The PA Commercial Products sub forum
jmucchiello
Posts: 985
in The Commons
Is it just me or are fewer products being listed in the Commercial Products forum recently? I haven't paid close attention but it feels like that forum only rarely had new threads. I know there's no requirement for the PAs to post there.
I don't know. I'm just curious if usage of that forum is down or I'm just seeing it because I'm relatively new here and have finally caught up to years of old threads.
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Comments
Sometimes I create threads for upcoming products and sometimes I don't, because often there's zero engagement with them - so it unfortunately ends up being a waste of time that could have been spent on the next product.
On occasion, there has been a request to create a thread retrospectively, which I'm happy to do because I know there's going to be at least some engagement with it.
For me personally I tend to focus on creating threads when an FAQ or other help related information would be beneficial, as this can be missed in the readme or just easier to read as the readme we include when we upload products can only be in plain text format. I've also taken to including a script dialog within products that need some user help, which is even more convenient as a customer wouldn't need to leave Daz Studio to get help.
It also depends on what the type of engagement is going to be - I love seeing how people make use of my products as it really makes it feel worthwhile knowing that they're getting value from what I've made.
The forum's tone has definitely become less positive over my time here; I don't blame PAs for not wanting to start threads that are going to be complaining about pricing, the fact it doesn't support a specific figure, etc.
I've expressed my opinion many times that the community here would really benefit from being overhauled to make it easier to actually share art and therefore boost the positive and productive side of things, but unfortunately it's getting worse rather than better. Notifications about gallery comments went missing years ago. More recently - in just the last several weeks - they completely changed the way their gallery served images, utterly breaking the ability to share images from there to the forum, in the process leaving many thousands of dead image links across the discussions here, and we've heard absolutely nothing about whether they intend to fix that or not.
I know the community isn't a direct income stream for Daz, but it is part of their word of mouth advertising and the interactions within it drive ideas and sales, and leaving it to rot will be detrimental in the long run.
@Matt_Castle I couldn't agree more. Product feedback is obviously important as it helps us grow and improve our content, but when it's delivered in a non-constructive and sometimes [frankly] cruel way, it does make one think twice about engaging with the forums.
Pricing is very difficult because whilst we know everyone has it hard with cost of living pressures around world, those of us that do this full time obviously depend on having enough income to pay our bills and put food on the table, which often falls short. Bearing in mind that not only are we doing product development but all store page content, promos and icons within the product, and Daz takes a 50% cut of sales, it can be very difficult to make ends meet, especially when everything is discounted so steeply and stackable with tokens. So return on investment is something we have to think about a lot more these days than a few years back.
It is possible that many of the script/plugin PAs are busy working on existing products because of DS 2025/6.
I can't speak for others but for me personally I'm holding off from updating my scripts just yet - because 2025 is still in Alpha the codebase is very much subject to change and I don't have time to waste on fixing things that could very well change.
50%???!! That is insane. So glad I never tried to be a PA
Still, that's better than the 10/90% deal (if they were blessed) music artists got from the now defunct record industry.
I know when I was first around here in late 2017/2018 that product threads felt more porlific and productive. You'd get a heap of people posting renders of what they were doing with the product, bouncing ideas off each other and all that.
I've seen few, if any, more recent threads that feel that way, and I really do think that the loss of community functionality is part of the root cause of that. And I fear there may be a "trust thermocline" that the forum suddenly drops off, putting it past the point of no return.
There's a reason most of my community engagement is through the Slackers Discord; while negativity isn't forbidden over there, per se, most of the dead horse topics tend to shut down pretty fast.
I don't generally think of Daz products as too expensive (unless they're really not up to spec), but instead as that I don't think I'd get whatever level of value out of them.
Having made things from scratch myself (and even published a couple of them), I'm aware of the scale of the work involved, so I couldn't legitimately say any price I've seen here is unreasonable. I might not like that a price is more than I can justify paying to do the one stupid joke I might do with it, but it doesn't mean it's not a fair price.
One thing I've heard is that Daz have intentionally *not* released an SDK for DS6 yet, because they don't want overeager script/plug-in developers leaping in and doing things with features might have to change by the final version.
However, it might well be that said PAs are left twiddling their thumbs because there's not much point developing for DS4 with it so close to end of life.
Scripting updates aren't tied to the SDK as strongly as plug-ins since their instructions are in plain text ang get converted, rather than being diirect liinks to a specific biit of code. That doesn't mean there might not be breakages if architectural tweaks are needed, but it is currently almost a given that anythng compiled will need recompiling in a build or two of the main application.