I think people will support whatever they want to. I know that sounds over simplified, but trendy isn't to be under estimated. You probably shouldn't stop short with that belief. It's important to understand customer buying habits to better feed products to those customers. I don't know if any of my observations can help. The Poser market is different today than what it was five years ago. Older Poser buyers were used to paying $30-$60 apiece for content. Newer customers, like me, aren't used to paying that much for anything. One thought for widening Apollo's user base would be to break the figure up to smaller marketable packages. The sum cost of all the pieces can be a little more than what's bundled with Apollo today to make the bundle still the deal to get. The main Apollo figure should be inexpensive so that more people will buy him and potentially want to buy more. The market potential for Apollo is only as good as the base of customers that own the figure. Nobody, that doesn't own the figure, is buying any Apollo products. More importantly, there aren't a lot of freebie users making Apollo products and I can only guess it's because they likewise do not own the figure. I'd suggest giving Apollo away to the more prominent community members, doing clothing freebies, to help invigorate community support for the figure. Apollo's cost has stopped me from buying the figure. I don't have enough time to do a lot of Poser artwork, so it's hard to justify the initial cost investment even though it may be a better deal in the long run. Apollo's base figure may be a better deal than Michael 3 after adding all the products together, but it's still too expensive. I buy new DAZ figures maximizing vouchers, coupons, and sales, so I'm not paying the individual prices. I've got figures I can use, so I'm in no hurry to buy the figure, head morphs, body morphs, textures, and hairs all at once. I can wait till there's a sale and PC voucher to drop the price to a few dollars. Enough people still have to have everything right away, so it's remains a viable marketing strategy for DAZ. Even if I buy the figure, it doesn't mean that I'll use the figure. There's only so much time in any week that I can devote to doing Poser art and the time to learn something new comes at the expense of doing something creative. My first inclination is going to be to use the figure that I've got the clothing for. I can always try to use Wardrobe Wizard to convert something to Apollo, but that's a hit-or-miss proposition depending on what clothing item is being used and, even when it works right, there's still some investment in time to make it happen. Unless I happen to be posing Michael in a way that the bend problems annoy me, I probably won't bother using Apollo. If the bends start bothering me, I might try Apollo and be happy enough with the results that it's worth the trip to WW to try getting the clothing I want to use onto him. The entropy of using what we're comfortable with is a hard thing to break. Something has to be really much better than what I'm using, or more quickly suitable for the drawing I want to do, to break my habit of using what I'm used to working with. Getting me to break those habits is hard to do. The first step of that is getting the new figure into my hands. There aren't any other steps taken till then. After that, it's a matter of educating the community how the new figure is an improvement worth taking the extra time to use more. That is tricky because not everybody has time to read every article in every forum. Again, it's another investment in time that takes time away from other activities. The hard part for you is finding a way to reach me. Those are some of the problems with introducing a new figure. It's hard for me to want to spend much money on a new figure when I already have an adequate figure to work with. DAZ had the good fortune of producing the first advances with Poser figures with Victoria and Michael and those figures have a lot of free and commercial support. Both figures were a significant jump from the old P4 figures. Versions 2 and 3, for those figures have been more modest evolutionary advances and not as significant a jump. Apollo has struck me, from what I've seen and read, as being a bit of a jump from M3, but not so big that I've felt the need to abandon M3 in the same fashion as when I pushed the P4 Male aside for Michael. > 2) I found out from a staff member about an internal discussion to discontinue the Apollo in a few months if his purchase couldn't be coerced. Just like what they did to Dodger and would have done to Koshini. The joke was called "Minimize Maximus". I guess I'm not sure what that means. Were all these producers pushed to sell DAZ their products outright versus remaining brokered items? If that's the case, I can understand reasons for DAZ to want to own figure products that would have wide support, such as human figures and human toon figures. A brokered artist can leave any time with their product and all the ancillary support for those products likewise goes away. That's not a big deal for a prop or clothing item, or even some animals because the loss, at most would only amount to a few items having to be removed once the product was gone. When Koshini was moved to RDNA, dozens of products by many different producers were also removed because of DAZ's policy to not sell products for anything but their figures. In one sense, it's a good business policy to maintain their survival. In another, it's a bad one when shifting policy midstream and alienating artists that had come on board with an agreement that favored them better. Without getting much deeper into the movie analogy, which doesn't equate well with Poser, I was never implying that "Star Wars" created science fiction, but that it created a trend that made science fiction a much more commercially viable product than it had ever been before. "Star Wars" appealed to the mainstream public in ways that "2001" never could. Looking at the top 100 grossing movies, adjusting ticket prices to inflation, there wasn't a single science fiction movie on the list before "Star Wars" and there were 15 on the list after "Star Wars". Every other cinematic genre is represented before "Star Wars", ranging from drama to action to western to comedy to animation, but not a single science fiction movie. There's even two horror films on the list. That's evidence enough for me to say that science fiction movies weren't a fad prior Lucas jumping in (not to mention that I was waiting around back then for good scifi entertainment and not finding much out there other than on the printed page). Right now, westerns aren't trendy, but it doesn't mean that the "Alamo" or "Open Range" weren't released to some level of critical and/or commercial success, but they certainly didn't start a western trend the way "Star Wars" kicked off a big-budget scifi trend. If somebody put out a western that made $400,000 this summer, there would be a good chance that there would be a number of westerns released the following year and that would be the start of a new trend. That doesn't mean westerns didn't enjoy success in the past. It just means that they're not fashionable now, so less get made and it's harder to get them the kind of budget that today's trendy movies can command. When Lucas made "Star Wars", he was starting a trend, not following one. It wasn't intentional. He was only trying to make a movie that he'd like to see. That's the way it is with most creative artists. They're not trying to follow trends. They're following their own personal muses. An artist, making a living, tends to be more beholden to what is fashionable in whatever circles they're working in, but there are usually ways to be creative even within the confines of what customers are willing to pay for. Relating trends in movies to trends in Poser is mixing apples and oranges. There's a difference in practical usage because sticking with already owned figures vs. purchasing new figures makes sense over watching one genre vs. another. When I don't want to invest in a new Poser human figure, it's not because I'm afraid that I'm not using what's fashionable. It's because I already have something that works and don't need to spend more money on a figure that I don't perceive as being so much better to justify the cost. If I didn't already own M2 or M3, Apollo would be a more serious purchase consideration. I don't have the same concerns with movies. If I had only one to watch, "Return of the King" or "Open Range", I'd lean to fantasy over western. There was no reason to not see both movies and they were both great in different ways. Buying Apollo is more akin to buying a new computer--I know there's a better one than what I have, but I've already got one that works and I'd rather save the money. Besides, both EFrontier and DAZ are supposed to be working on significantly improved posing figures that will have new technical advances beyond what their respective posing software use today. That's makes any new figure investments today questionable because today's figures are limited by what Poser and Studio can do today. If anybody's interested in science fiction film grosses, here's an interesting link: http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/ScienceFiction.php

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon