It's life. Crap happens. Not Ken's fault and I do appreciate that there is a Python3.x version available. Just mentioning why I haven't bought it yet. At some point by summer's end I will hopefully. I saw Ken mention about Poser sales of his products in a thread somewhere and how they fair in comparison to DS product sales. I do realize that scripts, character morphs, and other such products are not the same thing and target different sales demographics, but I felt that I would provide this info as it very well may represent other current users of P12.
I appreciate you posting your concerns, and it was hard on all of us when the HW store closed. It took me months to transfer all my contents to Rendo, and just today I have finally finished submitting the last remaining parts. And then it took me a couple of months to understand the new way Rendo handles Python scripts packaging, validation, and installation - not because it was hard or overcomplicated, but mostly due to miscommunication and bugs in Poser and the Rendo backend that took long to fix.
I have worked hard with them to find and report when things didn't work, so they could fix it. I was the very first (and only) vendor to ever use this new system, so it was just me and Rendo to make it work, and now, it is finally falling into place. Until the new system finally started to work, they stopped me from releasing any new scripts from early March all the way to the last week of April, plus the period when I was still transferring my HW products to Rendo, and had nothing to sell there. So I was struggling as a vendor with lots of new products I couldn't sell for that long - it was brutal. I am still trying to get out of the red zone, and for that, I can only count on your support to keep me going.
I am sure you are not alone and I would imagine any vendor would welcome any feedback as to the sales potential. One of my personal favorites is CKV-01 for Dawn which I have found to be very versatile and is superb value for money but I was surprised to find that the sales were nowhere near what I expected. There was clearly a lot of work put in the same way that the scripts were clearly hard work.
I was surprised as much as you when it didn't sell well. VolpeBox and I put a lot of work in the making, and we were sure people would love it because Dawn had nothing even remotely like that. It was so bad that Volpe left and never came back. I told him it would sell, but it didn't, so I can't blame him for leaving. This is a very unpredictable market. Mec4D is sure it would sell well for D2F, but I wouldn't be so sure at this point. We will see.
I think one of the problems is that at Renderosity Poser is clearly the poor relation which I suspect has a lot to do with the way the program was neglected for years by SM. That is not to say they did not provide updates but they were often updating wrong aspect of Poser. The scatter tool in a case in point in that it is a feature that most other such software has had for years but not Poser.
My thoughts exactly. SMS was working hard on Poser, but on all the wrong things. Perhaps their major flaw was never understanding the importance of content for Poser to exist. When they finally decided to do something about it, it was too little, too late. They thought they could get away by just selling Poser as another one of their software line up, and even closed Content Paradise, without understanding that without contents, Poser is useless.
This is why Poser is in better hands with Rendo. Nobody understands the importance of content more than them - a company that (according to their own statement) was born out of Poser and its contents. SMS also grossly misunderstood who the Poser market was made of, pricing Poser out of the reach of hobbyists, and trying to position it in a "professional" market that has never existed. The best example of that was when they claimed that Poser was "the complete character animation suite for professionals". That statement is SO wrong and misplaced. Poser IK is so primitive it can't even keep a foot on the ground, or in place when animating characters. SMS also made the serious mistake of not considering DAZ as competition. They claimed "we don't make contents" to imply they were not even in the same line of business, which soon enough blew back on their faces, and led Poser to its demise. That would never happen with Rendo.
I think Renderosity is doing a great job with Poser 12 and Ken's scripts will help bring it up to dat but it will be a while before it starts to gain some of the ground it has lost.
I totally agree. What gives me hope is that public announcement where Rendo has officially claimed they are working on a UNIMESH Poser version, and that will be the most significant step Poser has taken since it was first released back in 1999 (last century?). Without native unimesh support, Poser cannot compete in this market, putting it in serious disadvantage. I had several conversations about this with Larry Weinberg (original Poser creator), and he said they were considering doing it in Poser 12, but then SMS disbanded the whole dev team soon after, and Poser went into hibernation for years. That's why Rendo has named their Poser revival campaign as "Poser pulse is getting stronger", because it was found near death when acquired. It was defeated by the same competition SMS claimed didn't exist to the very end.
We can say Poser is being reborn in version 12, and I want to contribute with new scripts that may attract people back to it. The end of the HW store, the Python 2 end-of-life, and moving to the Rendo store were just bumps in the way. But in the end, no matter what I do, it is the community that will decide if Poser will survive or not, by supporting the vendors. Poser is nothing without contents, so if the contents sell, Poser will be fine.
