"It just seems Poser users don't want new stuff. So really looking at the freebe section seeing all those V4 stuff obviousley rendered with the Poser 4 render engine just gives me an eyeroll. Hivewire website with all its promos looks like the DAZ shop back in 2002. If an app and its comunity is not progressing foreward, than it is time to have an new app."

To be honest, this was one of the big factors (the biggest??) for me to not upgrade to PP11. While trying to make the decision, I took a long, hard, critical look at the community, and the images it was producing with Poser (both at the user and pro level). Having gone through this with my favorite software, Carrara, slowly dying (well, it still is alive, an not quite dead yet), I saw many of the same things. True, the circumstances are vastly different, but I saw what to me was a huge reason for the loss of support for Carrara development while researching P11.

The two main things that in my mind really hurt Carrara were it was/is way too complex for the average new user (at many levels), and the images being produce by a large portion of the community were, IMHO, not as inspiring as what DS was producing. I could get similar, and even better results from Carrara than with DS (before Iray), but I was one of the few making "great" (subjective observation, that could be influenced by personal bias) renders with Poser/DAZ content using Carrara. Without inspiring images, it's hard to attract users. That's not to say there weren't a number of truly inspiring images in the forums and galleries, but there were also a number of flat ...... ummmm .... Poser 3/4 quality images. I'm not saying they weren't good images/art, but they typically didn't compete with output from DS to make people say "I've got to have THAT!!!". The other nails in the coffin were that material/shader translation is typically not the best, meaning users have to get under the hood to make great renders, and Carrara is not as easy to learn as DS. So, even though Carrara provided a much richer tool set than DS, It is simply much less attractive to the average "load, pose, render" user, which TBH, is no doubt the vast majority of the DS/Poser user base.

So, when P11 came out, I was expecting to see hundreds of awe-inspiring images from Superfly featuring the new Pauline. Remember, Chuck said "content is king", so I really thought this time SM/Poser got it, and either had an amazing new figure for us, or that they had somehow brought Genesis into Poser. I was disappointed to say the least. I did almost upgrade to PP11 when the big sale hit (at the same time PE was released), but went to the store/forums here, to the SM forum, and Hivewire (store and forums) one last time before pulling the trigger to see how much things had improved. Was I ever surprised! There were still only a couple of artists making renders that I would be proud of with Superfly. As noted by Timberwolf above, the product promos looked like they were all from 10-15 years ago, as did most of the user renders. But, the straw that broke the camels back was looking through the forums. The primary people posting were the Poser "faithful", most who were still trying to point the finger at DAZ for the situation Poser, and the Poser community were in. Then I had an ah-ha moment, and realized that the community had become so inward looking that there was no way they were moving forward at a pace I would be happy with. Alas, I realized my long love/hate relationship with Poser was either at an end, or at least on a serious long term vacation. The community seemed stuck in an eight year ago time warp, with occasional glimpses of 2017/2018 coming through. There was no real talk about why Poser was losing market share, except to point the finger at DAZ and content vendors as being the evil force that put them in the current situation. All the time, the elephant in the room .... poor decisions and an apparent lack of under standing the user base by SM and the Poser development team.

I don't know what SM has decided to do with Poser going forward, but I hope they pick the proper path, as I would really like to see it make a come back. But, the competition is ramping up on all fronts, iClone is certainly a very viable alternative now, as is DS (sorry, but it's the truth). Unreal and Unity are also moving in on the "Poser" space, as is Blender, as well as some recent developments with Genesis/Maya. I do hope they find their way again.

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