How Big is the Market for 3D Models Used in Games ?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
in The Commons
What do you think the percentage is of DAZ3D content purchased to be used in games? And how much consideration goes into DAZ3D content design in regards to potential game use?
I know NOTHING about games. I've never played one, and I've never even knowingly seen one.
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anyone's guess
if the very popular 2D visual novel format it cannot really be quantified
DAZ might have figures for interactive licenses sold but not all are used or could be used multiple times
(I even own the older indie DO one and yet to make a game)
I suspect outside of the 2D visual novels DAZ models are only useful if they're generic enough. Like the contemporary, the nature/landscape or the actual historical models.
Then there's DAZ models being very resource heavy compared to what is useful for 3d scenes rendered in real time.
What are 2D visual novels? Are these graphic novels printed on paper? Or are they some kind of game? Where do you find them. I know I sound like I was just hatched out of an egg.
I'm not a gamer but from what seems to be happening, I'd say it's a massively large market. Just this morning I was reading of a sculpted work being done towards maybe ending up in a game ... started with one of the Genesis males from Daz3D.
They show up on Amazon's best seller's lists
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/7290675011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_digital-text
IT ROY created some videos on how to create a visual novel using DAZ Studio (assets).
Here you can find his video list on YouTube.
Now I have bought a boat load of game licenses from the PAs and own that older license for DAZ 3D for all DAZ Originals and the only game I've published used content from the Poser Game Developer product or content from the Unity Asset Store or assets I created myself instead. That was in December 2015. I enjoyed it really, but a lot of things have interfered since then with getting further.
I've seen only one other game that used DAZ Studio content and that was in 2015 too but no others; but then again I purposely don't play games or browse games and other store content so I can avoid copying other's games, intentially or intentionally, as that's not very interesting to me to copy their work.
So, now, I'd guess about 70%, minimum, of the content sold in the DAZ 3D store is intended to be used by the purchasers in games, sooner or later. That percentage will only increase too, I'm quite sure of that.
I really don't see much mention of DAZ or see Daz models in the various game forums and discords I visit and only see a few here that seem serious about using DAZ assets in an actual game (which is a good thing IMO). BUT, I do see lots of mentions of DAZ amd see daz figures being used in modding forums and discords, something that the interactive license doesn't allow and it's a pretty safe bet most of the ones I see wouldn't purchase the license anyway if it was. While I don't endorse using Daz assets for game design, I will be the first to tell anyone asking about it that they need the licenses and what they can and can't do, which many times discourages them since they were many times looking for an easy, free option and many times just for modding.
Having worked in a game studio I still believe that if a person wants to create a game, they need to put in the work, meaning modeling their own assets.
House Party
So these are basicly comic books? Do you need an interactive license to make a 2D comic book?
Both the Unreal Game Engine and the UNity Game engine have Asset stores/Marketplaces that sell ready to use in game characters and environmental assets to use with their game engines.
In the indie community, it's pretty big, and getting bigger since the advent of the bridges.
It's mostly just the lack of familiarity with assets that hides it from most people.
About fell outta my chair laughing at the first game(visual novels are not games) i played that used nothing but daz assets.
The thing that really gave it away was that they didn't change the names of the assets.
If done correctly, you'd never know, unless you're told.
I have seen my environment sets in more than a few 2D Visual Novels. I do not offer a 3D interactive license though.
STEAM certainly thinks its a game genre and probably has the marketing stats to prove it.
visual novels AFAIK can be interactive games of the role playing type where you chose how the narrative goes, I don't play them myself so not the best to discuss it but it's more than just a book or comic.
More a set of alternative renders and text depending on the user choices made.
if they pick A, B or C in response it branches off to a different sequence of events, I actually used to read paperback books that did that with text where you went to the chapter listed for your choices.
I do not believe so... it's basically a render... you are only redistributing/selling a 2D image you created... the game license is because if you add a DAZ asset to a game, it's 3D mesh data is incorporated into the game and gets redistributed with each copy... with a comic or graphic novel it's just a copy of the 2D render/image you created on your computer.
I have seen the branching interactive 2D visual novel games on STEAM, with different outcomes based on the choices made during the narrative. They generally all have pre rendered 2D stills and 2D animations. You click, you read, the story moves forward based on your choices. If you play through again, and make other choices, that unlocks other branches of the story, and potentially a different ending.
House Party on the other hand uses actual Daz 3D models in a full interactive 3D game that would need the interactive license. I have not played the game but the fight sequence of the trailer suggests they animated the actual Daz models for that game.
Visual Novels are more like a Japanese thing that have become more popular in the U.S.
While sex sells (the aforementioned "House Party"), there are many visual novels that aren't about sex. Some involve romance AND sex. (LOL) Others are non-sexual stories.
They are sometimes similar to "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, except in an audio-visual format.
Other times, they introduce more game-type elements such as dungeon crawling, "card battles", other random scripting. Winter Wolves is one company that makes some very popular VN games (which sometimes involves romance, and occasional nudity). They have some pretty neat scripting to do stuff like exploring & adventuring within the context of a VN.
Winter Wolves uses the Ren'py (Python-based) engine to do their work. It's FOSS, so it's no-cost to you if you want to check it out.
Japanese sometimes like/prefer Tyranobuilder because it is designed to incorporate Live2D models. (Animated 2D figures... pretty neat stuff. I imagine you could decompose a Daz model and create a Live2D figure out of it, but I haven't tried.) Also, Tyranobuilder has a GUI instead of using text editors like Python-based Ren'py.
You might even consider some popular recent games, like DONTNOD's "Life is Strange", as owing a lot to the Visual Novel format. The story structure is hella similar.
EDIT: VNs with no options, game choices tend to be called "Kinetic Novels" rather than Visual Novels, as the VNs tend to require some level of choice.
Basically like Myst?... The original...
Myst is another good example as a precursor to the Visual Novel format.
As you advance through the "Game", you advance through the Story of Myst. That's the essential gameplay of a Visual Novel, although the puzzles may simply be a "multiple choice" Q&A in the Visual Novel format... as compared to the "Stack the thing on top of the other thing" gameplay of Myst.
I also inadvertently learned I used the House from House Party in some of my videos when I used to enable comments and viewers recognised it.
I'm not going to make fun of anyone who has played "House Party" extensively. (LOL)
VN plus Daz... it's hard for me to be interested because I see the images and think, "Well, I can do that."
Daz is a good engine for VN creators to do their own work because the tools are simple (just Python scripting for Ren'py), and writing fiction is writing fiction. (If you're only setting out to do the sex thing, then it's really simple.) Once you add Daz, then it's possible for one person (or a few persons) to have all the tools to create VNs.
And I think they are growing in popularity. It's still a genre where story matters, especially as big blockbuster games are more and more homogenized.
Another thing... you can use Ren'py to develop for multiple platforms at one time. Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux. It usually doesn't require fancy hardware to run a VN.
These tend not to be really expensive games, however. It's not $80 Super Metroid World 13 or Residential Evilness or Call of Dooty or whatever. As I understand, Ren'py stuff also can be retro-engineered so that people can take apart the scripts and assets from the game packages.
(i.e. it's not necessarily a great career choice to go into VN development)
Daz apparently thinks you'll use their assets in games.
They make it available on other stores that trade in game assets:
CGTrader: https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/exterior/cityscape/japanese-alley
Unity Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/51491
Well, yes. You CAN do that. That's the whole point behind Ren'Py. You can write your story and bring it to life as an interactive experience.
Great questions. Daz won't know exactly how their assets are used, but they would have numbers on the sales of interactive-use licenses. As it is, Daz is unnecessarily tight-lipped about this sort of stuff. I suspect most sales are to people who are making stills with no use in games. I'd guess that customers making non-interactive animations also outnumber customers who are using Daz assets in games. But unless Daz wants to tell us what they know, we can't be sure how the assets are being used--Forum posts won't be an accurate indicator of the customer base's purchases or uses of assets.
Most of the Daz assets we're seeing for sale in Daz's store seem to be intended primarily for the creation high-quality still renders. If the games in question are limited graphically to stills or very short animations, then I doubt there would be any difference between content designed for still rendering and content for interactive use. However, if you need to animate stuff like a running-jumping-shooting hero of an action RPG, then many Daz assets will be problematic for use at the kind of framerates needed for good gaming graphics.
I've seen some promising stuff about the new version of Unreal Engine being able to use very detailed models at very high framerates, but UE5 hasn't been released in full yet, so it might be useful to revisit these questions in a couple of years.
And this is why we might (or might not) start to see more assets for sale in the Daz store intended for use directly in Unreal Engine or Unity--no 'bridge' required. To put it another way, Daz might turn back the clock to the time when a sizable portion of its customer base uses the content in an application which Daz didn't create and doesn't control.
I truly hope not. Daz Studio is a selling point for me to use DAZ assets. If DAZ does intened to sale more items that can be used directly in other apps, I would prefer they host them at those apps stores and not here.
The market for SFM is porn, also. LOL.
There's some Unreal game dev stuff, but the market is pretty saturated with generic 3D shooter. Walking Game might be interesting, except that it's just another Myst-y VN kind of genre.
Fancy 3D shovelware games are not that inspiring, even in a world where Steam can sell your stuff for you. It's to the point where dedicated pixel artists and pixel-based sprites seem to get more of the hype than yet another 3D shooter/zombiepocalypse game.
I look at the indie games out there, and the real deal stuff seems to be more hand-drawn or pixel-based.
You get a few unique experiences with indie 3D stuff, but the interesting stories seem to eschew the over-used 3D game assets. You need to be mega huge studio to sell any 3D games, except a lot of those are generic garbage in terms of storytelling... which is why the pixel games and hand-drawn stuff has a following, almost like a reaction against over-used 3D worlds.
The RDR2s of the world are very few, especially when the likes of CDPR releases an egg like Cyberpunk.
3D/fancy graphics aren't a solution for a lack of writing and scripting. It always has been this way. (Astronaut with gun.jpg)
/even porn games aren't immune when one can just look at porn rather than suffer through a badly written game