The prices are getting out of hand
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True... but then it'll take more than a day to "whip up" as RamWolf put it... LOL :)
I can see the OP's point. Then I see the likes of Luthbel's new release. Sure, it's the most expensive of today's items at $21, but look at what you're getting. The work put into this set is very obvious to me. There's a big difference between low price and good value. My supposition is that Daz has a minimum entry price point, and that customers have their limits on what they are prepared to pay. There's value to be had if you are discerning about what you buy and/or you are prepared to wait and buy in one of the endless sales.
Let's base our economy on the price of tulip bulbs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Lots of good points here, as well as humor. My takeaway?
1) High prices make people unhappy, not because the product isn't worth it, but because they can't afford to buy it.
2) The artists are overworked, but not underappreciated.
3) There will be no solution to the problem. The artists will continue to produce products to the limits of their time and skill, and the customers will continue to purchase them to the limits of their available income.
4) The people who come to these forums are a pretty good bunch.
5) TANSTAAFL
When pet rocks first came out they were $4 and came with the box and the manual. Now they are 19.95 and do not have a manual but a certificate of authenticity. Perhaps that helps put our prices in perspective for some of you. Because if you spend 19.95 (and I expect less than a dozen people to ever pay full price) on a set of my shaders you get over 200 shader presets. Not flogging my product btw, just not going to drag anyone else in as an example though I am sure would could find dozens where they are charging a tiny amount per object in a product. I just looked at one that if you only look at the full price may seem to be higher, but if you do the math and see that based on included content the price per object etc is less than .40 cents each at full price.
That was my first thought after that comment too. Definitely the best price bubble ever (partly because it happened long ago enough that its not just depressing)
Remember everybody money is just a collective delusion anyway!
Not sure where you're going with that; the link demonstrates that no economy was based on the price of tulip bulbs.
Trying to drag things back on topic, it's interesting that DAZ was founded in the heady days of the dot-com bubble. One of the few ideas to be profitable beyond stock market speculation.
Don't forget that, within HOURS, the item will show up on the warez sites costing us all.
Also not taken into account by many is that in many locales, the PA is considered a "business" and gets slapped with significantly higher taxes than an individual getting a wage. At the US Federal level there is the additional "Self Employment Tax", and I've heard stories of similar things in other Nations.
Does anyone ever notice that many items are not "single PA"? Wanna cut all of those numbers on the PA side in half?
Another consideration is that we PAs also take a hit on "special sales", "coupons", and other things that reduce the sales price.
Anyone want to ponder the amount of work that goes into a plugin?
Kendall
I'll be honest, It doesn't tend to matter to me the amount of effort that is put into an item, although I understand that can be many.. If I like it. I like it. If I find it valuable. I find it valuable. If I find it expensive, I find it expensive. It could take a long time or short time to produce.
I totally understand that making stuff takes a ton of time an energy. So does writing novels. But, I don't pay writers per page either, either, so as much as it saddens me that people can't make a living doing what they love, or have their work be valued at the true cost of labor or man hours, that's just the reality of 3d and other forms of art at this time.
Piracy will always be present, and will continue especially if prices skyrocket.
Thankfully enough people do value us that we can press on and to those people we say thank you and continue to try and please them.
I really hate to burst your bubble, but piracy is the wrong word for what is happening here, and quite honestly I don't thnk it would matter if the content was all so cheap as to be readily affordable to everyone that would want to buy it. Some folks simply will not spend money on anything they can acquire from an unauthorized distributor for free.
I don't think I said I don't value you or other pa's.
Maybe. Without statistics on DAZ Store piracy, it is impossible to say.
I don't understand what happened to the whole plan of encrypting content to reduce piracy. Daz made a big deal about that a few months ago, released a few trial products, and then...NOTHING.
I suspect that there weren't enough sales of the products to justify continuing to encrypt, especially once they announced the purchase of Runtime DNA.
It certainly seems daz store is either rethinking or retooling their encryption strategy which is interesting because I know there was a lot of protest in the forum.
Not really; the Motion Picture industry and the Recording industry still have to contend with illegal distribution of their IP (aka piracy) even with things like Apple Music, iTunes, amd the numerous legitimate video streaming services like Netflix. I firmly believe that if somehow all the sources of illegally distributed products suddenly disappeared, very few of the.people that used them would start buying the products.
One thing that I'm noticing in this discussion is that people are using the neutral "expensive" (i.e. I can't afford this) interchangably with the perjorative "overpriced" (i.e. someone is trying to cheat me). It seems like two seperate conversations are going on. Near my job, there is a condo complex in the overheated San Francisco housing market where young dot com people pay rents in the $5000 to $7000 a month; the housing complex has a market with prices that make me slightly faint. On the other hand, there is a castle for sale in Berkeley for sale right above the area called the "Gourmet Ghetto". The market verges on the "overpriced" for me but the castle is "expensive' since I can't afford it but but it is an "effing" castle in a great place to live. I am aware that It is getting more expensive and that I am less able buy everything i want but I want to make sure the store that I like to shop for remains economicly stable. Thus I notice more stuff that is expensive to me but rarely anything that is overpriced.
Fixed it.
There is the great catch 22 particular to our love here.
It is ART. making money at ART is horrifically, hit and miss.
Some people make excellent money at it...most do not, some make almost nothing.
It is ART.
What makes it even worse...it is Art...dependant on....Art
So some folks are almost always going to say it cost too much,
because there are not getting the returns on THIER Art.
Who is wrong or right ? neither and both.
But we can most likely agree...we are all art-sey folks...to some degree.
and we will almost always put in more than we get out of our work...but I hope it is fun.
PEACE
overpriced in my dictionary does not mean someone is trying to cheat me. It means priced too highly. Since expensive also means costly I'm not really seeing the distinction.
I honestly wouldn't read too much into the interchangibility of words. Expensive items are frequently overpriced. Such as when you pay more for brandname item that is the same as a generic.
..what about Cube 7 HD?
That's a really important point that is often overlooked. I think very few things at DAZ are "overpriced" (meaning you could get something similar for much less or that you get very little when compared to a majority of other products). I see far more overpried items at other stores, some laughably so. There's a whole lot at DAZ that I find expensive, but that's only because I'm on a fixed income and haven't been able to make any money with my own art. Like many of you, I have to wait for crazy 70% off sales before buying much of what I want, but I never feel like I'm being cheated even on the rare occasion when I buy something during it's initial 30% discount.
...this is why I closed my consulting service I had back in the 90s. the Governments (Federal, State and Local) were getting the lion's share of my earnings.
Remember the line in the Beatles' song Taxman: That's one for you Ninteen for me. That is almost what it was like.
Overpriced has a strong connotation of being cheated, rather than simply not in your price range.
Ah, for me they are a world of difference: there are things that I can't afford; they are expensive... but if they are shoddy, then they are overpriced. I do appreciate that I have the understanding that you mean you just can't afford them so thart if they were sold for a dollar each no matter the complexity, they would be underpriced.
I'm fine with the prices, it makes hunting/waiting for sales worth it. I rarely buy things at full price on DAZ content. Caught Lilith 6 Pro Bundle for $7 yesterday.
Overpriced does have a different connotation than expensive, as in your example of a brand name item that is the same as a generic. Something may be expensive because it is costly to produce, but that doesn't mean it is overpriced, just that the cost is high. Whereas taking the exact same item, slapping a designer label on it, and selling it for more is very much a case of it being overpriced. Whether items in the Daz store are expensive or not is debatable (I think they're pretty reasonably priced compared to other hobbies, setting aside the fact that some people use them professionally, even if I can't afford to buy very much), but I don't think anyone here thinks Stonemason is making his products on the cheap and greatly inflating the price by putting his name on them.
One of the things about langauge is that it doesn't always mean the same thing to everyone. It is fluid, and words have more negative meanings to some and not others.
I think for now I will give this thread a pass anyway. I find myelf less than enthused by the forums right now. I have done my best to attempt to support the OP because I do agree with him about the prices.... and think it is important for customers to have their say.
That would be the 400$ pro bundle... LMAO :)
For the record for the rest of you... I'm on a fixed budget too... very fixed... so I put my money where my mouth was over 8 years ago and started learning how to model, rig, map, texture, and create figures. I've written tutorials, done WIP threads, and in general tried to help other new people get started... I know all too well the amount of work and time and effort and cost that goes into what the vendors do because I do it myself as well... I also know that it is entirely possible to make at least small amounts of extra cash that you can then put back into your hobbies, but that it does in fact take a ton of work to get anywhere in this business and you have to treat it like a full-time job if you want to get anywhere with it at all... Not everyone can or is willing to do the work that it takes... I tip my hat to any and all that do...
I have never seen anything in the store that I consider "overpriced"; it may cost more than I can afford, or more than I can justify for the usage I have for it, but when I look at an item and calculate the man-hours it would take me, everything suddenly seems to cost far too little.
That said, every customer has different needs and different incomes. Customer A thinks an item is too high at $18.00, but at $14.00 they'd snap it up. Customer B thinks $14.00 is too high, but would grab it at $9.00; Cutomer C will wait until it' $4.00, and so on. The only way to *almost* make everyone happy with the price is to give it away for free, but then Customer W will complain that the download takes too long, while Customer X is upset because it doesn't work with his older version of DAZ Studio.
The clearest example I've seen of how unfair we customers can be (I've posted it before, but it's still true) was when Xena was asked to create an M2 version of some M3 clothing (many users at the time refused to jump to M3 because it was a resource hog). She did the conversion, put it in the Poser Pros store and sold a whopping three copies (one to me, though I wasn't one of the many people asking for it). At $2.50, people who -- a week or two earlier -- begged her to make them this item didn't bother buying it. This was an M2 version of an existing M3 product, so it's not like they didn't like how it turned out, or "it wasn't what they wanted", it was exactly what they asked for. $2.50.
My point -- and I do have one -- is that if 20 here told Vendor A that if the price was lower, they'd buy it would most likely result in Vendor A dropping the price and maybe 4 or 5 of the people would actually buy it, while the others would cite low cash flow, something else in the store took priority, and so on.
The PAs here look at their past sales, and based on the number of items they expect to sell try to set as low a price as they can to make enough to make everything worthwhile. At one time DAZ did try to do away with the big sales by attempting to bring items out at lower non-sale prices, but people really like sales.
I am amazed, daily, at the amount of incredible items that are sold at such low prices. Thanks, PAs.
-- Walt Sterdan