Inertia.

I'm using Poser for 23 years now, and I spent most of that time creating highly customized content which would be very time consuming to transfer to other apps.

I also thankfully don't need to worry about Superfly, as I'm perfectly happy with the results I can get with Firefly.

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But to be frank, I think Poser is completely obsolete now, at least for new users.

Have a look at Blenders "Human Generator" plugin. It's basically a "How Poser could have been in a perfect world", but right inside Blender with full use of it's modelling capeabilities.

(And yeah, this plugin also makes Studio completely obsolete IMO. They will be able to hold on a little longer due to the sheer mass of their content, though)

So, if a newbie / hobbyist 3D artist would ask me what program to choose, I'd say BLENDER, BLENDER, BLENDER!  :-p

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But for me, I don't really need photorealism and I'm too old and tired to loose 23 years of "muscle memory" I've built up with Poser and Wings 3D.

I was actually content with using Poser 11, but it would feel wrong bitchin' about Poser and not actually owning the latest version.  ;-)

So I shelled out the $200 (Poser 12 upgrade + Poser 13 upgrade) to "see".

Firefly is faster now and Superfly can even recognize my GFX card. (Though it's still not as fast as CPU Firefly is!)

Some new Python 3.0 scripts are available that can finally replace a few of my most beloved Python 2.0 scripts, so that's not that much of a problem, either.

As for the kill switch, well. it would be a real trust building move to ditch that, but when push comes to shove, I still have a copy of PP-2014 installed.

And as for the newer versions, well, "Ve haf vays to make you...continue renderink!"   ;-)

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So, while I'm not exactly hopeful for its future, I still find a few things I can enjoy in Poser 13.

And while I couldn't recommend it to a novice 3D artist (GO Blender!), I'd still say that if you already own another version of Poser and don't really feel like changing programs, you should download the Poser 13 trial and see for yourself if it's worth the upgrade price for you.