To be fair to the community, a lot of people on this forum have been critical of CL's new pricing policy.

You are, however, correct that a lot of people have lost some credibility by believing that the non-disclosure agreement they signed (in blood?) also obliged them to spring to CLs defence at the slightest imagined criticism. If CL feels that there policies need to be justified, I am sure that they are quite capable of doing it themselves.

However, at the end of the day, the future of Poser does depend on CL's own financial welfare, and the company is, in fact still run by Poser's original creators, so a little faith is to be expected.

I think a lot of the critics (myself included) have really been questioning whether CL's marketing strategy has been wise, or whether they (and the community) may, in a few years time, come to regret it. If they sell less that half of the number of boxes at $549 than they would have at $300, then it will have been the wrong decision.

Now that the noise has died down a bit, I must say that my predicition is that the P4 upgrade was intended to be about $300 and the ProPack upgrade about $150.

Why? Simple economics. These are approximately the differences between those product prices and the full P5 price. If the upgrades were much less, new users would be able to grab a copy of P4 at the current value, then upgrade immediately, making a mockery of the MRP for P5. I am not, in fact aware of any software upgrade that has been set at a price less that the difference between the versions.

If CL decide now (as a result of the debate in the community?) that they cannot justify these prices, then they will either put P5 on special offer for its initial release, or effectively lose a portion of their initial sales to "upgrade jumpers". Either way they won't have much room to maneuver as their sales targets are probably already set for this level of income, and anyway, unless they want to come under fire from recent purchasers of ProPack, the difference between the two upgrades has to be at least $150, which pretty much rules out a P4 upgrade less than $250.

Bill