You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption
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Studio has been on Cnet for over 10 years. I think for the first couple of years those numbers pretty much represented every single person who downloaded Studio. I also seem to remember being sent to Cnet to get updates back then. So that number is likely inflated due to including the people who updated or had to reinstall during the first couple of years. On the other hand it does not include anyone who has downloaded Studio directly from Daz.
I am sure there are many reasons why Cnets number is so high, but even factoring those in, I suspect it still represents hundred of thousands of unique downloaders. How many went on to use it seriously, is far harder to guess.
As far as active buyers are concerned, I think the number of orders for 2015 that Taozen mentioned is more interesting, ie one million orders. Hard to know what the average number of orders per user are, but I am sure for some very active users it would be 100s per year, whilst for very occasional users it will be 10 or less. Perhaps 50 (though I suspect it is less than this) might be a fair guess for an average, so 1 million orders would represent 20,000 active users.
Remember that a lot of those 1 million orders would be people picking up PC+ freebies, or the bi-weekly changing general freebies, so there would be no money earned on them for DAZ.
Yeah, about a third of my orders are $0.00
Well--vocal minority or not, this move by DAZ is getting attention in several places like this one:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160203/08363133503/software-company-asks-users-input-drm-goes-ahead-institutes-it-anyway-over-their-objections.shtml
To quote the article:
"Apparently, 'hearing' actually means ignoring concerns people expressed, including portability from older versions of Daz's software. And, as is nearly always the case when DRM to added to a previously DRM-free product, the company is presenting it as a win for paying customers."
"So, Daz is thinking of its customers while simultaneously willing to ignore those customers to institute something it thinks will decrease piracy. While I can appreciate the fact Daz wants to protect its bottom line, it needs to be aware that instituting these new restrictions will result in actual lost sales -- something that may ultimately prove more harmful than the theoretical lost sales Daz attributes to piracy."
Just because 100,000 people are not posting in this thread means nothing. There a lot of other people in other 3D forums being vocal about the encryption move as well and it all adds up.
Time will tell.
I've been away for a while between a very sick wife and taking on extra work to help make ends meet, but I have seen bits of this thread and the locked one that came before this one and feel I should post my opinions, just in case anybody cares...
I can't use encrypted items on my best computer. It has never been online and will never be online. So the one time connect rule is one time too many for me. Plus, as a Carrara user, I'm not able to use it anyhow.
BUT - I understand DAZ wanting to do as much as possible to protect their stuff and simply wont buy anything encrypted. No hard feelings. It's not my loss or theirs. The loss is mutual. But we both do what we do, and times/people change. I have enough old stuff and other places to buy stuff that it will have a near zero impact on my work, just as I am sure my not buying encrypted stuff will have a near zero impact on their business.
That said, if they were to release, say ... The Millennium Cow as an encrypted only item, I may reconsider.
best advice...vote with wallet
We had the same upheaval when Daz went to all packs being in zip format. Have the same with DIM. Had the same with Genesis replacing V4-M4. I see a pattern here. You can't make everyone happy.
There may have been similar upheavals, but please don't try to diminish the issue by pretending this is the same kind of situation. Changing the package format didn't make the files inside different or lock away part of their functionality. Nor did it have the potential for a user to be locked out of their content save perhaps by some wider issue in their system as opposed to a simple 'sorry your key isn't working'.
"Make a wish props" now avaliable on torrent... One day! That's how well encryption and DRM works... *headdesk* If it takes less than a day to decrypt, it's hardly making things difficult for the pirates.
As I recall there was a huge demand to get rid of the installers and go to the zip files. The complaints were over the indecipherable names that Daz switched to and the complaints about dim were about customized runtimes which is also one of the complaints about connect
Just because it's up doesn't mean it a) has been 'cracked', b) works and c) is actually what it says it is (although c isn't all that common, any longer it still does happen).
And if it is...have you reported it yet?
They were offered in DIM the same day since they supposed to be encrypted, so the unencrypted version is what is being shared.
I don't recall them ever being anything but Connect Encrypted only. There was the mixup with the first three items, but this one was encrypted from the start.
Supposed to be unencrypted was what I meant to say, since I can't edit from the mobile device.
I don't think that was the case with the Make a Wish set, though it had happened with older items. However, I'm also not sure that Make A Wish would be hard to reverse out of DS and rebuild - not like clothes or a figure with lots of ERC and/or overlapping areas to confuse Transfer Utility.
From what I found there are reports of people getting 404 errors when they tried to click through immediately after the newsletter arrived. Then they got to the item page and it was Encrypted only but not free, then it was finally free. Nowhere do I see any sign it was ever available in any for other than an Encrypted one.
You may be thinking of the Toll Booth that was the PC+ freebie that was listed encrypted by mistake and later corrected to unencrypted. Or those three items from the first day that were mistakenly available for a brief time in unencrypted forms.
There've been a few slip-ups in getting this implemented.
Sorry Frank.. the whole zip/DIM thing wasn't near as bad as now. And once someone mentioned that DIM could download into a temp folder and be manually sorted and then merged lots of us were content and bowed out.
If I'm remembering right, Genesis affected Poser users to a big extent and split the market which led Daz to create the DSON convertor.
Sure, there are complaint threads all the time, but this is way worse than anything I've seen and I've been here a long time. Speaking for myself, this has left me uneasy (to put it mildly) not trusting the future decisions and that's a first for me at Daz.
With the zip only change was just as bad. People we complaing about the same thing. I can't use my products cause I refuse to use zips. You won't be locked out of your purchase. You install with connect once and once it is in your system it stays there and doesn't need to connect again usless there is an update. You update through connect which is no different than DIM.
With the DRM content you also need to reconnect every time you install to a new system, restore from backups, or if your system is changed enough for the key to become invalid. Installer/zip/DIM doesn't require connection for anything more than the initial download.
I could reinstall all of my content from a backup anytime I had the need without ever having go online to ask permission from some authentication server. That isn't the case with the new DRM.
I'm trying not to get upset, but it seems like the argument here is that those of us questioning the DRM are somehow against progress and improvement. Crippling the usability and portability of content is hardly an improvement. This isn't some new feature that makes the content somehow different from what has come before. This is just a hobble placed on the content in the hopes of possibly getting a result in increasing sales/decreasing fraud. If it turns out that DAZ actually sees a real improvement in that situation then great, but the end users are being asked to accept the hobbling of their content for this gamble, so it's hardly surprising it's being questioned.
But please, if I'm standing in the way of progress, please tell me how an encrypted product is any better to me as the end user than the exact same product without encryption? Not some vague 'maybe it'll help our business' but any quantifiable benefit to the user.
Connect isn't the same as DIM at all. With DIM I have a folder on my desktop and one on an external. The zips go on the external and the files go into the folder on my desktop. I re-sort, rename and whatever else and then I merge into My Library.
Connect on the other hand? Either I have to let it put things lord only knows where and make links? And pull the folders out and zip them and rename them myself? Oh yeah... there are ways I can move the files but why should I?
Those of us that manually sort our files have said all this many times. For those using smart content maybe it's good.
But please don't said Dim and Connect are the same thing.
I download then sort by figure or prop which are then sorted by characters,clothes,morphs,poses,and materials for that specific figure or prop
Unfortunately, this isn't true for Carrara users. If we want to use connect only content we have to create new duf files for every product we want to use in Carrara (at least I hope it will be that easy). With encrypted content, we have to export it from DS for use in Carrara. With the exception of Genesis 3, prior to connect almost all DS content (props and figures) were directly usable in Carrara. Any new rigged figures that are encrypted only (a robot, or cars with moving parts, or even morphing props) would have to be completely re-rigged/re-built by the user to be used in Carrara (something that few would care to do).
That is why I, as well as other Carrara users are a bit unhappy with connect only and encrypted content. Fortunately for me there are a number of older items that I can get for now, but as more content
That's only the Windows downloads, there's another 275,906 Mac downloads as well.
I agree that it doesn't accurately reflect the numbers of actual users and users who actually buy content regularly, but even if there's "only" 10,000 active, paying customers, it does put things a little in perspectiv when 20 or 25 vocal forum members claim to represent the "majority" of their customers.
-- Walt Sterdan
No it doesn't. No one claimed to represent the majority. People said that "they're only a minority" insinuating that anyone not complaining approves, which is faulty logic.
I am sorry - I did not try making fun of you! Writing is sometimes difficult to interpret.
I want to apologize to you as well. This is a hot topic and a lot of people, myself included can have a short fuse and jump to conclusions. I should have stepped back and waited to reply instead of making a snap reply. I can't promise it won't happen again but I am big enough to admit when I am at fault. Thank you for responding and I hope there are no hard feelings.
This is rather disingenuous.
None of those had the possibility of stopping users accessing them permanently or temporarily.
DIM, Genesis offered something to the customer; they may not have liked it initially, but it did provide something for us. DRM offers nothing for us. We hope it wont have a negative impact, however such a post hardly fill me with confidence.
As a customer I object to haveing my concerns dismissed as more of the same by Daz representatives.
I can't help but feel you at Daz hope we'll go away? Not to worry, I'm down to about $68 in credit. Then you'll get your wish.
At one time, say a long time ago as in before 4.9; I'd have spent $300 getting a Gift Card with the current offer. Now, I'm just using up credit.
No hard feelings! I just didn't want you to think I was making fun of you. {{{hugs}}}
According to the person who uploaded it it was done using Hexagon bridge so it's not a crack. Obviously I cannot provide a link to his/her post but it's easy to find.
It's another interesting question. In case of DIM it's easy to check if something is distributed in violation of EULA - one can compare .zip files or even their contents (or even make a checksums) and know that they are indeed identical, so the file that came from site other than DAZ is pirated one. In case of encrypted content it's no longer the case and in fact these props are (and always will be) different as well as files they reside in are different too and thus generally it would require to involve some experts to make qualified opinion on whether they are really pirated or just happen to look and name similar or maybe just advertized as such.
Personnaly I would never report it because to my knowledge and abilities I cannot verify that it's identical to original product without downloading and using it in one way ot another - and then I'll become a pirate myself (what I'd like to avoid :) ).
You're absolutly correct, and my apologies.
I'd actually tried to delete or edit the post a second after I hit "POST COMMENT" but the forum wouldn't let me.
I'd just did a quick "catch-up" of the thread (and the others) too close to bedtime and after hundreds of posts some of the phrases blurred together:
What everyone in the forums can dislike the majority who aren't vocal may like.
...it also suggests the vocal minority may be a majority on a long enough timeline since there are so many long term members included there...
There are a small number of posters expressing support; the majority seem against
Again, my apologies.
-- Walt Sterdan