The best deal is the one that give you the most that you can use personally. I’ve loved Daz over the last six years, but there’s no denying that the PC club isn’t as good a deal as it used to be… especially if you’re a long time members who’s already bought a huge portion of the Daz Originals or whose workflow centers around a non-Daz core soft like Vue, Poser or C4D.
Mind you, that’s why I’ll quickly rate Cornucopia as the WORST program, as E-on seems determined to make Vue the most expensive program to stay up to date in. CC is fine if Vue is your only thing, you have the top end consumer version and upgrade annually, but not worth much to anyone else. It’s one of only two cg clubs I’ve ever joined where, at the end of the year, I ran the numbers and saw that I would have saved more by not joining (the other being Dreamlight.)
I think your notes on Rendo Prime are a bit off. The price is (and has been) $50 for almost a year now and I’d be stunned if they actually tried to charge the “list” price of $100.00, and like Daz there’s no hosting charge. However, the MAIN thing that you missed is that for every $3.50 Prime item that’s put in the club, a one-month only Prime Classic item also gets put in by the same vendor, so while there are currently about 370 items in the club, over the course of the first year there have been over 700 three-fifty items, and they’re currently averaging nearly 60 new items a month between the PC and PCC. Better yet, they’ve been adding a lot of Genesis product and, as a nice change of pace, Prime items include a lot of merchant resources, photoshop actions and even some 3ds max and Vue. With hints being dropped as to some kind of first anniversary extravaganza, this is the one I’d join tomorrow if I didn’t already belong… and that’s with Poser Pro only being my secondary program.
And finally, the Best Deal out there right now? I’ll have to give that to Poserworld, but NOT for their annual membership. Rather, they’re selling a complete set of their archive discs for $59.99 and adding in a month of download time… more than enough to DL everything that’s been added since. With 2300 items in the current listings, that’s less than three cents each.
