What about Daz Crowd-funding?
Sevrin
Posts: 6,313
All the cool kids are doing crowd-funding! So, yeah, more pie-in-the-sky project work for Daz!
There are a lot of things, like, say, city buses and certain military uniforms that aren't getting made by Daz PAs because they're intricate and PAs can't be certain that they'd get a decent return on their time. So what if there was a way for those of us who want those things could encourage the PAs to have a certain amount guaranteed?
For example:
A PA says "Some people want an opium den (or city bus, British WWII medic uniform, Dream House Iray texture set, whatever). It'll take me X hours to make an opium den, and I need to make Y$ in sales in my first 60 days for it to be worth my while. If I can get Z% of that guaranteed, I'll make the stupid opium den."
Then Daz could let people put up real dollars toward that goal, which would be deducted from an eventual purchase price. If the target is reached or surpassed (after Daz gets whatever cut for the service), a PA would make it as per the usual Daz criteria and then get the pot. The PAs only risk is the $Y-Z% part, although they could set Z pretty high, I suppose. And if the offer expires unfunded after some fixed period, then everyone gets back their funding says "Oh well, we tried" and goes on with their life.
I mean, it's complicated, but it's one way of getting stuff made, but with certain assurances in place. The money collection mechanics could be handled by one of the usual crowd-funding sites, to remove some of the burden from Daz, but if would be nice if Daz were involved to coordinate.
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Why does Daz3d need to be involved in this? Couldn't you do this through something like GumRoad or other services more suited for stuff like this? I'm just not sure what Daz3d gets out ofthis.
Exactly. Besides, how many are going to pony up for something sight unseen, not me (I guess i am not one of the cool kids). When it comes to clothing I need to see if it works for me. There are plenty of outfits I needed that i passed on because of the PAs style, quality or texture work.
Perfect example. I passed on this outfit many times despite really needing a dress military outfit. https://www.daz3d.com/military-dress-uniform-for-genesis-3-male-s-and-genesis-2-male-s
No amount of kit bashing would make this funky style work for me, sorry.
This has been suggested several times in the past. It seems like a good idea in theory, but there are several problems IMO:
The main problem I see with using crowdfunding solutions for this is that you actually need to show something if you want people to contribute, which means that you have to start working on the project before knowing if there's interest for it. No one will contribute to "an opium den" without at least knowing which parts are going to be included, in which style, or having an idea of how much detail there will be...If you are an established artist and people know what to expect from you you (which IMO is the only case it might work, as people are less likely to take the risk when they have no idea of how well you work) then you might get away with a few concept pics and explanations, but that's still an investment you may not recoup at all.
Moreover, you need to get enough people interested in that particular product made in that way or for that particular figure. How many times have you seen comments like "I wanted that kind of thing but not exactly like that so I didn't buy it" or "I'd buy this if it was for that other figure" when something is released? If we're talking niche items, then it's even more likely that people who would be interested in that kind of item have specific expectations.
Another problem is the time frame: with a crowdfunding project you need customers who are actually ready to purchase something in advance and then wait for the product to be built, not just people who would build that product if they saw it in the store right now at a good price.
And you also need people who would actually pay the price asked, not wait for a mega-discount later on.
I can see a individual maybe using a crowd funding to get a huge 3d animation or video game off the ground for help to support the cost of such endeavor with licensing and asset cost, because those investments can get pretty huge. & if your planing on marketing the project you can offer your supporters a piece of the pie when the projects finished.
But I would not hold my breath for daz to offer crowd funding for any reason, Because Daz is a 3d content market place and my guess would be they properly not want that responsibility for crowd funding just to support people in order buy hard to find content. ha ha ha man I wish,
the only solution to get those hard to find content is to either kit bash something together similar or learn 3d modeling and create it your self.
Of course there is nothing stopping you doing the crowd funding on your own using Patreon https://www.patreon.com/ or gofundme https://www.gofundme.com/ you don't need daz for that
I wasn't expecting quite this much enthusiasm!
People would know which PA is offering to execute. For example if a certain mason were offering to produce an opium den, the level of interest would be considerably higher than if someone who had previously only produced pose sets did. And vice versa for a set of surgery poses. If you dislike the PA's work, then obviously you wouldn't put up any money.
We're not talking about huge stakes here. Just a way to guage demand for niche items. I mean, there are only so many more ruffle top sundresses the store can absorb, no matter what the morphs are. If the next generation of Genesis is delayed, PAs are going to run out of things to make that will provide a decent return. Idle hands, you know. No one wants to see headlines about our PAs robbing 7-11s.
A PA could require that, for example, for an MSRP $36 set, funders put up, say $15 or $20 to buy in. If the funder doesn't follow up with a purchase within the usual initial 60-day new item window, they'd forfeit their ante. Nothing in life is risk-free, and the PA could benefit from future catalogue sales if they produce something worthwhile. PAs currently have zero assurance their efforts will even be partly compensated, especially if they make stuff for male characters. That's not going to improve in the near term.
Are the reasons I thought Daz should be involved can be expressed in one word QOVTH:
I swear it's a word. Or maybe a character I saw in WoW. A name is still kind of a word.
Again, one problem is that it makes Daz3d effectively compete against itself; all that stuff that people find repetitive makes a lot of money because there are always new customers who want that sundress because it is new to them while the crowd sources product is only being made this way because it is commercially non viable so the expectation is that it would not make a profit. People could go to the artists who are already in places like GumRoad or the various GoFundMe’s and commission clothes right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a great success rate since it is hard to get people to put money down on something that isn’t a sure thing or is very expensive. It almost certainly has to be expensive on top of everything else.
I realized I didn’t address your points. Daz3d pays for its quality assurance, already has some built in unique products and things like HD morphs, DForce etc, and has little incentive to fund a pseudo GoFundMe while risking its own reputation. I still think that showing that this is profitable somewhere else is required if you want to sell the concept.
Does that include Retro Computers Ltd. and the ZX Vega scandal?
Retro Computers certainly aren't 'cool kids'
edit: wrong thread
A big perk for PA's selling at daz (at least for me) is the continued revenue from a product. Back catalog sales are more than half of the income we make (depending on the size of your catalog). Sure you could pay a pa a thousand bucks outright for a product, but that kind of one time sale would not be as appealing in the long run.
In this business you have to think long term, because short term sales are very risky, one flop and your eating raman for a month unless you got back products to back you up.
Anyway...just throwing my point of view here....this would not be true for all PA's
Also, people are doing this on patreon.
Okay, so the point of crowd-funding is to spread the cost of funding an expensive project among many people (the crowd). Daz is popular among hobbyists who won't or can't cover the cost of producing an item they'll use in one or two renders, however much we have our heart set on it.
Daz wouldn't be competing with itself, because this would be just a way of putting things in the store that people have signaled their intention to purchase by putting up money. It would be an alternative to PAs making something on spec that never recovers its cost. There would be little risk for Daz, as any money put up toward failed projects could go into customers' store credit accounts rather than back to their credit cards, so Daz could register the cash as soon as they receive it. In order not to make things complicated, funding periods could be standard and fixed, and PAs would have to commit to a fixed time for completing a project with no time-outs or mulligans.
I'm not suggesting that this type of thing should be Daz's focus, but rather a service it could offer. This would take away business from the sites like Gumroad, rather than compete with the items Daz sells, because the projects this would be for are items Daz's PAs aren't already selling, because they don't want to take the risk of not getting paid for their time. In this scenario, they would get paid their Y% of X$ the moment (plus however long Daz usually takes) as they deliver a completed project. When their funders put the item in their carts and checkout, they would get more money, and then it goes into their catalogue.
And as for sundresses, say you want a common item, you can put "sundress" into search and find lots of nice ones. At this point, it would take one heckuva sundress to stand out in that crowd, whether it's a Daz veteran or a complete newb looking for one.
Finally, for Daz, the appeal would be in offering, in addition to their well-known vast catalogue, something else to differentiate them from all the other sites selling 3D assets. They could provide a platform for funding all kinds of 3D-related assets, not restricted to Genesis/Iray, while attracting attention to the Daz platform. They could probably, at this point, contract the infrastructure pretty reasonably from some SaaS outfit, as there's lots of competition in that domain.
Anyway, it's just a thought that came to me while rendering and contemplating all the neat stuff that's not getting made or bought or sold.
Not sure what your point is. Items would still go into your catalogue.
This would create a marketplace hub so many buyers and sellers would have a single destination.
I think there is still something I don’t understand here; why Daz3d, which has a specific business model, should be the nexus of crowdfunding (the keyword is crowd) rather than Patreon or GumRoad who 1) are good at this, 2) would emphasize the crowd aspect without putting an established store in a situation to deal with administrative costs it doesn’t want, and 3) frankly could use to business to further legitimize crowdsourcing. Daz3d has figured out a model that is financially stable for it; it is the people who want uneconomically viable products who should work on a solution.
Why would DAZ want to do this? They already have a much better system - they wait for PAs to make something, the PAs bring it to them and DAZ sells it with minimal up-front costs! If it's sucessful, DAZ makes money, and if it fails, most of the losses occur on the PA's side. Of course, that's better for DAZ, not the users, but they're in business to make money not provide a public service. Supporting a bunch of kickstarter type progroms would have two big drawbacks for DAZ - one, by running a program they run the risk of another PA or company dropping a similar product out in advance and taking the market (note that there's a brand new DAZ dformat bus that just showed up on Renderosity), and two) they'd have to become much more involved with managing the production of each individual item. I suspect that you have an inflated idea of how much money each of these items has the potential for making, as it would have to be a HUGE seller to make the effort worth all the additional management costs that would be incurred by DAZ on all the titles that don't end up being funded.
I also thought of this thread when I saw the bus at Rendo. I noticed in one of the promos the bus stop that has been sitting in the free products for the last 2-3 years was seen!
But ... that's not generally how crowd-funding works at this point. If I pay someone something as part of a crowdfunding effort, and it funds successfully, I expect the actual thing I've paid for. I don't expect to have to then turn around and buy it again. (It's also worth noting that crowdfunding, however it tries to stick to fixed timelines and deadlines, is notoriously unsuccessful at it.)
To a certain extent, you also couldn't hold creators to that sort of agreement. More than once, PAs have mentioned here in the forum that they've started something, run into an impossible technical issue, and had to abandon the project. They had to eat the time and effort and if they've been giving progress reports, they have some mildly disappointed followers ... but that's it. They're the only ones who have eaten the time/work costs involved. If people have paid money, and the creator reaches a point where they discover the project simply won't work, but they have people who have actually paid money ... that could go very pear shaped very quickly, and take the PA's reputation -- and Daz' reputation -- with it. (Also, stuff happens. Sometimes meeting or not meeting a deadline is entirely out of the PA's control.)
You could also wind up with a situation where Daz says, "We don't care if you can finish this or if it's workable, we don't want this in our store." After all, in order for this to work -- in order for it to make it into the PA's catalog -- it will have to pass QA here and be accepted as a product.
Agreed. You hit it right on the nose.
Also to add on to this thought... DAZ is not guaranteed to take an item into the store whether through approval or failing QA. As noted, there are other venues that the OP can try, but PAs by definition are publishing at DAZ; with the stuff on our plate and the long list of things we have to do currently to get items into the store, and with things that people suggest that would further bog our workflows.. I doubt there will be any takers on crowdfunding. We already have our workflows, but people that already do crowdfunding would be the source people could go to.
So the main objection is that this is how things have always been done? Or that people can go to Gumroad and buy pigs in pokes from unknown quantities which you may or may not get a refund for if they turn out to be crap, or finance someone's dreams over on Patreon, which is geared to projects of indefinite duration (I currently fund several at the moment)?
Participation would be entirely voluntary on the part of PAs, so whether some PAs have no interest is irrelevant, as they speak for no one but themselves.
I'm not sure what kind of insurmountable technical issue would be encountered creating 3D assets. Wheels have been going round and round on buses for a long time and the mechanics are pretty well understood by competent model-makers. We're not talking about projects of the type V3Digitimes produces.
I've already mentioned what's in it for Daz. The mechanics of crowdfunding are pretty flexible, and suited toward this kind of endeavour. White label solutions are abundant.
Daz has a critical mass of both artists and customers and a reputation with both. That's why Daz. Daz isn't perfect, and lots of vendors don't like dealing with Daz, but Daz is still the biggest game in town in the 3D character-centric hobbyist realm. There would be some cost involved in setting things up, and some decisions to be made, but there's no future in refusing to consider options for expansion. I mean, if they hadn't been dissatisfied with the limitations they came up against at Poser, there would be no Daz.
I am not sure you are familiar enough with KickStarter's TOS and rules, as what you propose runs afoul of them. I realize you mentioned Crodfunding and not just KS in the title.
It is true, if there was a way to get say $500-$1,000 into a PA's hand to investigate making a REQUESTED item that is both in their wheelhouse AND they would want to work on, you would probably see that item get made and DAZ would probably approve it based on interest.
However for $500 or a lot less you can hire folks to create models for you, tweak them and texturize them. All to your (or a group of supporters) liking.
No one is saying that crowd-funded CG projects aren't a good idea. I'm certainly not, but there are mechanics of scale involved and at the scale of production that most DAZ product is produced, it's really not economically logical in the way you envision.
Look at it this way - Kickstarter type offerings are normally run in order to finance projects that would otherwise be out of the reach of the people running them, but, assuming that the PA involved already has their own computer and software, the actual cost of producing most 3D modeled product is actually quite low and consists primarily of labor and the amount of time a PA has to put into conceptualizing and designing a product. As a relative reference, there are a number of sites online where you can commission a fully sculpted, rigged and textured model for prices starting at a little over a thousand U.S. dollars. However, running a crwod funded promotion actually raises the cost of production, as there has to be a lot of conceptual design and promotional artwork done BEFORE the kickstarter runs, because no one is going to invest in a project that doesn't have a solid visual representation of what the finished product is going to look like and what features it will have. So, not only does the cost of all that new, added, work get tacked onto final cost of the product, but you also have to account for all the added mangement costs that get tacked on because someone has to put up the crowd funding page and track and collect all the money/pledges, right? And if the crowd fund fails, where does the money to cover those additional expenses spent doing the pre-release promo work and managing the project come from? Well, ultimately, it gets tacked onto the cost of other products being made by the PA and the collection/management agency, and these costs are exacerbated by the fact that DAZ would have to create a whole new crowdfunding template and program from scratch.
Now, toss in the factoid that currently only 37% of all Kickstarter projects actually get fully funded, and even if a DAZ product crowdfund did significantly better, there's still a huge amount of time, energy and money being spent on vaporware products that will never get released that COULD have gone into producing products that the PA was going to produce anyway, and the price of the product that does get released is going to have to go up to help cover them.
By comparison, using an existing crowdfunding site to handle the project at least cuts the additional expenses by DAZ out of the equation, though the PA (or whever it is ramrodding the project and creating all the promotion art, etc.)is still on the hook for their time and labor.
I think you are still dancing around our questions.... First, the participation can't be completely voluntary since you require that Daz3d do something it has no interest in doing and the bulk of established artists have a better sense of the economics of producing products and are not clamoring to do these sorts of things (Sickleyield has a wonderful set of essays in DeviantArt about why she doesn't even do commissions; sucessful artists aren't gamblers) so someone has to be drafted to make the likely noneconomical product (let's assume that Daz3d likes to make money so they choose products based on whether they make money for the company while this venture exists to produce products of limited financial viablity but fulfill some niche which is starved because of the product doesn't sell well for most people). Having Daz3d have to be the fall guy for refunds is a disincentive; the whole premise of crowdfunding is that the crowd takes on the risk. Likewise, if Daz3d is the biggest game in town, it isn't clear to me why they must take on risky ventures to expand rather than follw the paths that made them the biggest fish in the pond.
Second, by definition, the product will be niche which means limited sales, high prices, and doesn't solve the problem of if the crowd turns up their nose except for forcing Daz3d to pay the refund as a penalty. Again, one of the points of crowdsourcing is for the crowd to accept the losses to make the niche product. Again, why would Daz3d act as a marketplace for a product that they wouldn't sell normally and risk their reputation?
Finally, artists create products for three reasons: they are inspired (not applicable for a crowdsourced niche product), they are paid well in a commision (this is done already in GumRoad and Patreon), or they have made the product already and sell it to someone like Daz3d (likewise not applicable). I suspect that if you really want to try this, you must do crowdsourcing outside of DAZ3d and bring a product to market to show Daz3d that it works economically and is scalable. It isn't that people don't want to try new things. The new things must make economic sense.
No.. I think the "objection" is that this scheme would introduce a number a number of variables to the Daz business model that does not pass Daz's risk vs reward threshhold.
Ahh but this is NOT an opportunity for strategic market expansion for Daz inc.
Would it help them grow their user base beyond the limited hobbiest demographic???
Not likely because the only people who would benefit from this are those existing Daz customers who want some content item (likely for one hobby render ) ,that the PA's would not normally produce for the many various reasons that they have clearly explained repeatedly in the past.
If people wish to entice a Daz PA to create a custom one off item they should be willing to pay for that one off as a commissioned peice or convince other like minded customers to pool their funding and get the products created via one of afforementioned "crowd funding" mechanisms.
Daz decided to create their own platform,native,characters and retail marketplace, because it is a good business strategy to not be dependent on the continued existance of ONE single third party who's future was, (and still is IMHO) looking rather doubtful.
Daz created DS primarily because they wanted to ensure there would be a platform their content could be used in beside Poser (a program they had no control over and which continued development was by no means guaranteed, especially given the debacle of the Poser 5 release), not because of limitations Poser had. Once they had their own platform they expanded it to do what they wanted.
Another thing to consider (sorry if it's been said before) is an item that people might want would not be something Daz3d would actually allow in the store.
Let's take the Opium Den as an example (which I now badly want). Daz might object to the content because it is a drug den regardless of the historical accuracy of said model and not something they would feel is a "family friendly" item. This is supposition on my part, but Daz does draw lines as to what type of content they will sell/broker, which would be another hurdle in the crowdsource-through-Daz scenario.
There realistically could be many items people would like that Daz would say "no" to regardless of the demand and/or quality of the item.
Good point. There's a lot of historical product, most specifically WWII related, that DAZ simply isn't going to allow in. There are some great new WW2 US Military uniforms and I'd love to have a G3M/G8M equivalent to Tannenbaum's gorgeous military uniforms for M4 at Renderdosity, but that's not going to fly here. They're also more discerning about products that are based on real locations and consumer products, as well as things with a more adult leaning, so that probably kills our chances of an authentic Victorial's Victorian Brothel set and wardrobe set. :/