Getting priced out of this hobby
daveso
Posts: 7,792
wow...seems prices are going up and up. the new stuff today, is way out there, not to say it isn't great stuff, but I'm still in the less than $10 range overall. SOmetimes splurge on a bundle, but I have to curtail my purchases,.
I'm not making any cash either, being on fixed income, but when prices go up, my pay doesn;t, so something has to give, and it has to be this.
Fastgrab or super sales are the only way for me now ... not a bad thing, maybe I will finally use all that stuff I bought in the past. I didn;t renew my PC+ again either, dont have the bucks right now.
Also, as the technology changes, my computer no longer fits the bill. I do not have an nvidia graphics card. CPU is ok, as I have a smewhat fast one, but i note slower and slower with the new stuff overall, and as each new version of DS is released.
Oh well ... just a thing I noted this morning.
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I hear you. For me, it's not so much the products although I have been buying less and less due to price increases
My roadblock is coming from the 5 year old pc that I'm using along with pretty buch the minimum GPU for Iray. (GTX 970)
In order to add more ram (mine's currently maxed out on my board) or upgrade the cpu (an athlon II x3) I'd need a new board, which would also mean new cpu and new ram. Which in turn tell MS that I have a new pc which means buying a new copy of Windows.
Unfortunately we have a lot of debt to pay off that was built up over the years when my income was well below poverty level.
Yep $24 for DzFire's new robot is too much. At first I thought it was some kind of bundle.
As a single figure, as remarkable as it is...
I can't do it. I'll support and picked up a light from him.
But for reals. What's going on?
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It's a weird smack now to be better off buying a vendor's similar item from their catalog than buy the new one.
I'm better off waiting for Dz to release something else AND THEN buy this same robot as a featured vendor buy at 40 -50% off.
Daz is really making it worth it to wait for better pricing.
If anything, (the opposite) I should be doing better by getting items when they first come out. That's the real incentive.
But, with a library this massive and so many items being repeats, it's time to pause on this for a while.
I'm getting the New Wizard character and that Dragon-devil and then I'm falling back.
This is not sustainable. lol
I also let my PC+ go. It exprired May 10th and I just can't afford $70. Plus as you say, everything has gotten so expensive, and dforce is extra expensive. I'm also on a fixed income the last 2 years, so I need to stop spending and just use what I have and not get new stuff. And the sales here for the last few yr aren't anything remotely like they were in past yr. Stuff was rock bottom pricing. Now it's like meh....don't need it that bad.
I'm also at the hands of my 4 yr old ASUS desktop computer. It has Nivdia GeForceGTX card, but it's only a 760 with 2GB. It's an i7 with 32GB of ram, but it's maxed out. I can render Iray and it's all I use, and run dforce sims, but I do experience shut downs with iray and dforce at times. The textures for clothing and these new HDR sets are way too much for my computer. Serious lag time, lots of 'not reponding' message from DS. Plus the downloads are getting huge. Like 3 zips of 600 and 700mb files for a product.
Time to cut the cord (from my CC to the Checkout button)
Yep, been in this situation for a couple years now. Absolutely zero interest in the new stuff for people, lighting and Iray. Minor interest in architecture and stages if they're 3Delight. I'm buying almost exclusively from my wishlist packed with stuff for M4, F4 and G1 but only when something floats to the top of my low-price sorted wishlist and is under $10. The wave has crested and I'm riding the whitewater.
I let my PC+ expire, too.
besides, I've come to find that Rendo and other shops offer much better for slightly lower prices.
My wishlist has 8 items, but I can realistically dump 3 because they're too 'heavy' for my computer and I'd be kidding myself. I do like sci fi, but none of the stuff is that interesting now for my taste or wallet. I like the more inexpensive sets from Petipet, but I already own everything in his store.
That's true. The prices are lower and the content is getting better all the time. I am swearing off Daz and all 3d spending. I did buy 3 sale items at rendo today, but that's it. I'm removing Daz and Rendo links from my menu bar in Chrome so they aren't just a click away.
I am not on a fixed income, but some years ago I had a cut in pay. And I just realized last week that I haven't bought any G8 figures. Not a one. Would like to, but can't. Maybe when the year end sales hit.
I've said it before many times, the subscription model is bad. When times are tough, people will have to look at their subscriptions with a more critical eye. Companies who overly rely on the subscription model should beware. The next economic downturn, whenever it may happen, will completely crush companies who have become dependent on that monthly fee coming in. And once somebody cancels their subscription, then there is ZERO incentive for that person to make any further purchases.
Adobe, Microsoft, Newegg, every cable or satellite TV provider, Amazon, and yes, even DAZ should proceed with caution. I think PC+ may be too costly of a fee. Just compare it to what you get with an Amazon Prime membership.
Well I never was one that could buy all these new products to begin with I'm not so much priced out as wrapping up a reasonable subset of purchases of what I wanted. I'll still buy occasionally like Girl 8 & Guy 8. Morpheus 8 if it happens. And maybe some of the more realistic 8 pro bundles if and when the timing of them being on huge markdown or as freebies with a new pro bundle purchase both coincides with what I want and what I can afford.
I'm more being pushed out by slowness and bugs in DAZ Studio and having a 7 year old laptop with no nVidia or AMD video card. Yes, it's an old PC but DAZ Studio needs more optimized and bugs fixed I have to say. The newest 2018 PC's CPUs truthfully aren't substantially faster than my 7 year old laptop. I so wanted to do a series Mother Goose renders but the viewport lag makes it frustrating more than fun to do that in DAZ Studio so I will do other things. I guess when I do DAZ Studio I will restrict me renders to portrait style renders but that has gotten boring.
Agreed, 100%.
Yeah, unfortunately I feel like I'm getting priced out as well. I completely understand how much time and work it takes to create a product, but this is a hobby for 90% of us, with no real way to recuperate our expenditures with actual 3D work. DAZ and their PAs will always create the highest quality content in my opinion and I know that compared to Turbosquid, the prices are a steal - but for a lot of us, they're reaching a point where we have to be extremely selective in what we buy.
I prefer the subscription model.
The other model is put a huge amount of cash down, and that model DID force me out of the hobby ~10 years ago. It stinks.
Now? There's loads of free stuff out there, and I can spend as much as I can.
Absolutely. My eye gave that critical look at the subscription and decided saving the money is the practical solution. You''re right about the subscription model. I have no incentive to buy due to the club being exclusive. Why bother? Plus the coupons aren't that great either IMO, and remember the whole slew of free products we used to get when we joined? March Madness was acually mad, and the PA sale was awesome. No more. Even the Xmas freebies aren't like in the past. So yeah, not much incentive.
The last Prime membership I bought was less than $59. Course those $2.50 products went away because I guess from what I heard, vendors were complaining about profits, and putting in the work for such a small return.
Oh yeah, as an aside, file sizes are way over bloated as well.
Many of those vendors are the same ones that are here. Or are vendors that have left here.
Or vendors that are in the process of leaving there and coming here, which actually seems to be the majority. Now that the old RDNA PAs have mostly settled down, it seems that the vendors who are moving back over there mostly seem to be doing it partially and putting the older V4 generation stuff up there. Which makes sense since DAZ has started culling back on the older product (when they're not in the process of discounting it crazily.)
I Blame iray for that - texture files are getting out of hand as far as size as far as prices? yeah. I haven't seen anything I wanted that badly here to plunk down hard cash for it.. Now a really good architectural set, with 3dlight support.. (i don't do iray)
And while we're on it - if a product supports both iray and 3delight, why not split the two out - download only the stuff for your rendered of choice..
I admit, the price jumps are finally starting to get to me and now that PC+ items are pushing past the $7.00 barrier, I've resolved to starting cutting seriously back. The thing is, I figure I can do that because I really do have almost everything I need so that if DAZ suddenly went under tomorrow, I won't be that severely impacted in terms of what I can render. Especially since while I've bought a bunch of stuff for the G8s, I generally still prefer the look of the G3's and lately it seems like I'm mainly buying newer versions of things that I already have, dForce being the latest suck up, or utilities to make my existing stuff work better.
Pfft, tell me about it! Yikes! I have 3 recent hairs that are between 600 and 682 MB. A few HDR packs that are from 600 MB to over 3GB that downloads in 3 zips. I should have returned it but now it's too late.
The large textures reduce the usefulness of content since renders take up too much resources for me, I will avoid buying texture heavy items and clothing because I just can’t afford to keep upgrading hardware because every prop has a huge texture now. Now that my computer crashes more often with those big texture items I’ve stopped picking up hdris and large sets.
I only buy men’s content, military items and robots so, that’s basically it. Today’s sale I purchased midnight stories male outfit. I had to wishlist the rest since the items were cool but outside of my price range.
I think the next official character will be male and I want to pick him up. So Saving money for that.
Subscription model might force me out - any individual subscription is usually not that much, but they can add up to a quite hefty monthly bill. I'd rather buy a version and then decide whether I want whatever new features are in a new version or to stick with an older version.
Subscription could also force people to upgrade hardware just to keep up with new features they might not want, but are automatically tied into.
Yep, I've been doing that for a while now. There are a handful of artists I try to buy automatically to support, or when someone actually prodcues one of the items I've been whining about for years, but when the majority of stuff that I've bought has sat almost unused through multiple sales it's hard to muster as much enthusiasm as I used to have.
Ditto on not renewing PC+ membership, even tho I do value the discount it gave. It doesn't really matter about the discount though as I can't buy anything anyway. I don't have a job yet, my car broke down to the tune of over $700 couple weeks ago, and life is kinda tough financially at the moment.
That's been my buying strategy from the start. People on low incomes have to be frugal. I shop the same way in supermarkets - buy more when something is on sale and wait for the next sale before I buy that item again. It has become a habit and there's always another sale. I only use PC+ occasionally when there is a sale on a 3 month subscription. Mainly because I don't like most of the stuff "dumped" into the PC category and the stuff that I do like - such as Jack Tomalin creations - I can catch up on during my occasional memberships.
Similar here. Still dealing with house repairs from hurricane Irma last year. Had to come up w/ $6,000 for insurance deductible on roof, fence, and other damage, and add to that car work for over $600 and some dentistry for another few thousand and well; let's just say I don't wear the latest fashions, buy DAZ stuff like I did, or eat out as much. And at least I don't have a car payment to worry about too.
I'm still trying to figure out how to afford a couple of GTX 1080 TI cards and a new laptop with at least one GTX 1080 in it. The former will run me at least $2000 and the later at least $4000-5000. And next year I have more house stuff to do, because that sort of work never stops.
If I get hit with too many more unexpected expenses, I too may have to re-evaluate my PC+ membership. I'm already not benefitting from it.
V4 n older stuff is cheaper n CGShare a lot of free stuff
Seems I'm the lucky one here. As a newbie there's still tons of stuff in the PC+ department that I can/could use and with all the coupons each month and regular freebies, of which some really are nice, I've got no reason to complain about paying $ 70.- once a year.
And I'm lucky again, as a lot of the new stuff during the last couple of weeks didn't fall into the themes that I want to render.
Alas, I'm on a tight budget, and right now it's some deals at Rendo that drained it. "Buy one product for at least $ 3.- to get a random Grab Bag Product for free" in combination with a "60-70-80% off" Deal (depending kinda on age of the products; made some of those medieval building by Dante78 jump in my cart) was too tempting to ignore.
I'll have to do a bit of tinkering and re-texturing to make some of that stuff work as I want it to, but the sheer amount of items/props coming with them for an terribly low price was just too much to let go by..
Still theres stuff in my Rendo wishlist for $ 1400.- waiting to get reduced to a point what makes me able and willing to buy it.
Compared to that, there would have to be extreme deals offered by the DAZ shop to get some stuff close enough to my budget. Right now there's 343 items in my wishlist here at DAZ (half of them PC+ items wishlisted, so I don't have to go through the shop list each time I can afford to buy something, and still wishlisted, because they are of lower priority) with some being so high-priced compared to the possible use they will have for me, that only a 70% off deal would get close in tempting me to buy them.
DAZ shop sometimes makes me think, that many items here are supposed to be bought mainly by other PAs or people making their money by working with DS stuff. Which probably allows for asking more money for them, as the number of sales might be lower due to a smaller numberof potential customers. Which probably could be wrong, as some of those more "professional" items would probably also work nicely for the hobbyists, but are to expensive to get their interest.
Then there's some pricing policy, which seems a bit strange... like.. dForceable clothes getting a higher base price, even though many of them offer less useability for people not intending to make all clothes dForce in suitable positions, and who would be satisfied if some simple morphs would be included.
Compared to that, the dForceable stuff at Rendo is often way less expensive, looks as good (and probably works as well) and often comes not only dForceable, but also with basic morphs included.
I do like to buy here at DAZ shop. Many very great and interesting items. Lots of stuff that I could use, but being on a tight budget keeps me from buying more than just the very few things that are cheap and interestig enough to not let them pass.
And it's the same at Rendo, with the one difference, that the basic prices there seem to be usually lower - though the deals usually aren't that high-percentage then.
As both shops seem to be able to "make a living" from the way they offer their stuff, I don't expect either to change much. And I guess I can live with that, as I have to live with it.
...I know the situation you are in. Had old student loans that still needed to be paid off while working a job that paid squat for wages, then, only months after I finished my system I lost my job. It took me 18 months of saving to build the system I have which is now going on 6 years old and is considered "legacy" hardware. Fortunately There was still a little room to upgrade so doubled the memory and swapped the old first generation I7 for a 6 core Xeon (the best I could do for an LGA1366 board). An Athlon II x3, 3-core? Wow. I used to render on a Intel mobile Duo Core (1.6 GHz) and that was slow even with 3DL.
Did come into a good deal for a Titan X a couple weeks ago so finally have the rendering power I need for most of the scenes I create. Even though my board is still PCI3 2.0 it will still work, just that the scene will take a little longer to load.
If I ever am in the position to get (build) a new system, going to stay with pre-Kaby Lake/Ryzen components so I can use W7 or 8.1 and maintain more control over my system (as well as not have to deal with the VRAM "robbing" W10 involves).
Do you mean CGShare or ShareCG?
If daz went to a subscription model Id drop it like a hot rock and never look back.