Aeilkema, sorry but I have to respectfully disagree. you have NO fact or numbers to back up your statements at all.

You have no idea how much developement costs, no inkling of how long it takes to develop technical advancements, and no real world prespective on things other then your own personal desires.

We have no real world idea of how many copies of Poser 7 are out there, and no idea how much actual profit was made on them.

If EF had money to burn and unlimited dollars, I'm sure they would hav erewritten the cde base, because there would be no reason NOT to.

And it IS fair to compare Poser with other 3d utilites, because at the end of the day, that IS what it actually is.

You see everyone creating poser utilites and content as "fat cats" when in fact many or most are struggling to survive, just like Newtek is.

Newtek's rewriting of the code base has put them 1-2 years behind everyone else in the 3d marketplace, and they can't afford to hire more developers to even play catchup.

When Lightwave was initially released, it cost $2500 for a license... the dollar has depreciated by probably 50% or MORE since then, yet Lightwave's price is now less 2 fifths of that price.. and the company is barely treading water because of that.

The high cost of developement, and the massive loss of revenue from sales is killing them more each year.

Let's say that they employ 20 of the top techs in the 3d developement field, and each make more then 100,000 a year.  That means 2 MILLION alone go JUST to the employees salaries for further product developement. And 100,000 for top fdevelopement people is probably pretty cheap.

So let's say they release a new lightwave tomorrow, and sell 5,000 units in 3 months time. Assuming that they make $300 of each seat (retailers usually make 40-50% off products), that eans in 3 months, they haven;t even made back the developement cost ... AND they've also now increased developement cost by almost 1/4 a million because the developers are working on bug fixes. mac versions, 64 bit versions and such.

If they are LUCKY, by the end of the next year, they are in the black again. An with the HUGE number of 3d applications on the market, each developer gets a smaller and smaller share of the entire marketplace every year.

So when they talk to thier stockholders, what do they say about the small return on investment? Fire some of the developers to reduce costs? Don't develop new features needed to keep up with the marketplace? Increase retail price so there is a bigger margin? Ofer a smaller discount to retailers, who then might no longer carry lightwave?

Then there's also the production costs, manual writing and printing, and then tech support, as well as corporate support, which requires a lot more support investment.

You really need to have watched these companies for years, and read all the cvarious things to understand more about developement costs vs retail prices.

Poser has changed hands how many times now? And the companies that carried poser are still huge profot generating entities? No? If not, then  if they were overcharging for the program, AND making massive profits, where did they go? And why?

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.