Let me add something to this discussion about software piracy and Poser. There was (and is) a strong incentive for buying a legal copy of Poser. At E-F you can only download updates after you registered with your serial number. If you want to have updates, serials generated with a keygen are useless since E-F knows which serials had been assigned to legal copies. Moreover, as a registered user you were granted free content which was in fact worth at least 100 $. So Poser was not expensive at all. I bought it, I decided that it is not the program I like to work with, but I do not regret buying it since the content I got was alone worth the price.

What impact does piracy really have on the software business? Adobe, Microsoft and Autodesk, to name just a few well known companies, prove that you can make a lot of money in spite of piracy. Microsoft has the easiest job. The WGA is quite efficient and if you have a computer that is connected to the internet you will sooner or later get into trouble if you have a pirated copy. Moreover MS software is cheap enough to be affordable for everyone and the operating system is bundled with most new computers. Autodesk and Adobe have a different strategy. They have mostly given up the hobbyist market and concentrate on the professionals to whom they sell their software at prices that cannot be afforded by most hobbyists. The copy protection they implement is more or less an alibi. I think they can live with hobbyists using pirated copies since the more people know their software the better it is for them. Think about how many companies employ people who have learned their skills in school or university or even at home by using pirated copies of 3D Max, Autocad and Photoshop. The same strategy worked well for MS and now, having a quasi monopoly, they are more serious about fighting piracy.

Lets get back to Poser. Poser did not fell victim to the software pirates but to bad marketing and poor software design decisions like the music industry was not eroded by P2P but by the quality of the music they tried to sell. It is an absolute mystery to me why E-F only had revenues of 6 or 7 Mio.I have to believe it because its the official number but this number is unbelievably low. My only explanation is that many newbies are satisfied with the free DAZ studio, that many of the the more serious users have switched to high end apps like 3D Max, Maya or C4D (pirated or not), that E-F could  not convince loyal Poser users that P7 was worth the upgrade price, that they realized that the new Carrara will drag even more people away from Poser and that e-shops like Renderosity and DAZ provide better content at lower prices so that sales at Content Paradise were not high enough to justify further Poser development. In this case selling Poser was just consequent and I do not believe that it will survive.