SydneyInPeril posted at 7:31 AM Tue, 22 October 2024 - #4490650

I used to use Hexagon as my modeler, it was decent, but had some serious and practically unavoidable bugs in the types of modeling I do, and no indication they'd ever do even maintenance development. I switched to Blender a few years ago, and I don't ever intend to pay for modeling software again.

I get some indication that, despite raising new content prices and rolling out new figures to encourage purchases (don't give me that "woke" garbage, G9 was meant to try to get wallets open by encouraging adoption by artists and hobbyists needing new content would have to move up anyway, and objectively certain cosmetic things are much worse on G9), that revenues are still faltering, hence testing the idea of rentware. Many software companies have seen much greater profits after their moves to rentware (Adobe makes more money these days as a result of Creative Cloud), and they hope to cash in on the idea. They might have enough lockin to manage to stabilize revenues; I'm not sure in the long term whether the rest of the lockin they would need is there.

I don't think they're going to achieve the lock-in they want, and will instead lock-out their customers by making it too expensive for hobbyists to justify staying. They just aren't as big or as professionally used as Adobe and this push toward rent-ware will more likely end the way it did for E-on. The question is will DAZ survive the damage to their customer base and reputation? And will whoever buys the company after they fail even bother with their original market of hobbyists and new to 3d users?