Quote - Lostinspaceman, some poser content creators are lucky if the make 2/3rds of minimum wage on thier products. How long do you think you could feed your family on $6 a hour?

And I myself amlost quit doing poser cntent after an almost abysmal year. Even though I had more products available, I made less last year then the two previous years... and we aren't taking a little less, we're talking a LOT less.

I do this full time, and yet by September last year, my total sales for the year were less then $4000. (That comes out to about $440 a MONTH... barely over $100 a week for professional 3d work, or about $2.50 an hour.) And some content creators are "envious" of my success! LOL!

I was lucky though, a few outstanding selling products in october and november kept me in the game a little longer. if I was the single bread winner for our hosehold, I would have given this up 3 years ago, but since my wife makes the majority of our money, this gives me the freedom to take care of household stuff, as well as bringing "play money" into our household. My income makes extra payments on credit cards, and gives up extra cash to buy things we'd like, but couldn't afford on just a one income salary.

So don't tell my how craftsmen have it so much harder because they have to create multiple products, when they are making $15-$20 at their trade, and I'm lucky if I'm making minumum wage at mine.

There were estimates a year ago, that more then 70% of poser content creators that are full time, make $12,000 a year or LESS. That averages out to about $6.25 an hour, showing clearly that 3d content creation for poser is VERY undervalued. You'd think the skilled trade of quality 3d content creation would pay better then someone who weaves baskets.

Just curious, but do you think Smith Micro charging more than twice what Poser used to cost is going to fix that?  Not arguing with your figures here, just wondering about the overall logic.  I don't see how Smith Micro's inflating of poser pricing is going to really do much in the way of helping out the content creators.

Right now Posers market is pretty much the hobbyist.  That won't change, not unless Smith Micro decides to bring Poser on par with the myriad of other programs you can get in the $500 range that have features that Poser can only dream of at this point.

Don't get me wrong, I love Poser - it works great for what I use it for, and I don't need a $500 3d app for what I use Poser to do, which is why I bought it in the first place.  But SM is entering an already established market with a program that is woefully behind the curve when compared with everything else in that price range and expecting to make inroads with a couple of add ons that allow you to integrate with higher end 3d apps that you need to plunk down a chunk of change on seperately.

I just don't see that happening for a variety of different reasons, and even if it did I don't see that it's going to really affect the prices of content or the profit margin of content creators.  If anything I think it would depress it, rather than stimulate it.  Your looking at fewer new users, and if they do manage to capture even a small market share of the "pro" market these are folks that for the most part are not going to spend much money on something they could model themselves with there own high end 3d app that they are using Poser to support.

So while I certainly sympathize with your plight, I don't see Smith Micro's ham handed bumbling marketing strategy to be anything remotely close to the answer to your prayers, in fact quite the opposite.  They are going to probably depress the number of new Poser users because the app is now going to be out of the price range of most hobbyists, and thus the number of people looking for content will decrease dramatically. 

Those of us who've been using poser for years will probably stick it out a bit longer at least, but like one of the previous folks mentioned most of us have oodles and oodles of stuff already, and we don't really buy things as frequently as a newbie with no content to his name would.  We're looking for the best bang for our buck, so what we do buy is going to be the high quality stuff, which of course means the content creator has to spend a lot more time on it, which further depresses his/her profit margin.

So I'd have to disagree with you that Smith Micro's new and "improved" pricing structure is going to do content creators any good at all, I just don't see that happening.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...