Quote - It should be self explanatory. There are no hoops to jump through to get V4 to work in Poser. There are many users who do not want to use anything but Poser, and many of them haven't upgraded to P9+. 

(eta: x-posted the above w/ coleman)

 

Then it's curious that several major vendors at rendo has hoop jumped to make V6 clothing, characters, poses and props over making things for native dawn. Some of those same vendors have set up shop over at DAZ too and not Hivewire. And some vendors that were staunchly against genesis have made items for them after their Dawn offering flopped and ended up on rendo's hot list a few weeks back.

Sounds like more people would rather hoop jump than load up Poser native Dawn.

 

Quote - But there have been several sales of P10 and PP2014 with drastic cuts on the price, making it very affordable for those who weren't necessarily able to upgrade right away before. So that will naturally have broadened the user base of P10. There are also other websites that still have P9 and PP2012 for sale, and have at times cut the prices rather drastically, again increasing the userbase. 

I got my upgrade to Poser 10 through a mac bundle (with 5 other mac programs) along with Anime Studio pro for $39.

That's like almost giving it away.

Quote - The difference with Poser is that you have to pay for your upgrades, and a lot of people don't upgrade right away. It takes them a good while to do so, either due to their finances or just not seeing anything that really stands out to them innitially. The economy hasn't been all that great for the last several years, so a lot of people can't afford upgrading software when they have other things in RL that are much more pressing. 

I think the most important thing in upgrades is that people will upgrade, regardless of finances, if there is a compelling reason to do so. If there is a must have feature, people especially those of us that are addicted to buying content, we will find a way to scrape up that money to get the product. It sounds like Smith Micro isn't there yet. If my tipping point is $10 when I got it in a bundle of mac programs I wanted, I think that's a problem that SM needs to look at.

I think SM's focus is more on resusing their and 3rd party content: from the fitting room, SSS to make older figures look better, to the game edition where their whole 5gb library can be licensed for games. I don't think they're particularly focused on figures and from the way these threads pop up from time to time about figures, maybe they should divert a little attention to that and not rely upon others to fill that void.

That said, I think the Poser group may be reluctant to do it because developing a good versatile figure sounds like it's a huge investment to do. And with SM's largest division, mobile, on shaky ground I don't think they'll be able to ask for a lot of money to do it either. 

Quote - So this is going to affect how well a new figure that requires that software is going to be recieved innitially. Vendors that attempted to incorporate the newer features into their content back when P9 was new, that are not supported by older versions, were likely not all that impressed with their sales early on so they gave up on it and went back to building content that was compatible with the last 10 years of Poser versions. Today their sales should be stronger for content with those features because there are many more users that have upgraded since then. 

 True, however failure is a strong motivator not to repeat doing something. 

Quote - I don't think Dawn is a doomed figure. She still has a loyal following who are supportive of her development and her developers. But like Coleman said, it's going to take time for that appeal to grow. HW3D are still developing for her, so they must be making enough from her currently to consider it beneficial to continue. 

I think the founders are pretty much in a position to burn through money because they are not necessarily reliant upon putting out product to make a living.

However the vendors are. I don't think Dawn was well received by the customers otherwise vendors would have kept releasing items for her. It looks like either those vendors either went back to V4, moved to V6 or are making items that work for both V4 and V6. There's an occasional Dawn item in the store, but the most support I've seen are hair fits.

And from looking at Hivewire's store, it looks like VanishingPoint has taken over. The first page is full of their back catalog you can get here. I'm thinking Hivewire has backed off its exclusivity clause because you can get the same things here as well as their own site as well. A good chunk of their items are props rather than figures. It seems like a lot of their major vendors that initially made product has went back over to DAZ, probably made more money there. The ones are left are a few that release over at contentparadise as well.