blondie999: Actually, "marketing" is advertising for the purpose of sales. It is entirely irrelevant whether it is directed at someone who has bought from you before. Wal-Mart does marketing for people who have previously shopped in their stores just as much for people who have not. General Motors does marketing for people who have previously purchased GM vehicles just as much as for people who have not. Etc.

While every company wants to expand its base, marketing to the base is still marketing, and it is NOT a minor issue. Many companies sell an average of one item per customer, while others sell new items regularly to the same old customers. And that difference is not simply about quality and support (although that of course helps). It is marketing.

It may be that there will not be a wildly successful figure comparable to V4 again. But for the sake of the question posed in this thread, I think for a non-DAZ figure to accomplish it, it would require several things, a number of which have already been mentioned.

1. Production and support by a company that is in a position to make a sustained push.

2. Realism. Now, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not mistake "realism" here for "average." (See next point.) While the realism purist crowd will render average and even ugly figures, the mainstream user wants realism in the sense that stunning celebrities are real (which means: sort of, if you factor in makeup, photo retouching blah blah blah).

3. Default stunning looks. If you want to co-opt the top figures, default face must be the most beautiful default face available. (Similarly, default body shape must be attractive.) Period.

4. Visual adaptability. The default beauty must still be just neutral enough that you can easily morph the mesh into other beautiful shapes. (And if that's possible, the rest of us will still be able to morph into less beautiful shapes.)

5. Content support at release. Nothing much to add here; almost everyone has pointed to this issue.

6. Low ownership cost. I don't think the figure has to be free to be successful, but if you want something on a massive scale, IMO you cannot charge $30-40 like Terai Yuki or Mariko. No matter how you argue that a figure is "worth it," if you're planning on mass hysteria, you'll much prefer 100,000 people buying a figure at $10 to 500 people paying $40. Not only is the math better on the figure sales itself, it also builds in a lucrative market. 500 people are only going to buy so much content.

JoePublic can talk until he is blue in the face. But JoePublic's figure wouldn't sell 50 copies (were it his to sell), is my guess. That's not the sort of realism that is important to the mainstream.

Nor is impressive technology for the sake of impressive technology gonna do it, either. Some of what Genesis does is impressive; some looks impressive at first glance only; and some is just beside the point. (For instance, beyond the novelty, being able to morph a male into a female and back again may be "neat," but in truth it isn't a capability that really offers much practically for most people and is in fact pretty limiting.)

Now, of course, a mainstream figure should use as much of the actually good new tech as possible (and use it easily, with no fuss), but a backward compatible version would still be necessary. To be fully mainstream, you have to catch the people who are not early adopters and are usually a version or two behind. That's just the way it is.

Probably equally important: These two versions would need interchangeable wardrobes etc. Impossible? Well, by interchangeable, the interchangeability would be so far as the user goes. In actuality, just as there is such thing as browser sniffing in the web dev world which decides what version of a web page is to be served, so too here, there would be a script running in the background detecting whether a given piece of clothing was going on the "modern" (weight mapped etc) version of the figure or the "legacy" version. Etc.

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