You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption
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Well someone can have my code I'm not going to use it
First really useful suggestion I've seen here in a while if (as Novica suggested) its done correctly. Of course if you ask the public directly if they want DRM they're going to say no. That's not how you get useful answers in a survey about the impact of change on spending habits. Questions should be something along the lines of:
If you see an item you want in the DAZ store and notice that it is encrypted, does it influence your purchase decision in any way ? ( ) YES ( ) NO
If you see an item in the store you need for a render, are you more likely to buy it, less likely to buy it, or indifferent to whether it's encrypted or not? ( ) MORE LIKELY ( ) LESS LIKELY ( ) INDIFFERENT
As long as a product works as intended, it's irrelevant whether it's encrypted or not. ( ) TRUE ( ) FALSE
Of course there would have to be a lot more questions to weed out the weight of the answers per user such as "What is your average spend/month at the DAZ store?" That way people who spend $20/year versus those who spend $500/year or more wouldn't get the same level of %weight. And before everyone freaks out about that statement being elitist, remember it's a statistical game of numbers for DAZ, so knowing the spending habits driving the input matters a lot. To be transparent, my input probably have very little weight.
No discount at all for me, must be due to too much grumbling in this thread :-(
Me too. After the many thousands I've spent here only getting 10% almost seems like nothing but throwing a few crumbs to me. It won't make an iota of difference in what I buy (or don't buy) this weekend.
Now if DAZ was to give me 10% of all the money I've spent there (or even 10% of the money I spent with them in the last year) that would be a different story.
DAZ do not need to ask how much you spend a year (at least in their store), they already know this.
So I was just looking at this dazzling array
and I only just noticed that the left side of the splodey head might be a cartoony head to show the difference morphing can make adjusting from the realistic head on the right o.o
Originally I thought it was meant to be a physical paint palette or something with a face on the right.
My coupon, that I won't be using, is also 25%. Up until now I've been buying a bunch at a fairly consistent rate for the last year (though I had a dry spell over the summer due to a move and assorted costs)
I spent over $1000 last year, which is clearly not enough to be considered a loyal customer.
Welcome to loyalty as defined by the marketing department.
Well, I spent $4K - $5K over the last year (or about $375 per month) at DAZ and less than a couple of hundred for the year at all the other 3D sites; but I guess I'm only a little loyal by their standards.
This thread has completely devolved from a mostly serious discussion of the various DRM issues to a mess of upset over what was possibly a randomly generated discount on virtual goods.
We may not like it that DAZ3D finds it necessary to do something about piracy but apparently the piracy situation is such that they feel that some steps are necessary. Do I like it? No. But the fact remains that DAZ3D provides higher quality assets than just about any other company out there AND they do it at a price that does not lock the casual hobbyist out of the market.
Maybe taking some sort of steps to cut back on financial losses is necessary so that DAZ3D can continue to keep the price points as reasonable as they are? Have any of us thought seriously about that aspect? I have been and while I don't like the implementation of DRM at all, I would much rather be part of a serious and forward moving discussion on how to best meet the needs of both the consumer AND the company so that we can all continue to enjoy and profit from digital art.
A company is in business to make money. If it does not make money it goes out of business.
I really don't mind that I'm only a 10% loyal. What does bother me is that it only lasts for a couple of days: not really enough time to budget, and definitely not enough time to get a saving on the next figure (if one wants it.)
Insert joke about how long Loyalty lasts.
The problem is that we've tried to have that serious and forward-moving discussion and Daz's answer is always "We've considered all possible options and DRM is the only choice. We can't tell you why."
So whats the point in trying anymore?
Because these things have already been thought of and replied to and bringing them up again gets us called circles. A summary:
There is no way to know how much money is lost to piracy. Daz knows this. They do how much is being lost to fraud (fraud and piracy are different things) and for secret business reasons, are choosing DRM over trying to counter the fraud directly. Since these things have been answered with no opening for wiggle room, no one knows of a way to move those particular topics forward.
The discussion kinda stalled when we were told pretty much that every possible alternative had been discussed, and we don't get an answer as to why DRM was the only possible choice. Or even an answer to Why Now? I still wonder why they didn't just put it in the very first version of Studio. It's not like DRM is somehow new. It's not like piracy is new either. Again, we're not going to get the answer.
All that's left is tossing around random ideas and questions in the hopes that maybe one will be ok to answer, and the occasional sidetrip when something like this 'loyalty' discount has the bad timing to be done in the middle of people questioning whether or not they even want to stay.
I mean, the reason the whole sub-topic about credit fraud came out is because it's one of the few pieces of information that's come up, which is one source of piracy.
So we come up with ideas to solve that.
I agree, but it does not follow that DRM was introduced to pull DAZ back from the brink of financial disaster. A company does not need a reason to want to make more money, that is the whole point of its existence. If I have a record year, I want the next year to be even better. DRM was introduced by DAZ in the hope that (in the medium to long term at least) that it would aid them to make even more money, not necessarily to stop them from going out of business. I have no idea of DAZ's financial results last year, but with the launch of Genesis 3, and everyone saying how successful is was, I would be amazed if 2015 was not a record revenue year (though not necessarily a record profit year, as that depends on its costs).
They seem to be defining "loyalty" in terms of last month, or maybe the first ten days of February. Which strikes me as curious, at best. That's "having a good week" or a "bad week". "Loyalty" is sticking with you for years, through good and bad.
This is the part I'm not sure anyone at Daz is hearing or willing to do anything about or something. Another dinosaur 1995-er here as I've also mentioned many times in this and other threads. Come up with a way for me to still use DIM on ALL content. That way you can have your encryption and I can keep my file system that's almost 2 decades old. Win-Win situation.
I'd even be willing to pay for a plug-in to be able to manually sort encrypted files. I think quite a few of us would bow out of these threads with that solution.
As far as loyalty, yes I still am. I got a few GC's with that last offer and shop the way I always have. Of course, my paranoid nature makes me check the products many time to make sure they aren't encrypted before I hit the check out button. LOL So thanks for the coupon! Looking forward to lots of DIM-able releases this weekend. :)
I just want to shop, sort my files my way, and make pictures. It's not that complicated. LOL
Pretty near zero.
The only "loss" issues are the fees associated with chargebacks, and the lowering of DAZ's standing with the credit card companies.
In that, it's very similar to the antecedent piracy. The people who download the pirated copies are the ones that aren't that likely to buy something in the first place. The goal isn't to "minimize" anything negative, it is to increase sales, pure and simple. Perceived value does that.
It does not actually feel like the only loss is to fees when you look what you have made for the pay period and there is suddenly a large negative to your income. Don't forget it isn't just a company named Daz that is hurt by this. There are also several hundred PA's who are real, ordinary people who have to pay bills and put food on the table.
DAZ could never have put DRM into the first version of DS as at that time the bulk of its content sales were to Poser users. Adding DRM to DS would have killed DS, as well as ruined the company since 90%+ of its sales would have gone. It is only now, with Poser (+ Cararra and Bryce) users considered to be a very small part of its customer base that it can think about DRM. The launch of Genesis 3 and iRay certainly persuaded a number of Poser users to look again at DS, and this has helped DS cement its more dominant market share, and opened up the possibility that DRM could work.
My point was that the loss (being to fees doesn't make it any less valid) to fraud is a measurable problem; the perceived loss to piracy is not. These are two completely different things and we are told that the only possible way to stop fraud is to put "DRM that will not stop, but slow down pirates" onto content.
There was no suggestion whatsoever that the measurable loss was an insignificant one to be ignored.
Very true. Despite sayings about counting chickens, and the reasons such as just ordinary product returns that can cause that, it is very hard to see a drop to what you thought you were going to get and not be upset by it. Percieved loss is a whole different concept to the individual as opposed to the larger scale, because it's not just a number on a balance sheet, it's groceries, or rent, or the power bill. Even when making content isn't ones primary income, it hurts. Someone sharing their purchased products to torrents or pirate sites is bad, yes, but it's the ones buying with the stolen credit cards that really need to be stopped. Even though the company and PAs would never have gotten that money anyhow it still has an impact beyond just chargeback fees and standing with the card companies. (Though given how brutal those companies can be with smaller retailers, that's not necessarily a small impact. If you're not Nationwide Chain Store big, they can murder your business with fees and penalties.)
I still think DRM is a poor solution, especially as it's currently set up. I get the whole 'gotta do something' drive, but sometimes a poorly executed plan is more damaging than letting things go as they were. Sorry if it seems harsh, and maybe this is one of those things where it looks different to those behind the curtain, but to us outside of DAZ HQ, it does seem kinda like DAZ was caught entirely by surprise by the reaction to DRM.
Not doubting you, but question:
How do you know that Poser is a small part of the customer base, and that DS has a dominant market share - other than that SM is known to not be doing great financially?
Except now it's very much like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. If they'd made it part and parcel of the studio file formats from day 1, it might have had a solid effect. (not saying a good one, just a solid one) Poser files wouldn't have needed to be touched, but now unless they release some new 'killer app' feature that is protected by the DRM, all that's been done is a minor shift in what is being targeted by pirates.
I'm pretty sure its just a sales gimmic to encourage some spending, not a political statment on the definition of loyalty. I think this thread has a lot of reading into motivations that just aren't there.
I think DRM was instituded because at a meeting they said 'hey all this piracy kinda sucks, lets do some stuff to make it harder'
Likewise this recent sale the maketing people probably went 'hey that 7 dolars for buying gianni or gia worked pretty well, lets do something similar, but with percentages rather than a flat rat, since that encorages people to buy more items'
I don't know that what I said was the case, but that is DAZ's own assumation, as some of them have stated. However there is little doubt by looking at postings in DA and other places that DS renders are beginning to dominate. How much of a share the others are left with is tricky to say.
But I want a flat rat coupon :(
I'm pretty sure people know that the loyalty promotion is just unintentional irony (well I hope they realise that.)
Ah right, good points. So Poser now considered irrelevent, Hexagon and Bryce last updated (when???) Carrara apparently in closed beta for at least 3 months. There are no other programs that run Daz content right?