Quote - I don't want to be pessimistic about this development but there a lot of good reasons to be unsettled about Poser's long term fate in view of this sale.

And in turn, richabri, you've summed up my feelings about this news. 

It's difficult to be optimistic when we know little or nothing about the new owners, and even less about their plans for Poser. I'd like to be, but as a content creator, I'm definitely concerned. 

On the plus side, I have a pretty large base of DS users, since I was one of the first people to create DS versions for my products. That's a version with a separate installer - no poser install required. I saw that DS was going to be more than an overnight sensation and made it my business to know about it, and develop products properly for it (as opposed to just chucking in a few DS presets), and that's paid off well over the last couple of years.

However, as I said either here or at DAZ, I don't want to see DS have a monopoly any more than I liked seeing Poser have a monopoly. One company lording it over a single market with it's software is not good for anyone, including the company in question. When there's no competition, it encourages laziness and a 'who cares?' attitude. Bad for everyone.

Re Doom & Gloom - I may come over sounding gloomy, but that's only because I'm looking at worst-case scenarios. In reality, I'm fairly confident that Poser will be around for a while. Here's what looks likely to happen over the next year or two.

1. Poser Pro will come out. No big news. It's already a done deal. That'll give SM some initial income (unless they have other arrangements with e-F). Whatever. It's not crucial right now.

2. The Poser dev team will carry on with P8 and it'll be released when it's ready.

3. There will be a period of at least 6 months after P8 when SM will watch the sales and decide whether the game's worth the candle. If P8 sells, they may go ahead and finance P9, which will already be partly started anyway, (because the dev team don't sit on their asses while the last version is already out there).

4. So, in 2-3 years from now, we may/may not see another change of ownership. Another possibility is that SM will repeat the above scenario with P9, then make a decision. Yet another possibility is they'll decide to cut their losses early on, and drop all funding for Poser and resell it quick.

Of all of those, the last is definitely the least appealing scenario. Let's hope it never comes to that.

mac