Quote - When your realize you've made a bad decision it's best to admit it and just walk away from it. Unfortunately, in the corporate world, that seldom happens.

I remember a billion years ago when Poser (Curious Labs) made the software and Daz made the content and it seemed from my outside perspective to be symbiotic. Then Daz, in an attempt to capture all the market, cut the cord and came out with DS3, which they gave away for free. Problem is, they didn't capture the market and now they were stuck with software they had to develop and support that generated no income and Poser ended up as a stepchild product in a much bigger company. Now, again, DAZ is reprising that role on an even bigger scale.

Worse, this infighting and tactics to undermine one another (Geniesis not compatible with Poser) only created frustration for the customers and summoned into the fray a lot of very intelligent people capable of working around DAZ's marketing ploys (weight-mapped V4) and giving it away for free!

If only the honchos at DAZ could admit they made a mistake and decide to work with Poser instead of against it, it would be good for all parties involved.

The new DAZ management team wasn't there when the previous change of no more big reductions was announced last year. New management can almost always feel free to change what they want.

DAZ started DAZ Studio back in the day because it looked at the time like Poser was going to go away. Not because they wanted to go their own way and capture the market. It was survival pure and simple. Poser has changed hands several times, including a few times since. Reportedly relations are much better between DAZ and Smith Micro compared to e-frontier, the previous owner of Poser, who allegedly tried screwing DAZ over at every opportunity (for example, one story was  e-frontier wouldn't license the SDK DAZ needed to update the Poser import for Carrara unless they paid really big bucks. So no more dynamic hair or clothing easily from Poser to Carrara! One of the big reasons I first bought Carrara was because it could import and render Poser dynamic hair and clothing and that would've been great to have in later versions that had been fixed from when eovia owned Carrara and Hexagon. Carrara has a faster render engine and has had network rendering for a long time).

As for the free releases this month, the DAZ servers are getting slammed so you know a ton of people are taking advantage of the offer. Just wait until the word really gets out there. There are tons of people who are interested in 3D/CG who have never ever heard of Poser or DAZ Studio. Those folks will be quite happy to check it out. There are people who couldn't afford to upgrade to DAZ Advanced or to go the Pro route because of the economy. Now they have the Pro version for free. All that expands the customer base of DAZ further.

As for docs, they have made good progress with their new online documentation. There's more info in some sections compared to the previous released manual. My preferred choice is still video training and they have plenty of YouTube videos that help me just fine.

As for Bryce and Hexagon development being suspended... they already said that's only for now because they have everyone on the development team working on fixing bugs in DAZ Studio, finishing Carrara 8.5 (and they have been working on 9) and getting the documentation done. They usually work on one piece of software at a time. They started work on Carrara when they had wrapped up most of their work on DS 4. They started most of their work on DS4 after they had wrapped up most of their work on Bryce 7. This stuff is all public knowledge.

With the economy as bad as it is, and even worse in Europe, I'm sure they felt they had to do something that would help stir up interest and from there make more content sales (I know one 3D website was going to close because their sales had dried up and they said the majority of their customers were from Europe. A last minute plea to their customers has kept them around a little longer). DAZ makes most of their money from content sales. Software is a small part of their business. I would bet that software sales had slowed to a crawl since the release for DS 4 and Pro is the version that has all the bells and whistles people want except for aniMate 2 (you have to buy that separate since GoFigure owns it). Making DAZ Studio 4 Pro a loss leader for a month really isn't a bad idea for DAZ. It will get more users to check out their store and maybe even purchase stuff they wouldn't have known even existed.

I'm only guessing DS 4.1 might be a paid increase because of the big jump in render speed. Maybe they got a more recent version of 3Delight and they might have to pay for it and thus pass along the cost. Usually, the version of 3Delight they use in Studio is a version behind so it costs less for the license. For the render speed jump, it sounds to me like they got the new 3Delight version 10 which has a much, much  faster  raytracing speed. Or they got some extra help on their licensed version from the 3Delight team. I bet it cost more money for that. That's probably why it's not in a current release yet.

Carrara 8.5 will be coming out of beta soon and it will be a paid upgrade. That was announced months ago. That's probably why it's not part of the free blitz. Also another reason I could see them charging for a point upgrade. It has been done before.

Kevin