@Earl Sure Chris and a few dedicated others, are still "making figures" but where are they being marketed and sold??

If you say at Renderosity then "Hivewire" is really just a dedicated group of poser content merchants selling poser stuff here amongst the wheat & chaff like any other group of poser or Daz genesis,Iclone/CC3 merchants in the RMP.

And sorry but this narrative that" I closed my commercial store front (that was started to be a direct competitor to the DAZ store) , to focus on making figures myself"

sounds a bit too much like a failed resturaunt owner saying he closed his business & fired most of his staff so the remaining loyalists could focus on the joy of cooking ourselves and peddle our dishes at the local mall food court next to "Chick fillet" and "Boardwalk fries"

In this figure & content market you need to be either $$$huge$$ and wealthy enough to have a team of
content makers employed full time by your company ,Like Epic games with the Meta-humans for UE4.

Or you need to have brokered , third party creators
contract with you because they see your product/software eco-system as competitive in the current market and a good bet to possibly earn a living.

I think you're misreading the market, Wolf.

So Earl, what is your analysis of the 3D figure animation & content market, regarding posers ability to compete with Daz studio& Genesis 8x, Reallusion Iclone/CC3&Actorcore, or NVIDIA Ominverse or the Epic MetaHumans in 2021??

what am I missing here??

Poser users Deluded themselves into thinking that Daz Studio will never be a "replacement for poser" based on the very weak feature set of the versions of DS prior to 4.x

Daz did not need to "replace poser" or even convince poser end users to switch over they only needed a platform for selling their higher quality figures& content and a better render engine, so they could focus on adding features (mostly third party like the aniblock system), to Daz studio ,while keeping it free with ALL of the better clothing rigging tools for NEW vendors and the major content vendors left poser behind.

Most Poser users do not really want to go deep into the

3D creation universe they just want there Barbies with the

clothes that come with them not more. As for the minority

would be the ones who provide these addons for the ones

who just want to create a little 3D universe. Like a Game

just setting up your Characters it is also the main reason

why Poser DS survived all these years......Poser will just

Vanish just like an old Game but Blender Iclone or

Metahumans will not really be a replacement for it , these

users will then rather buy a PS5 console and build up there

little 3D worlds in there.

That is my exact point. There are many other options now and all of them have nice looking, young ,white women now.

The old poser die hards ,you see lingering here, are not

really anyone's target demographic anymore except bondware who actually owns the program.

The new younger smartphone generation is very tech savvy and not so intimidated by Blender Iclone or UE4. and not even vehemently opposed to subscription based services

They are the future market for 3D figure interaction.

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