(pops head in)

 

Okay, I'm just going to say this... I'm starting to do textures, but other than that, I'm an end user. I highly doubt that I will ever be much of a content creator besides the textures. I primarily create covers for indie books, and I need lots of free content.

Let's enter "free genesis daz content" into Google.

(hm... hm... type type type)

There doesn't seem to be almost anything here. Okay, let's try ShareCG...

(typety type)

Three pages. And I don't see anything for Gen2 yet.

Now, let's entire in "free v4 content)

(jumps back to avoid virtual flood)

!!! There's a lot out there, let's just say.

On ShareCG...

102 pages.

Yep, one hundred and two versus three.

Now, when did Genesis 1 first come out?

(researchy research)

Okay, I need to keep watching a roast in the oven, so I can't find the exact date. But I found refs to it in May 2011.

It's an Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, IMHO. Two full years, and there's very little Genesis content that's free out there with a simple casual search. Unbelievable loads of stuff for V4 (and M4, too.)

Guess what a lot of end users are thinking..."Wow, the economy's bad. I want things that are free! Yay! Look at everything for V4!"

Now, I'm a research kind of person, and one thing I've been trying to find for awhile is any actual sales figure for Genesis. I can't find one scrap of information anywhere. I haven't seen anyone else come up with actual, solid facts and figures, and I have looked. That says something to me. There is no transparency, and maybe there's a reason.

So I don't know the whole story, and I don't know if anybody else does either. But this is a bunch of facts that can be put together. And coming out with a new second-gen figure, complete with lots of stuff that will need to be bought and not immediately compatible with the old free stuff without fiddling around, does not seem like a smart business decision to me. A lot of people have already been antagonized by the whole thing. So between the two, I would bet on Dawn being far more successful.

 

 ETA:

SmithMicro is on NASDAQ, and Daz is not, being a privately held company. Now, there are a lot of reasons why a company might not have gone public, but it means that they aren't required to release financial statements. I've been an investor for a long time (a small one...), and I am very leery of private companies. There's usually a good reason why they haven't made stock available as a public offering. This may be good, bad or neutral... but one day, people may look back on this and... okay. I'm not going to say anything else. Just an FYI...