randym77 posted at 7:21PM Sun, 21 July 2019 - #4357584

I don't think I agree that it's the picture on the box that matters. Maybe Winter Queen Jessie tempted a few buyers.

When I bought Poser, it was because I saw the art someone else made with it, and I wanted to do what she did. I bought Poser sight unseen from Amazon. (And ended up paying way too much. Little did I know, Poser 5 would debut in about a week, and the price of Poser Pro would plummet, like sheep that roost in trees.)

The image I saw that made me want Poser was of two Michael figures. So, yeah, my next stop was DAZ. Where I again spent way too much money, because I didn't realize that if I waited 10 minutes it would go on sale. ?

The point is that it was what you "saw" and "knew" at the time that made you want to buy Poser. You "saw" a render that really appealed to you in some way, likely of a human, since that's something that many people can immediately identify. (If you were more of a landscapes kind of person wanting to duplicate Bob Ross paintings in 3D, maybe it would have been Vue instead?)

What you "knew" was that someone did some computer stuff, sitting at a desk, and pressed a button and did the "Do Art" thing and produced the render you liked. (Probably)

You likely had little knowledge of even what a simple "Pose" was, much less what node-based materials systems did or exactly what a "render engine" was, right? And, rigging and geometry and weightmaps vs deformers, etc... Well, that's not something a novice user can easily grasp without pushing and pulling rigged figures in a 3D app, right?

A box of cereal is sold more often by what the potential consumer knows about the ingredients pictured on the box. Some few enterprising consumers turn the box around to read the ingredients list, but they're much less likely to do that if there's also a blurb printed on the front of the box that says the product is "Healthy".... :) If it taste's great, it gets bought again and again.

A good product appeals both to those with little or no experience with its type and professionals, where applicable, who want specific professional-greade features.