AcePyx posted at 6:04 AM Fri, 14 April 2023 - #4462139

The downfall of Poser actually happened sooner. It all came down to arrogance. Poser was on the second iteration of Face Room. At the time, it only supported native figures but they wanted to support DAZ figures... but they wanted a ridiculous fee to do so.

Smith Micro overvalued inclusion in Faceroom, and while it was perhaps fair to request a reasonable contribution towards their costs with the now defunct Faceroom, the amount they wanted was enough to fund development on the whole program for a year.

Face room existed long before SM acquired curious labs/e-frontier. Iirc it was licensed from a 3rd party (like most everything else in Poser), and that's where most of the fees to add additional figure support came from. Also don't forget that Apollo Maximus had faceroom support, one of the only 3rd party figures to do so, and I highly doubt his creator paid such an exorbitant fee for it, just to later turn around and give the figure away. I'm more inclined to believe Daz declined the faceroom support because it would have (potentially) impacted sales of their morph sets.

I certainly don't trust that Bondware has the business nous and especially not the marketing savvy, to guide Poser, although the tech guys seem to be in a pretty good head space. Sadly the devs are financially constrained in what they can do.

Bondware is in the best position to know what Poser needs to move forward, probably more than any of its previous owners. They've been selling content for it for over 20 years so they know what the customers want. I think the biggest issue at this point is budget to make it happen.