Daz, what's happening?
AllenArt
Posts: 7,169
I've been trying to think of a delicate way to put this, because I don't want to offend anyone, especially the vendors. It's not their fault...they just make what they make. However, I've noticed a HUGE shift in the Daz store and its offerings and I'm sure I'm not the only one. My favorite vendors (other than a couple) are suspiciously absent since the birth of Genesis 8. To be brutally honest, I think the quality of things in the Daz store (there are exceptions of course) have fallen thru the floor. Yes, I said thru the floor. I see stuff in the store now that I know would not have even gotten consideration two years ago, much less made it into the store. Frankly, it's depressing and my buying has fallen off sharply (not necessarily a bad thing for me, but if I'm not the only one, potentially devastating for Daz). Personally, I've been concentrating on other hobbies now and have been doing less and less 3D. Not sure if it's anything to do with Daz and the state of things or not (maybe a little). Truth is, Genesis 8 has somehow taken the fun out of 3D for me....just not happy with the offerings-not the clothes, certainly not the characters. The only thing that's not disappointed lately are the sets and scenes....same quality as always. Monique and Darius 8 are quite nice....as for the others, wellllllllll....
I know this post will probably disappear, but I wanted Daz to know just how I feel about the state of things. It might give them some insight, but I doubt it ;). I'm just a drop in the bucket, but I felt it needed to be expressed.
Sorry if I offended anyone in particular. That wasn't my aim. Was just offering Daz a bit of customer feedback ;).
Laurie
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Comments
I hear what you're saying. There are a lot of brand new (to Studio) vendors with products that really don't seem built to the same standard as previously. The December offerings in particular seem to highlight the issue.
I don't notice vendors missing, at least none of my favorites. I do notice that a couple have been releasing less often in the last couple of months, but those PA's had a flurry of product earlier.
Releasing less is what I really meant by what I said. I should have stated it better. Of course, my favorite vendors are still in the store, but have released little (and in some vendor's cases, nothing) since Genesis 8's release.
FWIW, I LOVED Genesis 3. I also loved Genesis 2. I did buy into Genesis 8, though I personally stated again and again that I wasn't ready for it. I think maybe Daz has devalued their Genesis figure versions by having such a short production run. If they would double the length of the run from two years to, say, 4 years I think it might do them better and make the customers feel better about the amount of money they shell out every month for this hobby ;).
Sometimes life gets in the way
Agreed. Due to real life stuff happening, I haven't been able to produce nearly as much as I normally would. This may be the case with a lot of vendors. Hopefully, we will see an upturn in the months to come.
You are one of the vendors who was among the missing that I was talking about btw ;). I did read of your health issues and I'm sorry. I'm all too familiar with being sick....I wish you a speedy recovery and the best of health from here on in :).
Having said that, I'm sure not all the vendors I miss are sick, or having other RL issues...lol. It just makes one wonder when almost a completely new set of vendors has overtaken the store (again, with a few exceptions)...
I think it could have all been solved or avoided if the compatibility issues were sorted out before launch.
And a few clever marketing gimmicks.
1) Delay the arrival of Genesis 8. - Make it arrive FOR CHRISTMAS or be the big end of the year celebration.
2) Have compatibility already sorted. The new figures need to be able to wear EVERYTHING (shoes, shirts - etc and poses and..and...)
3) If someone can create a script and use a bunch of complicated instructions to force compatibility, then it could have been included. We got all those old genesis legacy shape-type-products and such- Daz should have had the T-pose included with the A-pose so we could get clothes to work out the gate. Then there would be no need to pause before jumping on the new generation. So why jump?
4) here comes the gimmick. Make D-Force be (at launch) strictly for the generation 8 clothing. Make all the new clothing Gen8 ready. That way, we automatically know what clothing has it and also know anything before 'Required product: Genesis 8 Male/Female' doesn't have D-Force active. For those who don't want to bother with trial and error- there's an easy reason and clear line down the center. You can make additional d-force compatible items as some kind of growing list.
5) The compelling reason to embrace 8 should be quality. (not just that everything coming out is 8 or bust). The tight launch window left only the newest crafted figures at launch and they all looked too much like the base figure. Now that some time has passed and vendors have been given time, look how great all the figures look now.
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For me, not only is 8's clothing look like simplified clothes that are already in the store, I can ONLY use them with Generation 8 characters.
Doesn't make sense either way.
A) If you consider the customer base to be long time shoppers- how do you intend to keep selling Gen 8 (exclusive) gear for the (presumed) small number of gen 8 characters they/we own?
B) If they are NEW users, then why keep putting all the old(est) stuff on sale when it's NOT FULLY compatible with their shiny new characters?
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I bought a bunch of gen 8 items and clothing and still no way to get compatibility months later.
So that's it for Gen 8 clothing until this gets sorted out.
Other than a quality issue on some things (I don't mean HD quality, there is too much of that IMO), I really don't see it. I think it might have more to do with we have been doing this awhile and now with a newer figure and having to get our workflow back up to speed, it might be taking the fun/creativity out of it. I was late to the G8 game and just recently finally got my G8 base to where I need it to actually work with her.
The biggest thing I notice is not enough creativity in addons from PAs and too much of the same old thing. I know many want to play it safe and create what is known to sell, but it would be nice to have them thnk outside the box more.
I couldn't agree with this more. I wanted to skip G8 altogether since I know in 2 years there would be G9 and that is just too short a time span to get the full use out of a generation. Many users say, it doesn't have to be either/or, but I prefer to focus on a single base figure, especially if I am buying content.
i think there are too many releases ... for whatever generation. The last few months has been 10 new releases a day ... plus all the bundles. how can anyone keep up with that. Its too much eye candy, over and over. After awhile your eyes just glaze over. Everything looks the same. And then you have the deal where for every generation release the same stuff is updated and released yet again.
Slowing down would be good in my opnion. Allow us time to digest all this stuff. See where our creativity is going. I love free stuff for sure, and actually cannot afford to be buying more and more, but slow it all down. Make it feel like something special again.
EDIT: there are 14 new releases today ... and about 300 or more reduced and on sale. its like that everyday.
Well, it doesn't have to be either/or and I can use any genesis version I want (and do), but since I bought into the lastest version, I'd like to use it as much as possible and feel I can't. Even the clothing made for it is ill-fitting in more cases than I'd like to mention. Some of the female stuff looks like limp flapjacks glued to the ladies' chests until one adds a ton of smoothing (which I never used to have to do with Genesis 3 btw). While V8's skin is ok for the most part IMVHO, successive characters skins look god-awful in some cases. I mean, I'm willing to do a certain amount of leg-work to get a character tooking the way I personally like it, but prices are actually going UP and I find myself wanting to do the extra work less and less.
One more thing I forgot to mention. I don't think I've EVER seen a time since buying from this store (and I've been buying here since the place was still Zygote) when there was more stuff released with serious issues. I could always count on stuff I got here to work right off the bat with no problems. Now, seems for every 6 items I buy, one has an issue that needs to be reported. And I don't even report them all - only the ones I don't feel like fixing. All the way around, it just feels wrong. Just one woman's opinion ;).
Laurie
i think this is going to what i said above...too much stuff .. its fast and furious ... released too soon with not enough QC going into it. more more more ...
Well I have to disagree with the other DAZ Original characters not being up to snuff with Monique 8 & Darius 8. While I have only a few of the characters & only one Pro Bundle everyone of the characters is a big step up from Genesis 3 characters when I bought my 1st Genesis 3 characters almost 2 years ago and as good as Darius 8 & Monique 8. I expect the Pro Bundle or the Olympia 8 Pro Bundle I buy next week will be of similar quality. Except for the default transluncency settings being to high on the character skins everything about the Genesis 8 skin settings is better in my eye.
The autofit clothing looks same-same though, and not worse, but the one dForce clothing I have has been looks great and is easy to work with. So thanks for the Bardot Dress.
The hair, both fibre mesh and polygonal, also looks improved and never better either.
Changing the tone of the skin has never been easier or looked better but it is still my DAZ Studio Bugaboo, well besides dForce to being a major work in progress. I'd like instead of these non-obvious, except to longtime 3D professionals and longtime hobbyists, Transluncency Skin Presets to be replaced with a special skin tone modifier UI in DAZ Studio that goes from northern European albino to blueblack of some west African tribes and that UI make the appropriate shader surfaces settings underneath.
I'd also like more color options that are realistic on the DAZ female eyelashes.
There weren't any; Daz has never supported using new Generation content on older figures. That has always been PA work.
As far as I know, Autofit clones included in the G8 Starter Essentials could handle the pose difference. The big complaint seems to have been the reduced compared to previous generations choices within Autofit, which were supposed to to have been reduced because of increased intelligence in the Autofit algorithms used.
Not sure I get what you mean here, since dForce as it currently stands is added to the surfaces, and isn't dependant on anything specific to a figure generation.
I think you're missing that SickleYield told us how to very simply use content for G8 on G3 and visa versa not long after G8 Female was released.
I suspect a lot of PAs are trying to get up to speed on dforce and how to integrate that into our product lines. The content market is always an ebb and flow. I haven't noticed much different from the norm, aside the fact that marketing is running a different campaign from the typical norm that I'm used to seeing.
Could be I guess and to be honest, I never thought of that, but if that's all it takes to throw a monkey wrench into things, then I almost hate to see the next big Daz thing, although I will agree that Daz has a reputation of throwing lots of new things at vendors who have to either fly or crash land LOL. Maybe it IS just me who feels like something's changed....I dunno, but I doubt it ;).
At least YOU are still making stuff...phew. My creepy/gory/weird and wonderful fix would never be satisfied otherwise...*chuckle.
It's funny because I was just about to give in and buy all the MUST-HAVES to work with G3 (and it takes a while for all of those must-haves to be created), saw Genesis 8 in the DIM and promptly cleared my cart and went back to G2. If the figures are going to be replaced every two years, I'm not going to get a good return on my investment. I also wonder if the fall-off of products buy the old PAs has anything to do with the newer Genesis models short life expectancy and the effect I suspect it has had on sales.
What shocks me is the sharp drop off in male items. Under "Clothing and Accessories," proportionately, there are 3.3 G2F items for every 1 G2M item, 4 G3F items for every 1 G3M item, and 6.1 G8F items for every 1 G8M item. And male items are often lower quality than female. I do like the hair models I've seen though.
Maybe I'll give Genesis 10 a shot in 2021. On the plus side, I did want to practice 3D modeling...
AA, you've summed up pretty much how I've felt since the G8 release. Especially this:
I've noticed it, too, and I've never gotten the chance to find out if some of them are just poor promos and the items are fantastic, because I never buy the items. But things like a character with a huge tattoo baked into their base skin permanently would never have happened a bit back.
There are a couple vendors I like who traveled over from Rendo, at least, which minimizes the impact a little.
The first DAZ Flagship figure for G8M release is too recent to say anything, I feel. How does this calculation work out if you don't count any G8F items that released before M8?
With the risk of dragging this into the "why can't PA's make more mens stuff", @ArkadySkies is right, things are far worse if you're wanting menswear. Once upon a time, clothing had at least one morph and more than one texture.
I agree, I just think using G8 figures as they stand now is inappropriate from a statistical perspective.
...the downside is most of the dForce content is pretty much all for G8 (save for the Mil Dog Sweater holiday freebie). Even standard clothing and hair content seems primarily to be for G8. I am staying with G3 as I already have invested quite a bit in content and merchant resoruces for it and it works fine for my needs. I really cannot afford to buy into a whole new figure/character line (which doesn't seem to be all that much of an improvement) to get it to the point I have G3 set up to..
The question is why don't people buy more male stuff, why do they prefer more female. It's one I can't figure out ?
I'll buy your G3M Astronaut the minute it comes out! If you make it for G8M I'll buy it again! I'm probably an anomaly there, but I stand by my statements. :)
Thank you my friend ! we are talk days now so not long ;)
Do they prefer female? In another thread, recently, someone did a comparison of the cost of female and male character bundles. The female bundles were always noticably cheaper than the comparable male bundles (someone else may be able to recall what thread it was in). So maybe, Daz has an agenda?
But, this is getting away from the OP.
I don't know why either. I'd be happy if EVERYTHING was for the males. LOL
Laurie
We can only go by sales and the female is way out in front and that what the market data is saying. I don't think there is an agenda, it's what ever is selling the most. Any business would do the same follow the money. I will say daz does put out more female characters no question about it.
How much does this hold when male and female equivalents are released at the same time, or when the male equivalent is released months ahead of the female version? Because I've seen people support this with things like female skin shader settings way outstripping male ones, and it's like, yep, I bought the female one that already works on the male three months ago, why would the male one sell at all. Or I buy a female item that looks really neat and then I get months to find out it doesn't meet my expectations before the male version releases. :\
I know there's a bias towards female stuff, but some of the release patterns reinforce that to high heaven.
As for G8 compared to G3 it's simply a modeling thing A pose to a T pose. It's going to be harder and longer to model an A Pose. So easiest way is to start on a T pose figure G3 then convert. So I'm surprised there isn't more double set coming out. Straight lines make all the difference!