danfarr opened this issue on Mar 14, 2002 ยท 106 posts
danfarr posted Thu, 14 March 2002 at 9:10 PM
Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=610018
The past few days have been quite a ride watching the Stephanie threads on the Forums. We at DAZ like to use the forums as an indicator of how we are doing with our products and to learn what customers expect from us. We continue to listen to your feedback. At first, with the exception of some, it seems that there was a significant amount of negative feedback around Stephanie. The majority of the negative feedback centered on the thinking that DAZ should have developed something directly for Michael like an article of clothing or hairstyle or some morphs as our mystery model. We at DAZ were very surprised at the amount of negative feedback, expecting that the majority of people would really have loved this as the Mystery gift model. This feedback led to some very significant second guessing of our strategy on this product. In hindsight we reflect on how much easier and less costly (about 10% of the development cost) it would have been to create clothing or a morph character or a male hairstyle as the Mystery Model. If we would have done this we most likely would have earned a significant amount of revenue by selling Stephanie as opposed to distributing her free as a thank you for those who purchased Michael 2 or the upgrade. Not to mention, giving away a neck-tie (or something similar) would apparently also have been less controversial than a new female figure. A few days after Stephanie was released we saw a post thanking us for the gift (see attached link). We were so please to hear this positive feedback as a contrast to much of the prior feedback. (Thank you very much for this, by the way.) Now that there has been time for the dust to settle and for people to play around with Stephanie, we would like to know whether or not you feel DAZ did the right thing in giving Stephanie away as the Mystery model. We had suggested in an earlier post that one of the motives for giving away Stephanie would help to increase the user base of Michael. On that basis we feel that Stephanie has been successful since orders for Michael 2 and Michael 2 upgrades increased last week more than double compared to the previous week. This does not account for the number of people who may of bought Michael 2 knowing that there was going to be a bonus model included. The increasing number of installed users of Michael will make it more rewarding for developers to spend their time developing for Michael. On that note, DAZ, is developing a morphing suit coat and tie that will be available for purchase early next week. We also have some other clothing items to come shortly after. We are also aware of some other great Michael products that will be available in the near future. We sincerely thank you for your feedback. It helps us decide the direction that we take in future. We can only judge overall feelings about products by the people who speak up. So please continue to tell us what you think. Dan Farr President DAZ Productions