AmbientShade posted at 10:48 AM Fri, 14 April 2023 - #4462155

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

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.

Smith Micro bought Poser in 2008 and released Poser Pro and Poser 8. Faceroom was introduced in 2010 - Poser Pro 2010.

I don't recall Apollo Maximum support, but if that is correct, it only confirms what I am saying - that SM was trying to price gouge DAZ. At the time, I was on professional friendly first name talking terms with both companies, so I am familiar with the way that each of them presented their side to me.

Respectfully, I think your faith in Bondware is not justified, nor supported by the facts. The fact that they have made constant major marketing missteps since owning Poser, convinces me that that part of the company has room for improvement. As for their tactical decisions, it took them what, 10, 15 years to design a web site that wasn't awful, and they STILL got hacked. To my mind, it is still far from pleasant to shop in, and total crap to sell through. I have no idea how much Bondware makes each year, but if it does not run into the millions, I'd be quite surprised, but they have shown a consistent pattern of poor decision making, not least charging $250 for Poser. There is certainly an equation between how much they invest in Poser, and how much value it returns, but assessing that value, as they appear to, in terms of how many copies of the software they sell, rather than the less tangible increase in software sales and loyalty, IMO, is short term thinking in the extreme.