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I see those who have installed Daz as prospects who have reached the next level (beyond casual interest) of sales potential. Honestly, referring to such prospects as being meaningless doesn't make sense to me. I would agree that with any free software the number of people who install but never follow through will be higher than with paid software. You know, if one spends $200 on iClone one is likely going to try to learn it.
There are of course many instructional materials available for Daz, as example I'm finding the user guide especially helpful (as I reported in another thread). It's clearly possible for pretty much anyone to learn Daz if they are sufficiently motivated.
I would also agree that my life experience has incurably focused my mind on certain narrow topics which are of minimum to no interest to most users. We might call this "single point of failure" theory. As example, imagine that you are engineering a car to go 500mph. You might be installing all kinds of impressive advanced technology, but if you don't also upgrade the tires to handle 500mph all the fancy tech is for nothing. Thus, as the engineer your focus has to be on that one thing that can destroy the rest of your work.
With any complex software that one thing, the single point of failure, is that period at the beginning when frustration is high and satisfaction is low. If the user doesn't make it over that obstacle then it won't matter that a great deal of useful information awaits them on the other side of the obstacle.
After a more than a little whining
I made it over than obstacle, as did you, and pretty much everyone using this forum. And so it may appear to us that there isn't really a problem here to worry about. But participating in this community doesn't give us a full picture of the situation, because what we're seeing are the people who made it over the hump, and not those who didn't.
Should we care? No, not really. We don't own Daz, and we are not the newbie who didn't make it. I care only because my education and career experience has focused my brain on such obscure kind of topics, and I can't seem to get rid of these ideas now that I no longer need them. That, and I simply just enjoy typing way too much.
This is not an issue so much when the software is being sold, because once the transaction is complete the seller need not concern themselves too much with what happens next. But with Daz's business model we see a different equation. Daz profits would seem to depend to a significant degree upon new Daz users advancing to the point where they are comfortable buying assets from the Daz store.
The Daz store doesn't really address this danger zone between install and reaching the comfort level. As example, while I'm increasingly confident about animations, I still don't understand most of the terminology used on the store sales pages. I still don't quite get what exactly it is I'd be buying, given that products are often dependent on other products, and the sales imagery typically also depends on other products. Add all these points of confusion together, and the end result is that I'm installing free content instead of making purchases in the Daz store.
I'm comfortable now being in this stage of newbie development. I'm sure I'll get to the Daz store eventually. But many people won't make it that far, and thus all the money Daz has spent on marketing and software development will be wasted, in relation to those folks.
sounds about right