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People seem to feel they are entitled to more than they are willing to legitimately pay for.

I'm not so sure here... customers produce price pressure, especially if there is competition.

Comparison? Sure: Poser has a few bits and bobs that nobody else has at that price range... or does it? DAZ|Studio + Carrara 6 (which costs roughly as much as P7 now, and probably less than "Poser Pro" when that comes out) has a shedload more in the way of actual functionality than Poser has, with a better renderer to boot.

Feature sets of course do differ. P7 has the "face room", which some find useful, others (like me) find useless. Direct material re-arrangement is nice, as are joint editing, etc... but they're not exactly deal-makers or deal-breakers for most folks.

OTOH, Poser's big feature draws boil down to exactly two: Dynamic Hair, and Dynamic Cloth. (AOL/IBL can be had in D|S w/ plugins such as pwSurface for a fairly nominal cost).

If DAZ |Studio does indeed come out with direct competition for either Dynamic feature (esp. cloth) --and it doesn't suck-- Poser is screwed.

Quote - If these features are important enough to you, then you'll "find" the money to pay for them, just as you "found" money to pay for P7, which many seem to believe wasn't much more than a P6.5 anyway. (Which itself was supposedly just P5.5, but that's enough of that.) If those features are not important to you, then you get to just stick with Poser 7.

Or... I can just find similar suites at similar price points which offer more of what I want (even if more than one), and simply purchase that (those) instead.

Them's the breaks, yo?  Poser ain't the only kid on the block anymore. Their mission is simple: Respond to Market, or Die.

Quote - e-Frontier has not left anyone out in the cold. They've simply listened to what the general community wants, and wrote code to fill those desires. Is it any coincidence that the main features of this Pro version are the same ones discussed in the recent survey they conducted?

No doubt... and I give 'em props for doing it (though there seems to be a lack of native Linux support... ;) ).

Quote - Maybe they should just go open source and start giving away the software? Would that make people happy?

Considering that RedHat rakes in quite a lot more per annum than EF does? I'd say a lot of folks would be rather happy about that all around :)

/P