MistyLaraCarrara opened this issue on Jun 03, 2015 · 355 posts
WandW posted Sun, 28 June 2015 at 11:19 AM
"DAZ vowed years ago to be the "Poser killer," even said so publicly in an interview. That is their goal."
I can't get over the irony of that statement because of a post at a different forum by a former owner. If it was years ago then it was different management all together and you can't attribute the statement to the current management that implemented genesis and the new weight mapping.
Indeed. DAZ is now a small piece of a $74 Billion corporation. The question for their current management is; does it increase the value of DAZ more to increase sales by continuing to support Poser compatible, at some development expense, or not support Poser and eventually charge for the Pro/Advanced versions of Studio, as was originally envisaged...
Or option, three expand into the larger market (As with G3 DQ weight maps) and continue to drive revenue by offering a free platform and relying on the sale of content. There are some obvious advantages of giving DS away for free you do not seem to be seeing. DA has a whole bunch of powerful development tools included for free. Putting these in the hands of users mean more content will be developed for DS which in turn can lead to increased revenue for DAZ3D when those users partner with DS(the largest market) to sell their content. Giving the platform away for free also means costs are consolidated as the user base is for the most part is consistently on the same version of the platform. Poser suffers from a fragmented user base simply because the cost of chasing upgrades to the platform creates a lag effect. In its most basic application giving it away means more user -> means more customer buying content.
One more time; a few points:
Your third choice does not exclude the two that I have posited; indeed, they have already made half of that choice by going to a standard rigging scheme. But, people who are going to use Genesis 3+ in high end apps are going to continue using those apps.
The management issue is that they are giving away a Pro version whose comparable competitor has a street price of over $200; that is a lot of money to be leaving on the table; over $1 million revenue per 5000 copies, at negligible cost. Currently their HD creation tools are too valuable to give away to anyone else besides their PA's; I'd bet they would be included in a paid Pro version. (Digression; can one convert a figure to a DQ skinned figure in the current Pro version? I can't find an option anywhere)
Genesis 1's release did precede a compatible version of Poser ; it wasn't until Poser 9 SR2 that conformers would work with animated joint centers. As it was, Poser 9 was released early (remember the reservation system) to give a sales bump before Q3 2011 closed. This is all about business, remember. :) Since there is a big sale on PP2014 on right now, I expect there will be a new Poser version soon, and not DAZ Soon, either.
As Nanette noted Genesis 3 is very interesting. The parts that do work when it is imported into Poser work very fast and very well, and should fully work if Poser adds DQ skinning. As I noted above, JSON support has been added to Anime Studio, so it's possible it could be within Poser as well....
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The Wisdom of bagginsbill:
"Oh - the manual says that? I have never read the manual - this must be why."