Male_M3dia posted at 2:37PM Fri, 06 April 2018 - [#4327564](

Now that we've thrown that argument away, the focus should be on SM, not anything perceived as what DAZ is doing. As I've said before, if poser users don't want to have anything to do with DAZ, they should have held SM's feet to the fire years ago to help vendors so that they would not have to migrate to make DAZ products because that's where the users migrated in addition to not buying enough Poser products to support their vendors.

The problem, unfortunately, is two-fold. First, there's the simple fact that a large portion of the Poser base allowed themselves to fall into the "good enough" syndrome. Poser with V4 generation product was good enough for them, they already had invested in the key V4 base products, so why invest heavily in new ones if what they had worked? But not investing in new base products tends to lead to less and less new product being purchased overall, and in the long term that's going to stifle innovation as well. Did anyone really think that support would exist for the new SuperFly renderer when the Hivewire figures, which had a lot more potential for helping turn the Poser market around, are still struggling to find a space in a market dominated by a hacked version of a much older product? The BIGGER problem, though, is that there has been a fundamental misconception by many in the user base as to who and what Smith Micro is and how important Poser is to SM in general. Because Smith Micro is NOT "the company that makes Poser." Smith Micro is a company whose primary business these days is in wireless communication, which happens to have bought the rights to Poser back in 2008 as part of a much larger series of acquisitions, and Poser is just one small part of a small subdivision of the company. Worse, Poser isn't even SM's best selling graphic product, as that title goes to Manga Studio, and the company as a whole has been struggling to achieve profitability for years. Under those conditions, it's unwise to anticipate SM spending any more time and effort developing Poser than absolutely necessary, and the fact that a large portion of the Poser user base has been so actively adamant in the support of older tech has only served as a green light to cut that spending to the bone. After all, why spend money you don't have to, especially when pushing the edge can actually risk a major backlash like DAZ got with the introduction of Genesis?

By comparison, DAZ 3D's business is, and always has been, selling 3D models and figures. If they don't keep selling figures and accessories, they're out of business, so keeping this market alive and growing was an absolute necessity for their survival. Had the Poser base alone been sufficient to guarantee a steadily growing market for DAZ's product, there would have been little need to develop DAZ Studio at all. However, it obviously wasn't sufficient for DAZ's designs, and the fact that the market for DS product is apparently thriving while Poser-specific production seems to be gasping for breath is pretty indicative that no matter who was "right" or "wrong" in the whole DS/Poser split, the v4/Genesis controversy or the various Firefly/3DL/Iray decisions, the end result is that DAZ's path has come out as the clear winner from a business perspective. And while this may be just a hobby for most of us, many of the people who actually make the toys we play with have to treat it as a business as well and go where the money is.