"Software" means absolutely nothing without great figures to use it on.

90% of Poser users couldn't care less about IDL, IBL, weightmapping, SubD or SSS. Just look at the products currently made and bought. Not a single one that could be used for PP-2014 right out of the box. I spend more times reworking and fixing things to make them PP-2014 compatible than rendering.

Poser's "Do it yourself" mantra is a buisiness failure. How many people are really talented enough to use those fancy tools properly ?

How many people really have a full grasp of what the material room can do ?

How many people can weightmap a figure to a professional level ?

Sorry, Poser is not a "Poor man's MAX". It's first and foremost a hobbyist tool for those who want to render pretty pictures without too much fuzz.

DAZ understood that, that's why Genesis is so easy to use and easy to cater for. There is hardly any tech in Studio that isn't meant to improve Genesis.

Poser OTOH has lots of tech glued to it because it was cheap, easy to implement and looked cool in the advertising blurb. And then it still took several iterations before that "cool" tech actually worked like it was supposed to be.

Sorry, but I'd rather have a figure like Genesis without IDL, IBL, SSS, SubD and whatever else than all those things but be stuck with something like Roxy.

To put it bluntly: SSS and SubD and IBL and IDL don't sell Poser.

Vicky does.

That's why Poser is hemorrhaging users and Studio is top dog now.

DAZ says:

Here's Vicky 6 ! And once you're finshed admiring her, look at all the tech we implemented into Studio to make her look even better but still easy to use. And btw, it's FREE.

Poser on the other hand:

Here's some cool tech we picked up for free. If you work really, really hard and are really talented, you might be able to make Posette look almost as good as Vicky 4 some day. Sorta.

And it's all yours for just $499.

 

I have put 14 years of work into Poser, so I'm not eager to switch.

And thankfully, with just a few mouseclicks, I can have Poser AND a great figure like Genesis.

But if I were a new user just starting with CGI, choosing between Poser and Studio would be a no brainer.

You can buy lots of V6 content for $499.