Quote - I have bought nearly ever figure I own, the only exception being Mike 4. I bought him in morphs and textures. A lot of vendors (but not all) do 3D as a full time job. It's not fair to expect that they can even afford to give it away for free.

Cannot be expected, that is true. But on the other hand DAZ did exactly that and gave away their in hard vertex-pushing labour modeled V4 for free, yet they got enough money set aside to develop their own little application and genesis figure. So far for me it looks like that they did everything right.

Quote - I don't mind buying a figure if I really want to have it, and if I can't afford it, I'll wait until I can. I certainly have enough to keep me occupied until then :P. It's just the Daz mentality talking...they have us all spoiled with the free figures and rock bottom prices. Truth is tho, that it's hurt the little guy. They had to devalue their items just to sell them.

Yes, maybe, as a company they have the ability to shift their assets and losses a bit over time; make everything cheap now and then get rich next year. The little guy (who wants to make many dollars NOW) probably does not want or cannot do that. Not that i have anything against it, because it keeps prices low and makes room for more vendors than just a few; perfect for the cheap egoistic customer crowd like me.

Quote - I dunno. I have a certain respect for a vendor. 3D, and especially Poser rigging and the modeling and the texturing is a LOT of work. At most I bet they don't make more than 8 dollars an hour doing it, if that. Unless they sell hundreds. And of those there are only a lucky few who can demand that type of loyalty. Laurie

I have my doubts if selling 3d products can be simply valued with a dollars by hour measure and if the vendorism work the vendors do is the only income they have. I also have respect for the creators of the firefox browser i am using, which is free and has probably much more work in it than any 3d figure i have ever seen. If it is not money they probably get something else out of it (otherwise they would not do it). Of course this is unfair against Microsoft, who could otherwise sell their Internet Explorer for money, but i do not care.