Priced out of a hobby
Ippotamus
Posts: 1,580
in The Commons
Yikes, the prices this last week or 2.
Too rich for me.
Beyond the PC Club, I fold.
:(
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Comments
No need to fold, just change your buying habits.
Once items are out of the "new" zone they become subject to occasional offers and discounts - some major. Make good use of your wishlist and bide your time.
I feel your pain. One room for $35.00? When you can get a complete bowling alley for $28.00? A single outfit for $30.00 that comes with one texture? I realize that the cost of living is going up, but it's going up for all of us. When our incomes don't rise as well, we have less to spend on hobbies anyway, much less when the price of our hobby goes up as well.
It's a simple fact of life, when my cost of living goes up, the value of DAZ offerings goes down. I just don't have the money to spend on as many items as I used to. Which is why I watch the sale prices, not the sale percentages.
Time to learn a modeling app, LOL
I am s..l..o..w..l..y learning Hexagon. Urgh...
That's why I buy nothing unless it's discounted 50% or more. lol You'd be suprised how often things go on sale. Like I've been wanting Victoria 7 for the past two months, but I was like "no way am I paying $45 for a single naked and bald character". lol I have been patient for the past couple months and just scored her for $17! Awesome!
I'm slowly learning to use my wishlist more. It's just really hard because so many good offers keep coming up.
50% is the new 30%
?
Even then just very barely.
I'm not angry or anything at the PAs, just sad and disappointed I can't afford the shiny new things anymore.
:( I love shiny new things. :(
But yes, this is not some empty complaint about prices. I seriously can not afford he new pricing ... the line of fact is just crossed for me personally.
Like I said, 50%. But yeah, if you are too impatient to wait for things to go on sale and just HAVE TO HAVE the "new shiney" then that's your issue. There is nothing at all wrong with waiting a little bit for what you want - particularly if you say you can't really afford it when it first comes out.
Exactly! There's no need at all to have to jump on everything as soon as it comes out of the gate. You can get major discounts if you just wait a bit.
I'm like Ippotamus - not angry or anything at PA's or DAZ re pricing, but with loss of income, plus the awful currency conversion rate right now, everytime I look at something that I like, my first thought is "ouch, can't afford that". LOL. It's simply my circumstances have changed financially, and like I mentioned, the currency conversion is so bad right now that i'm paying almost double.
I'll agree. I'm not tightwad stingy, but hobby money will only go so far.
I ponder over a new release for as long as I can before buying, and I do try to catch the sales.
Modeling our own will only go so far, too. I can do clothes (not like the pros, of course), but not hair.
Planning to rejoin the PC soon, though. Maybe that'll help, since a lot of new products are being ticketed as DAZ Originals.
Edit: I do appreciate being able to use DS free though, and it's become a powerful program. And the galleries. So I look at part of what I spend as support for those things.
Plus 3 Ippo and jaki. I promised myself to use what I already have for the most part.
With this sale though if you put one new item that's about $13.00 in your cart, you can get a lot of Daz originals for around $3.00 if you're a PC member... It will say $5.00 or $6.00, but will go down once you get it in your cart.
I learned that the hard way and got stuff that I do not remember getting. Right now I am trying to get a new computer before getting lots of new 3d stuff. I have almost a TB of stuff from daz (if not already that amount)
Yeah, I thought I was browsing Turbosquid for a moment there.
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Sounds like the start of a new club.
I want in this one. :D
Learn Blender, make your own assets.
there are a 1,000 x more tutorals, resources and development hours than Hexagon. Hex is ancient, outdated, not supported and not very stable, it's not even free.
I feel like I am priced out even before looking at the store as I have to get a new computer to continue this 3d hoby and the ones I want are out of my price range but the ones in my price range are the ones I do not think would handle what I want to do.
If you've got the upgrade bug you may want to hold off on the Pascal GPU until the smoke clears. The first released Nvidia Pascal cards will come with a $100 surcharge for the GTX 1080 ($70 for the 1070) for any early adopters with $699.00 US burning a hole in their pockets. These card were branded "founders edition" but they do not have any performance benefit to "non-founder edition" which will possibly be released at the same time or after to let the junkies blow $100 (or $70) because they can't wait any longer.
however the GTX 970 after rebates and other incentives has dropped to about $260, but keep in mind three of these things against a single 1080 will loose the dog fight.
I always ask myself if it is worth the full price; if no, then I ask, so why buy it?
Agree; been a fan of Blender for years. Love or hate em though, the shortcuts are essential.
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LOL sounds good to me, where do I sigh up
Like almost everyone nowadays, I have less disposable income than I'd like and I have to make some major real life purchases over the next few months. So I've had to cut back on my hobby spending pretty dramatically.
There is a silver lining. Since I'm still rendering at the same rate, not buying new goodies is forcing me to better examine some of the older goodies collecting dust in my Runtime. I am enjoying further exploring some of Stonemason's sets from a while back (for example) and making some custom textures for clothing that I'd bought for G2 several months ago. As a rule, the re-use value of most of what I've bought at DAZ is pretty high and gives me hours of hobbying fun. So while I can't afford the latest and greatest anymore, I feel as though I have gotten more than my money's worth on my older purchases.
I have been part of hiring processes with a number of graphic artists who despite really good skills they were passed over because they were pointing and clicking commands when they should have been typing them. A good designer optimizes his knowledge of a program and the steps necessary to perform an action in the fewest steps, a designer unfamiliar with a software package notoriously clicks on things, which wastes time. this is something art directors look for when candidates come to jobs. If you mouse, menu, submenu, click the little arrow and this for your hobby that fine, but in the real world that's a determent to deadlines and productivity.
All that aside I have yet to learn all my keyboard functions in Blender but there are a good many of them I do without have to thinking or looking now so the anxiety of using a keyboard should be put into perspective. Yes it's a PITA when you start but once you make sense of them you wont go back to playing hide and seek with the mouse.
ok, back on topic, the rent is too damn high! I mean the cost of assets is too damn high!!! especially if you want to keep using current generations of figures and the features of the core application depreciate against older generations of figures.
I don't buy at full price if I can avoid it - and normally that just means waiting for a sale. There's always a sale.
Having said that, there are some products that are either unlikely to go on sale or that are just must-have-it-now purchases. I think the new VWD cloth sim (plus DAZ Studio Bridge) will be one of those so I hope it will come with a 30% new product discount.
There have been more than a few times since I've started using Daz 3D that I've seen something new in the store and thought 'Ooh - I could do this, that and the other with this product - I've got to get my mitts on it!'. Now when I get that feeling, I make a point of remembering the products that have made me feel that way in the past and how the excitement lasted for about an hour after most of them hit my runtime, after which time plenty of them were never used again. Almost without exception, the ones which are still used pretty much daily are those which can take stuff I've already got and resurface or reshape it - e.g Mech 4Ds shaders or SimTenero's randomiser.
Since realising that these and similar products can give me something new every single day (and they do), I can get the 'Oooh, shiny!' feeling from my runtime rather than the store. These days, unless new store items can help revamp what I've already got, I'm quite happy creating new goodies from old and wishlisting new stuff until it's cheaper. By which time I've realised I don't want half of it anyway :)
Regarding the VWD cloth sim for DAZ Studio Bridge, I haven't been following development too closely lately. Is there some news other than "it's being worked on now, will take a while"?
I'm in the same boat as many of you, fixed income and in the middle of a new computer build. I have everything except the video card, am waiting for the user reports on the 1000 series.
I guess I'm fortunate, in a way. I have just about all of the products that I'll need for a long time to come, so my spending here has dropped off. "Do I need it?" "Do I want it?" have different levels of willingness to spend, and most of what's in my wishlist is in the second category, so, no.
DAZ, with it's high prices and constant sales, has trained me not to buy until the items go on sale, and even then I'm watching the price and not the percentages. Is the value of the product greater than the price? If no, then no.
I can understand that the cost of living is going up and that PAs want their income to go up to match, but I can not work up much sympathy since I'm in the same situation but my income isn't rising. As I said above, the rising cost of living means that I have less money to spend here, and raising prices will raise income only to the point where sales drop off due to the price increases. I suspect that DAZ has a pretty good idea of where that point is, but I don't.
That's one reason that I am downloading large product images, so that I will have an easier reference for what I already own! Just going through my past purchases has been a real eye-opener!