AmbientShade posted at 12:35PM Wed, 09 November 2016 - #4289329

So for those who feel it's dying, what do you think would revive it, or rebuild your interest in Poser? Is it the tools or the content offered? Or both?

Just curious.

For myself, the Poser business model and its development direction is at the core of my issues with the platform. SM's Poser seems to be squarely aimed at selling boxes to the niche tinkerer and the nostalgic hobbyists, and seems to have left a lot of the broader market sector neglected or left those facets of the software underdeveloped for unknown reasons. Their business strategy directly affects any professional content creator and in turn the user base of the platform that would like to see new content continue to be released. The current direction has firmly established it as the end product in a consumer cycle which makes it very difficult for content developers to leverage as the key to opening the door to a 3rd party end user product market. The purchasers of Poser are the direct target market for SM and any 3rd party or aftermarket content markets are simply an after thought for them and are somewhat excluded from Posers development cycle, even though content developers are also a significant base of Poser purchasers. These factors have the effect of leaving vendors and professional content creators for Poser 3rd party products in a rather exposed and isolated position. (@Rorr: If you think some of the top vendors in this market sector would earn more flipping burgers, you may need to check your sources as I can tell you this is far from correct...)

What this has come to mean is that any professional content developers are taking a fairly big risk if they do choose to 'partner' or continue to 'partner' with SM and Poser exclusively for their content development in the long term. Some core issues are becoming more and more apparent. for example just finding simple answers to basic questions like how many people truly know the direction that SM's Poser is heading? What guarantees and solid foundations if any are SM willing to provide for professional content developers in both the platform and in the content market? Does SM see an interest in helping to secure their roles in content development and in securing the futures of their small businesses? Who really knows the current size of the market pool of Poser purchasers out there?

Over and over we are told that Poser is the best platform for content development mainly from a small group of long term users, but the actual user base message is somewhat different in most forums, more like "You need to understand the different ways that Poser is broken, so you don't fall into any of those many known pitfalls along the way when you create something." Even high interest projects are often put on hold while appeals are made directly to SM for Poser to be fixed in some capacity that has brought the project to a halt. This is meant to be a good base for content development? Seems like a rather large risk to me, given the frequency of these events.

For content creators attempting to assess the market share of the Poser user baser, it can be extremely difficult and tends to come down to a small amount of data sets that do more often than not reflect badly for Poser, especially when the main provision of counter argument comes from a rather small amount of peoples who continue to claim that there is a huge hidden iceberg of users out there, but with no actual data to prove it. When looking at the across the various forums which address Poser, which in itself could be considered as symptomatic to the health of the platform, one word tends to comes to mind and that is slow and closely knitted. The amount of traffic and activity on all of these Poser forums seems to flow forth at a rather sedate pace these days. Some of these forums are lucky to see more than a few posts a day. I've really found nowhere that screams this is big, this is thriving, jump on board! Even the Smith Micro Official Poser forum is rather quite with just a few posts a day. This tends to send off alarm bells for anyone looking at developing 3rd party content for that platform. Maybe someone more in the know can direct me to where I can see more clearly this hidden iceberg of Poser users? Or is this theory more of just a cosmic teapot kind of thing?

But by far the most detrimental factor for Poser usage for me, is the lack of a solid in house, market competitive professional figure. As 3rd party content development quite often tends to follow the pattern of the horse and rider product model. This means that there are generally speaking a few obvious 3rd party product types, the first being: The horse (The actual figure base) then products directly for the horse (Characters,morphs, textures, Poses) or content that rides the horse (Clothing, hand props etc) or the third item which is somewhere for the horse to romp (Environments). For a third party developer, the market take up of the metaphoric horse product is the benchmark to base their own sales projections on. Unless of course they want to create their own horse, which is a commercial project that even the most top tier of content developers generally shy away from. The core of the problem is that SM doesn't even truly have a horse in the race these days as far as a professional 3D human figure bases go, leaving content development for the platform somewhat stifled. This prolonged scenario doesn't particularly work well for many potential Poser users but mostly impacts on professional content creators. There is also a group that doesn't have an issue with this 'problem' and may consider it actually as a good thing for the Poser platform. This group is made up by the users that enjoy using Poser to create their own amateur figure offerings or have a strong nostalgia factor for older tech/figures/content that they own. It seems that this group is truly the current core target market of the SM business model for Poser. A new tech figure is hardly their priority and maybe even seen as a threat to many in this group that SM seem to be prioritising as the buyer group for the Poser platform.

When you look at the current development cycles you can clearly see that this group is seen as their most important market sector and is the key focus for future development. Prioritising the protection of these users legacy content has overtaken the need to keep up with market innovation and keep poser moving forward tech wise. With Cycles being the obvious anomaly. This direction has led to things like Genesis 3 needing to be put through a meat grinder to finally land in Poser somewhat incomplete. Keeping the old compatible is clearly more important than making Poser compatible with the new. This, with time, can lead to a limiting of the market demographic that Poser is the best option for, also limiting its shelf appeal for new users due to its dated content. But is mainly a big negative for professional 3rd party developers interests in the platform. There really is no denying anymore, that regardless of the health of Poser, the 3rd party market for Poser content is suffering and shrinking as a whole. And also that there is a group that have no issue with that continuing to progress, as its seen as not directly effecting them in any way.

Poser's competition has more and more been moving into filling the other aspects of the market that Poser seems to of moved out from or has left neglected over a longer period of time. This leads to the question of, if Poser is no longer a staging platform for professional modern content with user orientated content tools, What is it? Who are its user base? Who are not its user base? Is the user base primarily legacy/inbuilt content users who do not really need 3rd party content anymore or does the current user base want to see new innovation and content developed for the Platform? If it's the later why is that buyer base seemingly shrinking in its purchasing across the markets? If Poser is the best platform for making content where is that content? And in the longer term is the current target Poser software/upgrade buyer base large enough to continue to see the platform viably developed into the future? Will this purchaser base grow or decline if the current path is sustained?

So if you find yourself within this group that does see Poser as primarily a vehicle for your large existing content hoard or if you prefer dealing mainly with the quirks of figure development within the platform. Then I'm sure there is no apparent issue with Posers health for you. There is no reason as to why this kind usage of Poser will be effected for the foreseeable future.

For me the question is no longer is "Is Poser is dying?" It's 'how useful is Poser to me?". And the answer I have unfortunately arrived at is, that it really isn't. And I guess that ultimately will be the decision, that for each individual, will decide the future of the platform.