Kazam561 posted at 9:48AM Thu, 05 April 2018 - #4327471

SM doesn't really want to go into making figures, especially with Daz pushing theirs so hard.

Excuse me? Making figures is all SM does. Almost every new iteration of Poser comes with a completely new set of figures - Paul and Pauline, Rex & Roxy, Allyson 1 & 2 and Ryan 1 & 2, Sydney & Simon, Jessie 1 & 2 and James 1 & 2, Don & Judy... and that's not counting the huge glob of old 2nd party stuff like Creech, Beta Boy, the Grey Alien...

What they DON'T do is actually support those characters after release, so after a handful of outfits at best, they all end up on the ash heap of poser history and most of their assets have little appeal once those are no longer the figure of the month, and promptly disappear from the market. Whereas with DAZ, EVERY new generation of figure that they've produced has been designed to have at least some level of backwards compatibility with the previous generations of product, something that DAZ has doubled down on since they entered the Genesis era. Working in DS I can still use my old v4 and V3 outfits on G3F and G8F, with textures converted from poser & 3DL to iray, using older poses and so on, all with only a few keystrokes. That gives the DAZ assets a sense of long term value that makes buying their newer products feel like a fair deal.

Back when it was owned by EFrontier, you did have Terai Yuki which while not a great figure, it certainly was a very cute figure without going to the extremes of some anime characters (some toon characters here as well).

Actually, Terai Yuki existed as a commercial figure in Japan long before she sub-licensed and ported to Poser as TY2, and even had her own series of animated films. By the standards of the time that she was created in she was a fantastic figure, but you have to remember that her contemporaries were Posette, Victoria 1/2 and Judy.

New characters sometimes get unfairly attacked like Scarlett did without realizing it was a first version and much smaller development team than Daz fields for it's characters. Renderosity and Hivewire have tried to support new characters (and even RDNA did it) with waves of content but Poser users seem to hesitate to watch development so sales start off weak.

Yep. One of the fundamental problem that Poser has had is that its' users are their own worst enemies. By digging in and entrenching around a figure base that ceased development a decade ago, they're now looking enviously at all the toys the other kids are getting and realizing that the market has passed them by. The ironic thing is that there has been FAR more product produced for the V4 generation than any of the other generations, but the mechanics of the Renderosity store have worked to purge a large portion of it out of the system since that product clearly didn't sell well enough to stay in the store. And that's really the key issue - PAs have cut back on making product for V4/Poser because the Poser user base wasn't buying enough of the new product being made to justify the continued production of more of the same. At some point it simply stops being a business decision on the part of the PAs involved and becomes something more like making a donation to charity.

As far as development cycles being glacial, well Daz Studio's development is just as slow. Nope, that's not even close to true. DS gets updated constantly, with major updates about every nine months on average and more new features have been added to DS in just the six years since DS 4 was launched than in the entire ten years since Poser was acquired by Smith Micro. Under Curious Labs and E-Frontier Poser was developed at an incredibly robust rate, but SM's idea of an upgrade for Poser has been to add something that was previously available as an add-on (wardrobe wizard, bullet physics,) make a few minor changes to some tool set and toss in a new pair of ugly main figures that no one will ever use. But hey, SM's best selling product, Manga Studio (now called Clip Studio) has had even less developer love than Poser. :/

Besides, how often would you pay for new features if they were released every year? Would you want a subscription fee like Adobe Photoshop does? I certainly don't.

Well, I actually prefer the idea of getting all the new features for free as an enticement to buy new products that utilize those features, which is the current DS model, but I do subscribe to Adobe and have found it to be better model for me given that I use multiple Adobe programs and would have been updating them regularly anyway.

In releasing new features, I prefer time given to quashing bugs and to bug testing.

I rarely upgrade to the new version of anything immediately. On the other hand, DAZ let's you run both a beta and the latest stable version simultaneously, so you get the best of both worlds.