Just an observation/comment
bnstone_stone
Posts: 110
So, I'm noticing the silent increase of pricing of everything here. I realize creators need their bucks, but recently I've been priced out of many purchases.
I'm a Premier Member...
Yes a deducated $18/Monthly cost for stuff I've still have yet to use effectively, features that IMHO should not be forcing us to rent out their use, and 'perks' that are really not usable or said 'perks' (biggest culpirate 'expiring TOKENS').
I'm not really mad at Daz, or Rendo, but it is almost impossible to obtain the great works being offered, and worse not able to create these items due to the quarks and oddities DAZ has with its programs and items.
This restrictive environment is not exclusive to just Daz, all the 3D sites have increased cost. I'm also a Blender user and always strive to find things for it as well, but this silent increase has prevented my purchasing of newer items.
For me, I attempt to keep trying to learn how to develop my own stuff, and I will keep my DAZ (6 is actually quite good), but my wishlist is larger, and my funds are scarser. I've dropped Poser 14 due to needed disk space and a waste of software, overall the future in this medium is growing dimmer and dimmer every day/week/month/year.
I'll still support DAZ, if only they could find a happy medium for pricing and actually develop an effective content catalog method, I might feel a bit better about things and contribute more, and dump any extra things like, say, food, streaming, or other entertainment/necessities life has to offer.
I know its like playing Russian Roulette, and I am expecting a flame/napalming, but still we do have freedom of speech...for how long I don't know, but this is just my oppinion.
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Comments
I think the prices are rising. Can't disagree there. The minimum prices on offers used not to exist, then $0.99, followed by $1.99 and the latest today is $2.99. Tokens are more expensive to obtaine that they used to be for base members. However, I rarely buy frequently enough to ever have benefitted from any.
I have gone though many of my old receipts looking at list prices, and many are lower than current. I have not run the numbers, but it feels that the rise is above inflation, but without doing the numbers I could well be wrong. Gut feel is usually wrong with the slow erosion of spending power by inflation.
I would say that the quality of the tool (DS) is fantastic, and with a bit of careful spending you can make the absolute most of what you have. It also means that you have the tools available to make poor quality freebies look really good, and the best freebies are no worse than commercial items. Just target spending to what you can use the most. It may be the point at which you change your principal focus to being a content user instead of a contentent buyer/collecter. And if you could then become a content creator that'd be fantastic for the whole community.
Regards,
Richard
Editing this as sales are up according to the thread and I don't want to spread misinfo.
I wrote a comment about rising prices before..more than one of them over time. Sent a ticket to sales support a couple days ago as well. There is no doubt in my mind that prices are rising. I look at new content every day and notice the lowest pricing isn't $7 anymore, its more like 11.xx. This puts the buy-in much more difficult to get discounts. Then you couple that with sales pricing accomplished by coupons, makes it more difficult to use your membership coupons. Then the reduced choice in the "free" Premier bundle coupon. It all adds up to more expensive. I was going to renew DAZ+ or Premier for this sale, but pricing overall too high anyway, plus I already spent my October budget on the extended PA sale.
You aren't going to find better prices at the other 3rd party Daz stores, where the prices are also rising. Prices rise. That's how the world works. The artists need to pay more for basic necessities just like everyone else does.
I somewhat disagree. I think the nature of 3D marketplaces leads to an attitude of devaluation of the time and effort it takes to make product for others to purchase and use. It takes months and years to learn the skills to be able to produce the content we purchase, and hours of time to make it.
But, using this site as an example, there's a half dozen new products here every day. Six a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year - 2184 products. I think it's easy to look at that output and think it's not worth the asking price if so much can be made. I also think this volume is what leads to limited themes and styles of items that are sold. It wouldn't surprise me if PAs stick to certain things they know will sell because they have a very limited selling window to grab customer attention, and prioritize their return on investments.
I've been a customer here for decades at this point. I buy what supports my hobby, my interests, and make my value decisions based on that. But I don't think it's on anyone but me to decide what is or isn't affordable, and had to ask myself at one point what my hobby and interest was - collecting content or using content to illustrate my ideas.
Base prices may go up (mine rarely do)...but the nuber of sales at DAZ also has gone up a lot, and the number of ways to get discounts that stack has also gone up, leaving sales at pennies on the dollar.
This applies to all artwork at all times since probably cave dwellers when Ogg paid Niff to paint a hunting scene on the entire cave wall for a few beets.
Yes, the prices are higher and I will be more conservative on what I buy, but honestly, I've been at this since 1996 or 7 and I have WAY more items than I can ever render...lol. I do feel bad though for those that are just starting or don't have much in their catalog of purchases. If I buy these days I wait for sales - sooner or later one will be coming around ;)
This might be the issue (I think it was even explained by the mods at some point) with the payment processors' fees. As far as I know, many charge at least $0.3 + 5% per transaction. If someone's having one $0.99 item in the cart, it's barely any income for Daz and PAs.
And since it's hard to implement minimum cart price, they put them on the products instead. Not that I'm happy about it, but I can understand why.
As a side note, there's also the matter of the current state of the world. People being laid off en masse. Prices going up everywhere. Many people can spend less on their hobbies (if anything). I think almost everyone who's selling something experiences it at the moment. So to make up for lack of volume in purchases, prices go up, pricing out more people, and the vicious circle continues.
It is?
so its all rather circular, isn't it. Costs go up, PAs need to recoup costs, DAZ the same, and we pay more. Its very understandable. The caveat. Are your or my wages going up at the same rate to compensate for the overall rise in pricing, not just here at DAZ but in general? I know for fact that mine are not, so it stands to reason that to me, costs are now at the tipping point for me to continue purchasing here. I can grab some high reduction products, but even new release pricing is too high. I don;t even look at products that have no discount any longer for purchase, in fact that new release 30% off doesn;t hack it either. Facts are facts. As a hobbyist and long time collector of assets here, my purchasing has to be reduced. Not everyone obviously in same boat. Life is the same. We don't go to the movies, rarely eat out, we go to reduced price grocery stores, can't afford farmer's market pricing, etc etc. Our cars are 11 years old. it is what it is. Reality. Daz probsbly has more discounting than pretty much any vendor I frequent, not just in 3D modeling world but overall. When was the last time you've seen an apple for 90% off? Perhaps they're just trying to keep some revenue coming in?
That assumes most people pay with actual credit cards or paypal each time. It would be interesting to know what percentage of sales this applies to. Speaking only for myself, I suspect less than 5% of my purchases are done using payment processes, all the rest are using store credit, and these should not cost DAZ anything.
For a counter point of this anecdotal evidence, 99% of my purchases are via PayPal/credit card. I rarely buy gift cards, because for them to make sense, I would have to commit a lot of money to Daz upfront which I don't like doing.
Not technically. But I can imagine what would happen if Daz told all its users that the minimum cart value before tax has to be now from now on $5/10/15. That would cause much more uproar than the floor price on individual items, even $2.99, that is also often bypassed by tokens.
Uproar? And this uproar would affect Daz policies? The $2.99 floor affects every purchase and individual items in all carts. People screamed and hollered when it became normal. A cart floor only affects people buying one item at a time, most likely infrequently. I can't imagine it would get nearly 1/10th the uproar. And Daz did what about the prior uproar??
Yeah. Only. Most likely. Especially during big monthly sales when people buy something small every day to accumulate bigger discount for a bigger cart and better discounts.
Definitely very infrequent. Affecting only a small group of users.
Just because Daz might not care about people complaining on the forums doesn't mean they don't care about sales dropping. I'm sure they did their math, and the item floor price makes more financial sense to them than the cart floor price. Especially that, as I said, floor price on items is often overriden, if with nothing else, then with tokens. And I'm guessing cart floor price could devalue tokens really quickly.
I suspect data centers are passing their rising hardware costs on to digital asset companies like Daz. And whoever is upstream of that is passing their rising costs to data centers as well. Some of it is true scarcity since there's unprecedented demand, some of it is parties along the line realizing some extra profit.
Art and workflows augmented with ai is the future but there's still (currently) a demand for 3d model truth and figures that can quickly be dressed, shaped, and posed to exact specifications. Ai is improving but still hasn't mastered perfect frame-to-frame consistency, large crowds, intricate background detail, or complex depth cues or angles without reference to guide it. Even when the tech eventually gets there, stuff that isn't in its vocabulary can be helped along with eclectic, historic, or complex 3d props and characters. And it's just a fun flowstate to snap together a 3d scene exactly as you imagined it, or do character design with props and accessory sets like digital legos.
I notice there still seems to be a growing list of older products being acquired as Daz Originals, and there are very generous promotions where quantities of Daz Originals are given away cheap or free. Wouldn't surprise me if Daz eventually moves toward a subscription model where the whole DO catalog is readily available (but rented) and buying your own perpetual license stays the premium spend.
IMO the Daz shop reeeeally needs a separate sales model that supports software releases. Plugins are dropping right and left but PAs have to price them at like $200 base to compensate for the deep sales and the shop's own cut. I have a few potential plugin offerings in the works too and it's a little scary seeing new release plugins going for like 75-85% discount at launch with the promise of even deeper sales following.
All they have to do is add a "card processing fee" to transactions that have one, and don't add that fee to transactions that don't have them. Just have it as an extra line in the list of things adding up to the total, like sales tax.
When you sign up to something like Paypal, as a vendor, Paypal makes it part of the contract that you can't charge a separately identifyable 'Processing Fee' or a different price when paying by Paypal compared to any/all other means of payment. I suspect DAZ could get caught by one or other provision if they were to have an extra line in the list of items to be totted up.
(I did have to look into this in detail in the past - I had a bit of a problem as a mod on a fountain pen forum when a well respected pen modifyer decided to take it very personally when I reminded him what he'd signed up to with regard to separate Paypal fees in a classified ad in the forum [I was concerned Paypal could open litigation with the forum as the advert publisher, and being voluntary, there was no capital to be able to pay for any legal refutation & it could close]. The pen modifyer was outrageous in his personal attacks on me until I published the very innocuous e-mail and he suddenly looked pretty foolish for getting so upset about it - and shut up very quickly.)
Regards,
Richard
Prices have been increasing:
A. General inflation. Prices for most things are up. Two primary reasons: (1) Knock-on effect of overreaction to COVID, both with stimulus spending and loose monetary policy. (2) Two wars (Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iran/Strait of Hormuz crisis). Probably best to just note the problems and avoid anyone's foreign policy analyses. The effective price of Daz Studio content seems to me to be in line with general inflation.
B. Daz's own sales and membership strategy encourage everything to have a high list price, and this trend is worsening. Add to my list (If you can, and feel it necessary): New item discounting (Most of the money to be made on content is when the item is new), periodic sales (holidays, promotional periods (i.e. the 2026 Member Sale), Daz+ and Daz Premier coupons, and tokens. It all leads to the vast majority of sales being discounted in some way, so that a high list price is needed to get Daz and the PA to an effective price at which actual sales happen. Not only does it make shopping involve more algebra than I would usually want, it also leads to some list prices that many of us balk at. For me, it's not so much "can't afford" as "wouldn't pay that much", especially since I can't justify being a Premier member on a year-round basis. Anyway, list-price inflation has been happening at an accelerating rate since the introduction of tokens and Daz Premier, for the stated reasons.