That's quite a post, Wolf! :D I've no doubt they need a little extra staff. I've no doubt customers are waiting for discounts. That's part of the game here and there.

You surely know Marvel has used Daz for pre-vis on its movies and people use Daz for lots of things. I know some people want to use Daz assets in their indie games. That's done more easily now, I guess. But if I were a vendor there I would not provide the interactive license for that. Daz has discounted those to nothing.

I don't know what protections Daz actually provides against license abuse. I recall they've showed you the pointy end of the stick for making clothing mannequins. But that was before the big inter-program compatibility push. I wonder if that would be such a big deal now?

I would not throw stones at the pinup or stills crowd. They've kept things going for decades! Plus there is a lot of interesting not-pinup content here and at Daz. And I enjoy a good pinup. ;)

The Iray/GPU thing is a problem, but how long did 3D rendering technology seemingly sit still? A long time, I think. Now it's moving forward, but it's moving forward in a big jump and there are research and hardware costs. The pricing on all that will surely produce a divide in the market, especially now. And yet, prices may come down a bit when AMD strikes back in a more meaningful way and when NVidia reaches the limits of this growth spurt.

The giant textures issue is a different problem. Daz QA lets all that go, but I doubt anyone wants gigabyte downloads for throw pillows. Vendors need to be a little more realistic about how their products are used. The part I don't like is, I see compression artifacts in some of these big textures. So, they're offering more resolution than many people need while overcompressing their map files to keep the per-file size down. I think there is room for improved optimization!

Anyway, I find your outlook interesting. Thanks for that :)