A Roadmap for Daz Studio Would be Helpful

Wolfwood

ebergerly said:

For those who think any company should provide a long term roadmap for their business, consider the following:

If YOU owned a business where you produced new products and technologies regularly for sale, would you:

1. Tell your competitors (or potential competitors) what cool new products and technologies you're working on and will be introducing in, say, 3-5 years? 

2. Tell potential investors about those planned products, and then accept their investment money based on that roadmap, but then something unexpected happens and you can't meet those goals? "WHAT?? Why do you think we gave you all that money???" Not good. 

3. Tell your customers about those planned products, but then something unexpected happens and you can't meet those goals, and your customers get disappointed? "WHAT??? We've been waiting 3 years for that!!!". Not good. 

I think it's safe to say that most for-profit companies (unlike Blender) keep their long term future plans very, very secret, and only discuss with those who have signed a lot of proprietary agreements. And some publicly-held companies are under government regulations that restrict what they can say. 

1- DAZ do not need to reinvent the wheel or create the next generation of defense satellites. If DAZ says "We are working to provide full body physics to the next genesis" what could happen? If daz, had said next Gen8 update will have updated UV, new rigg/expressions and new shader but will be backwards compatible and we are targeting Q4 2020. What could have happened? Ohhh, they released Q1 2021 and some people complained, so? 

2- Are you saying a company should not tell a potential investor about their plans? So when YOU go to look for potential investor (or even shareholders) you say, hey "I wont tell you what i will do with your money nor when i think i might get a result, just write a check...... and keep them coming please"? Does that work for you?

3- Customers get dispointed all the time. Not meeting a deadline is something that happens all the time, and is trivial in comparison with other things like:

* Deciding to promote a technology that has nothing to do with your business and is catalogued as a piramid scam that also has big environmental issues.

* Increase prices without reason.

* Violate customers privacy to send promotions on items of a 3rd party company that has nothing to do with what the people subscribed.

* Release products without proper QA.

 

ebergerly

If DAZ had already developed a cool new technology like Metahuman or whatever and was advanced to the point where it was almost complete and they could actually produce a video showing how awesome it was (like the Unreal demos), and they were confident enough that they had the resources to finish that at some point in the future, and they were a large enough corporation to be certain that they could weather any storm and still produce it, then sure, a reasonable corporation might decide to take the risk. 

DAZ is a small company. DAZ may not have a cool new technology that is awesome enough to be able to make a video of and have peoples' jaws drop. Maybe their plans are relatively incremental, their resources are limited. If you look at the splash screen when you start DAZ you can see the team of people who were working on DAZ Studio. 

Again, if you were in DAZ's position, how much would you tell the world about your 5 year plan? 

Sevrin

ebergerly said:

If DAZ had already developed a cool new technology like Metahuman or whatever and was advanced to the point where it was almost complete and they could actually produce a video showing how awesome it was (like the Unreal demos), and they were confident enough that they had the resources to finish that at some point in the future, and they were a large enough corporation to be certain that they could weather any storm and still produce it, then sure, a reasonable corporation might decide to take the risk. 

DAZ is a small company. DAZ may not have a cool new technology that is awesome enough to be able to make a video of and have peoples' jaws drop. Maybe their plans are relatively incremental, their resources are limited. If you look at the splash screen when you start DAZ you can see the team of people who were working on DAZ Studio. 

Again, if you were in DAZ's position, how much would you tell the world about your 5 year plan? 

I would hype the heck out of it, because everyone else is hyping their stuff.  Epic Games may have given Daz some money, but it's MetaHuman they're actively promoting, not Daz's Genesis.  I'm not sure where the thing about 5-year plans comes from.  At this point, a 5-month plan would be welcome.

With this NFT and Season Pass stuff, one could be excused for thinking that Daz is hoping to get as much revenue as possible out of their existing customers, and has given up on enticing new ones.  I am asking to be proven wrong.

margrave

ebergerly said:

If DAZ had already developed a cool new technology like Metahuman or whatever and was advanced to the point where it was almost complete and they could actually produce a video showing how awesome it was (like the Unreal demos), and they were confident enough that they had the resources to finish that at some point in the future, and they were a large enough corporation to be certain that they could weather any storm and still produce it, then sure, a reasonable corporation might decide to take the risk. 

DAZ is a small company. DAZ may not have a cool new technology that is awesome enough to be able to make a video of and have peoples' jaws drop. Maybe their plans are relatively incremental, their resources are limited. If you look at the splash screen when you start DAZ you can see the team of people who were working on DAZ Studio. 

Again, if you were in DAZ's position, how much would you tell the world about your 5 year plan? 

If you went to Kickstarter or Patreon and saw a small team of creators put up a page saying "We have an AMAZING concept, trust us on this. Just give us money and we'll make it happen, we promise," would you give them your money?

I'm guessing "no".

Having a small team is all the more reason to be forthright about your plans for the future, your capabilities, how much you can expect to accomplish, etc.

Robinson

FSMCDesigns said:

I wonder is the new bridges system has helped or hurt sales.

In business terms I cannot see a downside to opening up with bridges.  If you want content for Maya, you'd probably go to Turbosquid or something and a decent rig will cost you an arm and a leg.  Then if you look at content stores of major engines like Unreal they're pretty dire when it comes to characters, clothing and so forth.  With Daz you've got hundreds of characters across the same rig, all able to fit the same clothes.

ebergerly

Yeah, I agree about the bridges. It's kinda funny, if you just look at the Blender community over the years, it seems like all there's been is arch-viz renders and tutorials and sci-fi spaceship renders and tutorials, but few, if any, character discussion. Oh, and lots of donuts...

To open the market for DAZ characters to the entire Blender community (not to mention all the other 3D software) to me is a HUGE business opportunity, and one that is probably very welcome for those communities. Clearly, at the end of the day, DAZ is about content sales. The more avenues people have to use that content, the better. 

Faux2D

ebergerly said:

If DAZ had already developed a cool new technology like Metahuman or whatever and was advanced to the point where it was almost complete and they could actually produce a video showing how awesome it was (like the Unreal demos), and they were confident enough that they had the resources to finish that at some point in the future, and they were a large enough corporation to be certain that they could weather any storm and still produce it, then sure, a reasonable corporation might decide to take the risk. 

This is apropo of not telling your competition what you are planning on releasing in the future.

It took me 2 weeks to test out a MetaHuman-like tool in Daz to see if it's feasable and I'm just one guy. Unreal even released 3Lateral's rig to the general public which I will implement inside Daz at some point in the future. A lot of R&D goes into these things and once people know it's possible then it's far easier for a new team to replicate in months what others have done in years.

Sevrin

Faux2D said:

ebergerly said:

If DAZ had already developed a cool new technology like Metahuman or whatever and was advanced to the point where it was almost complete and they could actually produce a video showing how awesome it was (like the Unreal demos), and they were confident enough that they had the resources to finish that at some point in the future, and they were a large enough corporation to be certain that they could weather any storm and still produce it, then sure, a reasonable corporation might decide to take the risk. 

This is apropo of not telling your competition what you are planning on releasing in the future.

It took me 2 weeks to test out a MetaHuman-like tool in Daz to see if it's feasable and I'm just one guy. Unreal even released 3Lateral's rig to the general public which I will implement inside Daz at some point in the future. A lot of R&D goes into these things and once people know it's possible then it's far easier for a new team to replicate in months what others have done in years.

 If this is such a big concern, then why repost demo videos?

Anyway, I'm not asking for demos, just a general idea of what kind of what kind of thing they're up to.   Daz is not a leader in technlogy.  I'm personally curious about whether any improvements are in the works, rather than the details of how those improvements will work.