@Peng & ssgbryan: you both are making really good points and providing a very interesting Dialogue to read IMHO

On the matter of growth, In general true growth only comes from gaining NEW users/buyers into your ecosystem.

This is an economic fact of capitalism.

A good strategic plan to, achieve this, involves learning ,the specific consumer/cultural/economic mindset of the Target demographic you are trying to capture.

I can name three companies that have been failing ,quite spectacularly, in this endeavour IMHO:

Daz Inc.

Reallusion

Lets lump every owner of Poser since the P5 days as one group .

That model isn't working for DAZ - if it was, they wouldn't be putting

most of their content on sale at 70% off at the drop of a hat. If they

were a stock, I'd short them - they are showing classic signs of a

company with cash flow problems.

I actually agree with this assessment ....to a point It is not that the model of capturing users from the competition or from outside of this market space entirely ..is flawed

It is the methods ,used by these three companies, to entice these much needed newcomers thus far, that have laid bare a complete ignorance of the consumer/cultural/economic mindset of those prospective new users/buyers.

Take Daz's Attempt to capitalize on the Multi-billion dollar Gaming industry.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/30/newzoo-global-games-expected-to-hit-180-1-billion-in-revenues-2021/

First "Morph 3D": Daz's attempt to capture the Unity Game dev Demographic.

They took the genesis 2 figures and content and crunch down the vertex count a bit call it the 'MCS "and use the EXACT same marketing methods of still renders of tall Pretty Northern European people (mostly girls),that you used in the main Daz store to sell& resell to the
Digital content hoarding ,OOhhh ,Me too!!, make a picture, crowd.

Not one single promo VIDEO of their content in action in a game build. (See Blizzards "Overwatch")

No stylized ,over the top, villain Characters in motion with cool weapons etc (See Blizzards "Overwatch")

Just the same Daz store promo style images of Pretty white people standing there looking like..pretty white people.

As though Unity gamers have never seen sexy white women in a game before.

Then they re-brand the site to "Morph ID" and claim to have a custom online tool to make & dress avatars for "The OASIS" as in the movie "Ready Player One" ....fail.

Now they have become something called "Tafi" again promoting some scheme to sell "monetized" Avatars on the "VIVE" headgear platform and other "Mobile devices."

One afternoon spent in any major gaming forum would have spared them this ongoing Debacle

Next: the DaztoMaya plugin the Genesis 8 to Maya plugin and the DSON based DEX plugin coming this fall.

All plugins providing various levels of native genesis functionality inside Autodesk Maya. The DSON based DEX being the most complete from what they have shown publicly.and what has been shown is a Demo video of someone loading a Gen 8 female ,(big surprise) and clicking and loading clothing/poses/Character morphs directly from their installed daz content libraries inside Autodesk Maya.

Now they may get some new store content sales from those solo user ,tinkerers taking advantage the extremely liberal Student license policy of Autodesk.

However NONE of the major Animation & VFX companies will use a system that cannot have the assets on a shared server for large teams of Character TD's & VFX artist to access at the same time via a complex linux based file referencing system.

Daz studio requires separate purchased copies of content to be installed on every machine .

Reallusion decides to improve their native Avatar quality in an attempyt to become more than just a Middlware solution for pre vis and character motion retargeting & export to other programs.

They create the $200USD Character creator 3, and for some Bizarre reason, include the DUMB unidirectional brute force path tracer from NVIDIA..IRay

Utterly useless to the current user base, spoiled by realtime viewport motionbuilding in iclone, or any newcomer seeking the realtime motionbuilding tools of Iclone.

No Daz user will switch to iclone for stills/pinups as they already have IRay in Daz studio without paying $200 USD

Their Character creator 3 promo videos targeting the game dev community, are very well done.

However they dont really let on that you are going to really need to buy the full pipeline version of iclone $700+ USD to have any the required export capabilities to your game engine.

$700 USD can buy ALOT of cool goodies &plugins in the Unity& UE4 markets.

Now reallusion has a Live link plugin for UNREAL 4 to have your Iclone Avatar in UE4 excellent realtime renderer, being controlled live remotely from iclone

$1000 USD on top of the cost of buying Iclone 7 For a demographic that paid Zero dollars for their main game engine.

Now to be fair we have not seen any hint of Bondware's strategic plan to bring in NEW poser users or even where any new users are going to come from.

It remains to be seen if they will break from the FAILED approach of selling poo-ware ornamental program updates to the die hard loyalists,practiced by their many predecessors.

They better have a really REALLY good plan before targeting any demographic NOT currently use Poser or Daz studio, as this market has many alternative options for people looking to play/create with 3D/CG Virtual humans.

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