Attached Link: http://www.poserdoll.com/dancingflower/index.html

I think figure makers should follow this example. Make a lite version for example a spaceship with no interiors and unmoving parts but the paid version has a cool interior, movable parts and overall awesomeness.

Umm that will decrease sales. Most who would have bought the full one will be happy with the lite version. Eg what if the customer just wanted the spaceship for an exterior shot? Now he gets it for free and doesn't need to buy the full version. That counts as a lost customer.

Yeah, I agree...way to many will be satisfied with the free version. LOL.

I think this would apply better (and does) to software, which will give someone a run, enough to see if it'll work with their system, workflow, etc.

Laurie

I'd say it depends on the item and the differences between the free and paid version. You can argue about the semantics but DAZ essentially gave away a 'lite' version of their figures for quite a while. You had to buy the morphs to get the full functionality. I doubt that many peoiple were content without the full package. There've been a couple of figures that had free 'limited' versions that had perhaps very few or no morphs, and a very simple texture - Sraci is one I recall. I can't say how well that worked for them.

You'd really have to look at the market, e.g. I agree that for a spaceship it might not pay. You have to figure how many people would do exterior renders vs. how many would do interiors and want all the bells and whistles - same thing for a car. With human figures, it's may be easier, most people probably want the morphs and nice textures. Of course, those who would be happy with the exterior wouldn't necessarlly buy the full version anyway, so the loss might not be that bad. If they have the lite version and one day decide they want a detailed model then there's a greater chance they'll go with your product.

I'm not sure how well it works for software in general either for that matter. I'm sure it does in some cases. OTOH, I have lite versions of things like Revo Uninstaller, Atlantis word processor, NoteTab text editor etc. The free versions do all that I need, and I bet that's the case for a lot of others - how many people buy the deluxe anti-virus package? Where a lot of the software vendors make money is with commercial use sales and features that are more necessary for businesses.

Tha dancing flower is actually a pretty good item for a lite version. If I liked the free one, I'd probably want the one with all the moves.  

A lite version of a Poser product is like a lite version of a feather when you consider the price in most cases; however, the workload isn't lite at all. I don't fault content creators for not bothering with another version of their product to be downloaded for free and most likely forgotten on the hard drives of the collecting multitudes.

I have a free version of my car materials, I dont think its negatively effected sales of the full version, but that is mainly due to the type of product.  In the free version you get around 30 materials, but the full version has 167, greatly expanding the free categories with more options.  Here the free version I think attracts sales, as people want more choices once they get a taste of it.

That is not really possible with figures and objects.  Unless you released a free non UV mapped version. I am sure there would still be people out there who are satisfied with even just a basic non-texturable model. They do this over at Turbosquid. Well a few sellers do. It seems to work for them, and I can see in principal why.  For a figure you would get to look at the model in your own app and lighting/style but unable to texture it, or pose it (without a rediculous amount of work). a very low res non-uv but posable version could work too I think.
Also generally you would not see a quick gain in sales, as purchases are delayed by having the free version to play with.  How stripped the freebie is will decide how long it takes before people decide to "upgrade" to the full.

with a free version that is geared towards bringing more purchases you need to way up the amount of lost purchases against the amount of additional purchases the exposure the free item brings you.  Some people will be satisfied with the free version and you lose a purchase, whereas some people who would not have purchased before will be convinced to buy thanks to trying the free item.
On top of that, in order for a free item to make any real difference at all, it needs to reach a wide audience, which can be just as hard as making a purchasable product reach a wide audience. You would need ALOT of downloads to see any noticable increase in sales past daily fluxuations.

If you are an established seller with a large client base of course, this is all extremely relevant, but smaller sellers will mostly just lose out on sales releasing a free version.

Yep, untextured is another option, especially if the textures add considerable value. Again, depends on the product.  For something like a car, it's may be too easy to for people to use something like those shaders etc. thus make the textures less valuable - unique human figures would be different.

I l;ike the model EvilInnocence uses with CrossDresser, i.e. free modules for some less used figures. I was thrilled they had a free module for Pu Doll. Even if I didn't want the full product, I'd still give them plenty of good word of mouth. You don't have that many options with content, at least not Poser content. I know that some Vue content is 'node locked' to your serial number. AFAIK, the only functionality limitation is that you can't export it. Presumably with a binary format and some clever coding, you could do things like distribute a full figure and have certain features require a purchased lic. code to work. Of course, that would require support built into the application. You could say that RTEncoding is a (very) approximate implemnetation, in that it requires you to have something (a valid .obj file) in order for the product to work, but its all or nothing. With a more sophisticated scheme, you could, in theory, do a lot more, even 'rental' assets that expire after a certain period. That's probably more suited to productioon environments than Poser where someone might want to e.g. rent one of Zygote's expensive human models for a single project. 

DAZ gives Genesis away for free, as they did V4 and M4 previously, and V3, M3, H3 and A3 before that.  However, there has to be a large incentive to buy upgrades to make this model work; this apparently didn't work for DAZ Studio Pro 4.0, for instance.....

I wonder if something like the OBJ visualization system used at ShareCG could become an online trial system.  Instead of simply rolling the mesh around, you could run a figure or prop in an online instance of Poser or Daz or Vue for a few minutes, with a watermark over the resultant images.

"However, there has to be a large incentive to buy upgrades to make this model work; this apparently didn't work for DAZ Studio Pro 4.0, for instance....."

I don't remember what the Pro version added but, probably not enough things that a lot of people felt they needed. I would have made a free version that only worked with male figures - simple :-)

"Instead of simply rolling the mesh around, you could run a figure or prop in an online instance of Poser or Daz or Vue for a few minutes, with a watermark over the resultant images."

I don't know if it's still up but DAZ had an 'online' version of DS4 that let you play a bit with Genesis - try different morphs, add some clothing etc. The link was in the thread where one of their folks (Randall?) was trying to discuss DS4/Genesis. I'm not sure if it was intended as a demo or a proof of concept for a real online service. Something like that might tie in with asset rental, giving you access to their whole catalog without having to buy or download anything. I don't see a reason offhand why they couldn't use that technology to create the type of demo functionality you describe. That would be one huge freaking runtime - probably not much bigger than what I've seen some folks here describe though :-) * *