Getting priced out of this hobby
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
"What's good for the goose, isn't necessarily good for the gander"
Subscription would force me out too. To be honest, I'd rather have Daz free, with expensive content.
Most of my library has been bought in sales. If it wasn't for the PC+ sales, my library would still be pretty empty. If I want stuff (and have the money), I buy it. If I don't have the money, it gets wish-listed (I have an income of less than £90 to last a fortnight). That's why I'm grateful for what I can get.
I don't have much in the way of G8 content. But that's not because content is expensive, I'm still using Genesis 3. For me, focusing on one Gen saves money anyway.
Plus, there's a lot more free content avaliable now, than there was when I first started in Daz3D back in 2013.
I'm learning Hexagon, and like others, I want to model stuff for myself. Maybe offer freebies when I get a little more confident.
I like to tinker around with stuff, which is a main reason for me to buy some not-so-good-looking or not-perfectly-working stuff that comes cheap - mostly at Rendo - and adapt it to my needs. To really make stuff myself I'm not yet skilled enough and, to be honest, if I would invest a lot of time into learning how to make certain things myself, I'd have no time left for creating scenes and rendering them.
Took me a while for example to remake the Ranger SUV into a police SUV, even though I only had to add some decals, different license plates and some flashlights on the top of the car (made them from primitives). It helped, that I've done some re-texturing for some 3d games that allowed it.
Thank the gods for all the nice freebies available everywhere, which - with a bit of tinkering - help to get stuff done with a tight budget.
It's not just support, though. It is also marketing and the whole store/cart thing.
50 percent seems high to me for what they get.. 50 percent off of a 3 dollar item... - not so bad, but 50 percent off of a 30 dollar item, is a bit steep for what you get. So I still think it should be capped for the higher cost items.
You aren't getting more support or more publicity for paying more.
True.
Not enough info to debate that.
how about a question for you, you think it’s reasonable to pay fifty percent of your take to the store?
Depends
Stores gives credit cards companys 33%.
You can make your own store but will there be enought trafic for any sells ?
Do I make $10.00 or $100,000.00 a year ?
If I make $100,000.00.If the store gets 50% -CC33% Store gets $17,000.00 CC's get 33,000.00.I still get $50,000.00 -Taxes = about $35,000.00 give or take a few.
Ya I'm good :)
50% of earnings is extreme in my mind. I think 30% that the Apple App Store, GooglePlay, Amazon, and the Microsoft Store was already too much. However I've heard before, and this was like when I was in middle school decades ago, that a fast food restaurant only makes a dime off of $20 in sales! And since I once managed to work for 4 hours in a fastfood burger joint called Burger Queen before quitting I was amazed at all the meat & other food they'd throw out every 15 minutes was the rule! No wonder they only made a dime per $20 in sales. I don't know how they stayed in business.
Agreed. I've unfortunately pretty much had to stop/near stop purchasing from Daz, just too expensive. I have some hobby cash, thats not the problem, since I don't really spend on much else except software upgrades. I'm like everyone, I have some bills, but after bills everything else has pretty much went to Daz.
...there are stores, like Cornucopia, that have relatively low priced content however you need to invest 400 - 500$ into either the Studio or Complete editions of Vue to use it as it is proprietary to the software as well (and Vue is not very friendly for posing characters as well as not having the capability for morphing, so you still need Daz or Poser for that).
At least the core Daz programme is free.
I totally agree. An example is all of OOT's new hair products seem to come with 8000 x 8000 textures (transmaps). This sucks up a huge amount of video card ram, and I end up going into cpu mode. 4000 x 4000 is plenty IMO.
I think the prices at DAZ3D are definitely getting close to a kind of “tipping point” that has or will force people to take a hard look at what they spend and how they spend it in the store. It’s definitely at that point for me but since I am a hobbyist it always has been to an extent. Just more of the same. With the release of Mika 8, I found myself thinking that I am pretty much done with G8 figures until/unless I see male releases. I have more than enough female content and figures. I have ported almost all of my Genesis3 characters over to G8 with wonderful results thanks to all of the people who spent the time to create scripts, formulate and disseminate tutorials, and build utilities to do so. Likewise with poses, clothing, and hair products where possible. Shoes are an issue there but they always have been so that’s nothing new. Right now my focus is on male content , props and scenes, and resources and utilities such as lighting and shaders that extend the uses of what I have. I was really excited about D-force but it has not turned out to be as useful as I hoped. Certainly not useful enough to justify the markup that building it into products seems to have created. Right now, unless Genesis 9 (or whatever they choose to call it) is as backwards compatible as Genesis 8, I may have to refrain from buying into it at first beyond the base male and female character releases and any utilities that will let me use previous generations content.
I don't mind the larger textures for closeups.
But it's rather easy to get the texture size reduced for any item in the scene: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
Highly recommended tool.
Credit card companys get 33%?
Those I know get 3,3% from each sale ...
As well as system RAM - last time I used an OOT hair it used 3 GB.
Yes, that's within the normal range. And usually it gets lower the more transactions you have.
Many vendors evidently do think the division is reasonable, including high-rollers - often to the extent of exclusively selling here. I'm sure they'd prefer it if DAZ could operate with 20%, but they settle for the 50% - because it's a good deal for them.
Also, sensible vendors will recognise that the retail price isn't "their take".
I believe Turbosquid takes 50% if not more. It's currently the top 1 3D models e-store, I believe. I don't use turbosquid much though since their site lack some of basic features.
CGtrader takes 30%, I think.
If you browse those sites and compare the price with Daz, you will find Daz price more than reasonable.
I think 50% is incredibly reasonable.
Yes, Daz provides customer service, but that's not even a blip (IMO) on the list of reasons they are worth it.
Daz has QA, and whatever people might grouse about QA consider the complaints about the quality of free items.
Daz manages payments and has a very generous return policy, and they manage all of that.
Sales, marketing, a site that is, IMO, the best CGI hobby store/forum around (which is why I'm HERE and not any of the other places).
Information and help.
Now, the sales and cut mean that sometimes vendors get really small amounts per unit. And that can be incredibly frustrating, particularly when customers are so excited about paying nearly nothing for something you spent months working on.
Vendors sometimes get so frustrated they say 'nuts to this!' and buzz off for other stores. And then a fair number of them find that, in the end? They don't make as much elsewhere. They don't get all the services they get here.
That the way Daz does business and the position of their store mean that however the individual sales might look, things are better here.
So I have no complaints about 50%.
Yes, I've seen this occasionally. I think it's quite difficult sometimes for artistic types to wear the business hat; they often have an emotional attachment to their creations that other manufacturers (of light switches or staplers, for example) don't have.
DAZ ought to brief prospective vendors that if they want to move into making money from their creativity they should try to adopt a detached overview of the process - that in this context their art is simply an investment toward maximising a return.
The other thing to consider is the size of the business and the customer base. I mostly work with Apple and Google with my apps, and whilst the 30% cut they take is a good deal less than DAZ, you can not forget that Apple and Google are huge multi-billion dollar corporations, and so get the ecomomy of scale when they are acting as brokers. The market for 3D resources is much smaller than smart phone apps, and so it is not surprising that a broker needs a bigger slice to cover the costs of development, QA, marketing, support etc.
I noticed that too. The textures are huge and mine also goes into CPU mode.
I stopped buying them a while back for that reason. My card is only 2GB, so by the time I dressed figure in a scene with heavy hair, my computer gets very laggy and DS keeps saying 'Not Responding'. I hold my breath waiting for it to shut down. Mostly it doesn't, but I always save frequently. I wish DS had an 'autosave' feature like lots of programs have.
yep ..what the market will bear. when sales dump, they will figure out a way to pick it back up. If they don't, DAZ will dump. then what we gonna do?
Never really understood why Iray takes up so much RAM.
For me to use 3gb of RAM in Blender, I have to use a lot of needless textures in 4k or a lot of sub-div for the heck of it.
My favorite parts of these discussions is where, on one page, someone is saying "Vendors SPEND MONTHS making an ITEM - oh you can't imagine the R&D and WORK they put in and the quality and the dedication!"
And the next page, someone says "Oh you think the prices are too high, just make your own stuff /// become a PA - nothing to it!"
The proper middle ground is learning to get more use out of the items you have.
Instead of buying one more outfit, flip an old one and use some shaders and what-else to add new life to older items.
There's so many steps between "I must always buy something new" and "Roll your own from scratch".
i need to say, as others have, that the quality of the stuff here is overall very good. It is the fact the pricing is getting to the point that I have to pass on so much that looks so cool. I already do not like buying the same clothing model, or even same character , for every generation that comes out.
DZFIRE and STONEMASON ... great stuff, but higher priced. I usually wait, but there is no question on how great their work is.
There are amny others as well ... their work just pops your eyeballs out.
Yeah ... fixed income and now pricing becomes a reality, and overall forced to buy way less.
I can relate to that. I used to co-run a commercial Sims2 site and all I wanted to do was model and create, but the site got so huge, that I had to help with the backend, emails, setting up subscriptions, etc, that it became too much and took away from the creative aspect.
You speak of things being the same for each generation....ironically, I was looking through all of my old Gen4 poses (M4 V4, etc). You know how many of those packs look like the same stuff we see now, or are the same as now when I compare? had to laugh. I mean realistically, how many different poses can anyone do without them repeating over the years. It's just funny to me.
I've been in "acquiring" mode for the past year and a half, now I'm probably going back to "making do" mode. Spent a few minutes this morning trying to see how the old Versailles Tail (last PA attempt at a hairstyle similar to what was released today) by Arien, Wyrdbard, etc would hold up in Iray, and with the proper hair shaders and positioning adjustments it did okay. (Profile shots were going to be iffy because of the way the tie and ponytail were modelled/transmapped, but front and rear shot both looked pretty good).