Discussion about content

[Ken1171]

I love and use both DS and Poser and have for the entire time I was a content provider... I just don't agree with the policies and changes that Daz made and what those decisions have caused to happen in our community... As a company they seem to have forgotten that it was end users and 3rd party content providers that made it into what it is...

Same here. I came to learn and love DS only after I have joined HW. I use both programs nowadays, and have supported them both natively in my store for the most part. However, DS customers didn't buy enough to make it worth it, because native version means I am actually creating the products twice. In general, DS users are not interested in human figures other than the ones they have from DAZ. There is also widespread misinformation like you said, like HW figures are for Poser-only, or that they are really bad to start with. None of these are true, but that's what has been said all around, and it affects my sales. Therefore I have doubts if I will keep supporting DS from now on, since I don't make contents for Genesis. They haven't bought from me so far, and I doubt that would change now. It's not that I have anything against DS, on the contrary, but it just doesn't pay off.

 

[DanaTA]

Haven't actually heard from him since July.

Dana

 

[eclark1894]

Thing is, much of the DS stuff will convert quite easily to Poser and vice versa. I've done it in the past. When I first started my directory, the only reason I didn't include DS vendors was because I was looking for Poser NATIVE content.

 

[theschell]

There was a whole group of us back then that worked closely together with cross-promotions and helping each other out with content develoment and such... Meshworks, BeyondVR, VanishingPoint, MrSparky, and myself and a few others... Most of them got driven out by the same changes in the community and life events that ultimately drove me out as well. It was a very different community from what we have now!

 

[theschell]

Thing is, much of the DS stuff will convert quite easily to Poser and vice versa. I've done it in the past. When I first started my directory, the only reason I didn't include DS vendors was because I was looking for Poser NATIVE content.

Oh yes... I know all too well... all of my "Poser native" content was actually made using DS and Hexagon... I'd say about 90% of my DS runtime library is made up of Poser items, and I have my DS install set up to also load my Poser runtimes. I'd written a tut on it but got trolled out by the rah rah daz crowd saying it didn't work that way...

 

[Ken1171]

Thing is, much of the DS stuff will convert quite easily to Poser and vice versa. I've done it in the past. When I first started my directory, the only reason I didn't include DS vendors was because I was looking for Poser NATIVE content.

And talking about Poser native content, that's the central point of that conflict of interests I was mentioning about Rendo. That's currently a tiny fraction of the Rendo store contents. For Poser to succeed, it needs contents. SMS has failed Poser in good part because they wouldn't understand how crucial content was for its existence. When DAZ departed from Poser contents, Poser has starved itself to death, driving chunks of the community to jump the fence. Content is everything in this market. However, the Rendo store is dominated by the competition. How would that work out for Poser?

 

[theschell]

It won't without 3rd party vendors continuing to support Poser, and Rendo and Daz both decided that 3rd party vendors were killing their business... but hey... what would I know about any of that...

 

[Ken1171]

Most of them got driven out by the same changes in the community and life events that ultimately drove me out as well. It was a very different community from what we have now!

That is directly related to what happened to Poser once DAZ has departed from Poser contents. Once native Poser contents became scarce, some decided it was time to look elsewhere. SMS just wouldn't conceive the idea that content was vital to keep Poser alive, so they slowly but steadily let it starve out. Of course, the market was never the same after that. Rendo is trying to change that, but their customer base is mostly turned to the competition. I see a conflict of interests right there, but looks like it's just me.

 

[theschell]

That is directly related to what happened to Poser once DAZ has departed from Poser contents. Once native Poser contents became scarce, some decided it was time to look elsewhere. SMS just wouldn't conceive the idea that content was vital to keep Poser alive, so they slowly but steadily let it starve out. Of course, the market was never the same after that. Rendo is trying to change that, but their customer base is mostly turned to the competition. I see a conflict of interests right there, but looks like it's just me.

Rendo will ultimately need to choose between supporting Poser or supporting DS... and no, I see the conflict there as well...

 

[Ken1171]

It won't without 3rd party vendors continuing to support Poser, and Rendo and Daz both decided that 3rd party vendors were killing their business... but hey... what would I know about any of that...

As far as I can remember, 3rd party figure creators had their legs broken overnight back in 2005, when DAZ had released Aiko3 for free. That was never seen in this market, and people have jumped into the free Aiko wagon and never looked back. Contents for other figures simply stopped selling, including all of mine. Indie figure creators all went out of business overnight. That's where DAZ has turned the tables and most of us went out of business. I couldn't even make contents for Aiko3 because I had no idea how to create JCMs. Nothing I could make would sell anymore, so I retired for a few years until V4 came out.

 

[theschell]

It may have started with that, but what actually broke most of the vendors I knew was when both Daz and Rendo decided that we were no longer welcome to actively post about our items and content back after the Daz buy-out, blamed us for the results of their own poor decisions, and then started going after the smaller sites to get the competition closed down or bought out. It left us with no real way to connect with our biggest customer base or with the programs we were supporting and left quite a large number of us with a bad taste in our mouths from the manner in which it was done... After that RDNA got bought out, and etc...

To be honest though what killed me out was when Content Paradise closed up... I lost half my income in that single instant...

 

[Ken1171]

Rendo will ultimately need to choose between supporting Poser or supporting DS... and no, I see the conflict there as well...

It may sound unconceivable right now, but DAZ had to make a choice on this as well, for the same reasons. Everybody is claiming there is no way Rendo could ever do that, but then, things have changed now that they own Poser. If they want it to succeed, it's not going to happen with their own customer base massively turned to the competitor's software. It's like trying to sell Windows inside an Apple store. Nonetheless, people are still claiming this will never happen. Time will tell.

It may have started with that, but what actually broke most of us was when both Daz and Rendo decided that we were no longer welcome to actively post about our items and content back about 6 years ago after the buy-out, blamed us for the results of their own poor decisions, and then started going after the smaller sites to get the competition closed down or bought out. It left us with no real way to connect with our biggest customer base or with the programs we were supporting and left quite a large number of us with a bad taste in our mouths from the manner in which it was done...

I have stayed away from both Rendo and DAZ for as long as I could, but now I am back at Rendo and have missed a lot of what has happened there in all these years. Or maybe I haven't missed anything for my own sake. Having seen what happened in the past, I would never do business with DAZ, but I was once a Rendo vendor, and now I am back hoping for the best.

 

[theschell]

It may sound unconceivable right now, but DAZ had to make a choice on this as well, for the same reasons. Everybody is claiming there is no way Rendo could ever do that, but then, things have changed now that they own Poser. If they want it to succeed, it's not going to happen with their own customer base massively turned to the competitor's software. It's like trying to sell Windows inside an Apple store. Nonetheless, people are still claiming this will never happen. Time will tell.



I have stayed away from both Rendo and DAZ for as long as I could, but now I am back at Rendo and have missed a lot of what has happened there in all these years. Or maybe I haven't missed anything for my own sake. Having seen what happened in the past, I would never do business with DAZ, but I was once a Rendo vendor, and now I am back hoping for the best.

Probably best that you missed most of it...

 

[Ken1171]

To be honest though what killed me out was when Content Paradise closed up... I lost half my income in that single instant...

I know how that is. I had a store at CP for over a decade.

 

[theschell]

6 months after that happened my website and storage server host decided to give me 6 days notice that they were dropping server storage support and would only be doing website hosting... 6 days was no where near close to enough time to even look for another storage host for my products... and my old host wanted to keep charging the same rate for just my website as he'd been charging for both web and storage hosting so it would have doubled my overhead at the same time as I'd just lost 50% of my income... and that was after the hits taken when we lost the ability to advertise ourselves at Daz and Rendo, and the loss of RDNA as well...

 

[Ken1171]

I have currently lost 100% of my sales, since this is the very first time I have no products on store in the last 17 years. And I am kind of weary of Rendo, because of the big fish/small fish vendor policies that may obfuscate the smaller guys with little exposure, living in the shadows of the big sellers. I don't know if it's still like that, but I will find out very soon.

 

[Alisa]

I have moved this out of the HiveWire store closing thread.

 

[theschell]

I have currently lost 100% of my sales, since this is the very first time I have no products on store in the last 17 years. And I am kind of weary of Rendo, because of the big fish/small fish vendor policies that may obfuscate the smaller guys with little exposure, living in the shadows of the big sellers. I don't know if it's still like that, but I will find out very soon.

It's still like that... I have a few of my products on Rendo... they were burried on page 300 within a week of being put up for sale and I'm lucky after their cut to make any money or sales at all... specially since they have a policy of discounting products that don't sell well, and it's very near impossible for a small fish like myself to sell well there... I can count the number of sales I've made through Rendo on my fingers and toes and have toes left over... lol

 

[theschell]

I have moved this out of the HiveWire store closing thread.

Sorry about hijacking the other thread...

 

[Ken1171]

It's still like that... I have a few of my products on Rendo... they were burried on page 300 within a week of being put up for sale and I'm lucky after their cut to make any money or sales at all... specially since they have a policy of discounting products that don't sell well, and it's very near impossible for a small fish like myself to sell well there... I can count the number of sales I've made through Rendo on my fingers and toes and have toes left over... lol

Well, sounds like I have found it out sooner than I thought. However, maybe there is some hope for me, because I am starting a new line of products - several new Python tools to extend the Poser 12 functionality. One of them went into beta-testing today, and should be hitting Rendo QAV soon. I have no idea how many people have upgraded to Poser 12, though, but with older versions no longer being supported, maybe that will make an incentive for people to upgrade? Or maybe my plugins will, because they will only work in P12.