Why is everything so expensive?
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Well said, thankyou @certaintree38 !
I don't think he meant $100 Million just for the year and my guess is pandemic revenue has been way down as it has been for many. They have also lumped user numbers together in the past. Notice EBITDA improved from -50%. That means it was low for a time. I feel Daz Products are very affordable if you're a PC+ member which I have been for years. I took a look back to the early days of me buying stuff. On 3/31/2006 Morph Designer 2.0 was $39.95. Shadow Dancer for Aiko 3 was $16.07, Morph Master Pro 2.0 was $29.95, and a bunch of things I bought a little before that were normally $16.95 or $14.95 were had for $1.99 each. Not nuch different than the past few years. The pages of orders from March of 2001 weren't available but the sales amounts sounded about right.
I just purchased https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-chaotic-hair-for-genesis-8-and-genesis-81 for $8.49 and https://www.daz3d.com/michaela-hd-for-cj-8 for $4.22- a great deal!
..adjusted for inflation alone, a 99¢ PC item in 2008 (when I first started in this) would be 1.25$ today.
That's funny, because I grew up in New England, and our teachers in elementary school called it the lavatory.
I just can no longer afford the hardware requirements, until I can get a graphics card that works with the latest build I am stuck on D|S 4.11 for rendering iray animations as later builds will use 1-2GB more VRAM and drop me to the CPU, I can use Filament and do but not the best option.
Other softwares the improved technology doesn't export too well especially dforce strand hair (can get a misplaced impossibly highpoly mesh if line tesselation and pbr view enabled) and all the fancy rigid nodes etc (am forever deleting buttons etc on everything and exporting one separately to use attached in iClone particularly, don't get me started on sockets and blueprints in Unreal).
On the brightside the buttons do work in Carrara garment converted to blended weight but G8.1 Misty's character conversion cannot see the G8 morphs so thats pretty much stopped me buying new characters unless there is an G8 version too.
Same issues in D|S4.11 so yeah I buy old stuff now on sale.
There is also additional reasons I am looking more elsewhere than DAZ I cannot discuss here.
Unfortunately I still spend a fair bit on the older stuff with the sales, bought something nearly every day mostly M3, V3 lately and some Bryce scenes.
first of all, the best thing at Daz3d is this community, a lot of smart people, a lot of experience, differentiated opinions and no rude behavior, enough time to think about a problem or something to discuss, to learn from each other, instead of emotionally react to an opion and last but not least a lot of funny stories, great!
Well Kevin, you said you took a look back to the early days of buying your stuff, I did the same and I came to the conclusion that I paid far too much in the earlier days of my so-called "3D-career" compared to these days. At first glance it appears there was price cuts compared in those days till this day, but this might be half the truth in my opinion and I think has more to do with the own ever-expanding experience over the years. Today I'm able to better appraise a value for an item and the amount of work that goes into products, in the first days of my so called 3d-career, I paid just every price and it blew my mind when Vicky 2 was able to laugh and rotate their arms and legs, now I'm impressed when I get an answer from support in a timely manner or I'm happy if I'm allowed to buy 3 items all at once from my ever-growing wishlist and at a more favorable price and if I understood the complicated requirements to redeem a coupon code before, do you know what I mean?
Oh my goodness, this was exhausting for me to write in English as a non-native species, hopefully Kevin doesn't read what I wrote and I haven't to answer again :-)
"Expensive" or "cheap" are quite personal standpoints, depending on income and for what the stuff one buys is used.
A professional artist who sells tons of his 3D graphics for tons of money probably sees the prices that DAZ asks for the products here as "cheap" and doesn't even thinks about waiting for an item getting a price reduction through a sale.
The other 99.9% people buying here probably don't have unlimited financial resources available to them, so they set the limits for "cheap" or "expensive" on widely different points of the scale.
So the questions we really have are "did things at the DAZ shop get more expensive?" and "is the quality still high enough so that the price fits?" and then to decide with our wallets.
I totally agree and is exactly what I meant in my statement above.
To me personally, the balance, so to speak, between the regular prices and the sales events is kind of off at DAZ. Like, - and again, this is just my PERSONAL take, okay? and just for the record, a thousand years ago I used to be a PA at DAZ myself - I don't feel that 25,00 for a simple hairstyle with few morphs and some basic textures is really appropriate, especially coming from vendors who have done this a hundred times before and can call on existing resources. Usually, for these things, half the price feels about okay to me. And if the general price of a new hair was around 13,00 or 15,00 and of a clothing set about the same, I wouldn't see the need for so many and varied sales all the time. I'd just pop in and buy the stuff I need when I need it. That, to me, would be so much more convenient and also rather fairer for the PAs, I should think. Because their income would be much more steady.
But the strategy here seems to be the complete contrary - up the prices and then do a lot of sales screaming discounts, discounts! to draw the masses to buy. Because 70% off is just way sexier than 0%, even if the end price is the same. It's kind of fun sometimes to juggle the sales I'll admit, and of course it's a really nice feel to grab some great stuff for 1,99 - but honestly, there's also other things I want to do, not stay glued to the DAZ page all day so I won't miss any sale. And if stuff is well done then I'm absolutely fine with paying for it, I don't need it to be discounted to almost nothing.
So yes I also feel that things are a bit on the expensive side, and that this is being done to enable the many sales that apparently the management views as the main attraction of the site. There's this saying I remember from accountancy school, along the lines of: Buyer beware, every discount given is added to the price beforehand. DAZ seems to be an excellent example of this tactic.
Oh yes, so true ...!
I want comment to this: "You can get loads of brand new items for 80% off if you have purchased enough bundles and buy enough new stuff at once"
Sometimes I don't get it, what is the advantage and why people buy a lot of expensive bundles packed with useless stuff first, merely to get a pretended cheaper price for something they actually want, is a brand new item really that cheaper if you bought a lot of expensive bundles first or is the real reason little patience or acquisitiveness or something like that? I really don't have a clue or it maybe I misunderstood something.
Yeah, I don't understand that either. I look at bundles quite often but I don't think I have ever bought one unless there was some ridiculously heavy discount (80% at least). As you say, I have never seen a bundle where even half the items might be something I would want. I don't even clutter up my content library with the free (or $2:99) PC+ bundles. Again - they fill up those bundles with stuff they can't sell normally.
Check out turbo squid, and than let's talk about DAZ prizes again.
Soo... when one thinks the prices for a VW medium market segment car has risen too much in the last month one should check prizes for a Lamborghini and say "Well, I'm glad that it's cheaper than that"?
Yeah, sure...
40% off an item whose price has doubled is still 20% more than the earlier full price, and double that of the discounted earlier price.
Disagree that quality is better—much less "way better"—than on 'osity and 'otica. May (emphasis on "may") have been true 10-15 years ago, but ain't close to the case these days.
Heh, you guys are funny. Just because a handful - and yes, it's a handful of products like that overpriced ice cream OBJ make it into this store doesn't mean overall quality is dropping. Try to find something on the level of an Aeon Soul clothing set or a Strangefate or Stonemason scene at Rendo.
That's not an accurate comparison because the products at Turbosquid aren't always of significately higher quality than products here.
As for prices, I just spent $1.18 for the new JoeQuick demon arm thanks to a sale and a coupon. For what we get, we have nothing to complain about.
My favorite natural environments and vehicles come from Rendo. They're also made for Poser so they're much more friendly in terms of graphic memory.
My favorite highly detailed armors and outfits come from Daz3d, though.
The hair is 50/50. I have next to no use for dforce strand based ones so polygonal hair and the ones using cloth physics win for me.
It depends on the modeler, not on the genre, though.
Also, lots of Rendo models are made for Poser and they require manual conversion to Daz. That's a fee added in time spent for converting.
Cheap is a relative term. Technically speaking you can find outfits at the other store that come cheaper than the complete outfits here. The question is if the value per item in the set is the same when what we're looking at is mostly two- or three-pieces lingerie sets with undress morphs.
Or rather... How many lingerie sets with udress morphs one might need? Regardless of the quality, it will start to repeat after a while.
However!
If you fancy yourself a detailed environment, outfit, whatever made to modern standards then regardless of the store you'll be looking at the $20+ expense and you'll be waiting for sales no matter what your shopping place is.
"Just a handful of products" ... jeez are you kidding dude? More than half (that's right HALF or 50% or 1 in 2) products I purchase (new products as in released in the last few days) ship with errors. The quality is out of control bad.
I agree, it's a value judgement and a ridiculous one too.
On the flip side, compare how many 3D assets and content are included in a typical triple AAA video game to what's found in a similarily priced DAZ bundle - not to mention the sound, music, voice acting, mocap, ai programming, scripted missions, etc. Consider the man hours and resources needed to produce one versus the other. For the price of a Stonemason scene or two, you can purchase a GTA game that includes an entire city with it's complex underlying systems, spanning dozens of square miles populated with people, vehicles, wildlife, and all sorts of stuff.
Admittedly, it's not a fair apples to apples comparisson - DAZ content and video games are different mediums that serve very different purposes. But at the end of the day, an individual independant DAZ PA with a customer base of maybe a few hundred simply can't hope to compete on a value per dollar basis with a multi-million dollar corporation employing hundreds of people making content for tens of millions of customers. It's not the fault of the creators but DAZ content *IS* expensive compared to a lot of media competing for people's money, and the consumer has a breaking point.
Compared to years past, the content for men has been slipping since the arrival of dforce but prices remain the same for worse quality content. Outfits now just are tubes, which require simulation to actually fit. Not an improvement. In addition, hair, is now 'unisex' so it can sell for female characters. yes, there are some new creators doing a better job at making men's things, but in general, the quality of guy stuff isn't so great. We still have peter pan collars, pants with no seams, shoes with no laces, hair marketed for men, that is a woman's style, etc. The prices for these things is higher, and they just don't look as good since they are ill-fitting. If something is broken, it takes a long time to fit. This isn't an improvement.
DAZ store needs better standards. If collars are a consistent shortcoming on men's outfits, why isn't there some energy devoted to improving the quality and realism of men's clothing?
I have bought hand wood carving materials, painting materials, and such and DAZ is of course cheaper. It gets expensive when you buy enough to avoid the same scenes all the time but even then it's still cheaper than the other hobbies that require physical raw materials to use over & over again.
I guess playing musical instruments would be cheaper, just playing video games, watching TV, and those sorts of things.
I agree, but the website, QA, & ethics ARE noticeably worse than before.
My cart from today shows that we just have to wait for the right prices: