BTW, Zygote did create a Poser model with a hip, lHip and rHip grouping (just a difference in naming conventions; we decided to stay with Torino's conventions already in public use) to solve this problem also over a year ago (before Eve came out, I think). We had debated on adding knee, elbow, breast and buttock groups (as well as modifying the collar boundarys) at the time we planned the content for Poser4 with Metacreations. But the bottom line is that we did indeed experiment with and use elements from Eve that would have been slightly different in Victoria had we not heard of Eve. (Which I consider to be a high compliment to Torino's work.) And as far as transparency mapping hair (or anything else for that matter): Though this is a recent capability for Poser, Zygote has been trans-mapping all kinds of models since before we ever heard of Poser. I don't mean to belittle any of the work done here. I think it deserves almost as much credit as for discovering techniques like this for the first time, as those "re-discovering" these techniques for Poser were probably not aware of their existence in other areas earlier. Obviously (or perhaps not), as soon as Zygote was told that Poser4 would include transparency capability, we thought of the ramifications and the products we could now produce. We did feel "beaten to the punch" by the Poser users, and regretted that we were too busy to develop that for Poser at the time. Wow, this has been a long post. To end, thanks for your questions, Storm. I hope that my answers have been informative and interesting. In case I have said anything here that makes anyone feel like Poser and its users are not very important to Zygote, or that Zygote doesn't respect or takes you for granted, then I would like to make it clear that the opposite is true. Thanks for your support, concerns, and suggestions. -Chad Smith Zygote Media Group