Vendor earnings.
SteveM17
Posts: 973
in The Commons
We probably all dream about using Daz to make a living, and obviously some people do. I was wondering (if it's not too much of a personal question) if any of the vendors could let me know how much they earn per month, roughly. No doubt there are good months and bad months, but it would be interesting to know, as my job situation is a bit precarious at the moment and I'm wondering how to make some cash if things go wrong.
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some have said before but as with anything it depends on the product you offer and if people want it, I dare say it varies wildly
There seem to be some PAs I've seen in the past, who have that as a very prime motivation; I don't actually own any of their products. Sometimes the earn-some-cash can affect the outcome.
Chose your market carefully: skimp, skin, stylised and female sell more it seems.
Probably true, although I don't think any of that could describe Stonemason's stuff, and his are possibly the most popular products in the store. Maybe an exception to the rule, but exceptional skill is probably more likely! Having said that, a look at his store would show that it's a skill that's grown over time and with each advance in technology, and even if his first product was as pie-hot as his latest is it would still take some time to build a store catalogue. I suppose what I'm saying is that in the light of the precarious job situation, becoming a vendor might be better off becoming Plan C. Good luck :)
Also, you should invest in zbrush if you're a sculptor as that will give your characters a gigantic boost in variety and quality!
That is way too private of information..for sure....and there really is no answer for you.
The range of how much money is being made is all over the spectrum. Some make a couple hundred bucks a month, some several thousand. It all depends on their product quality and how large their catalog is. The main reason that not everyone is doing this for a living is that it takes a very long time to have a large enough catalog to be seeing decent money. I spent almost 10 years doing this part time before I switched over to full time, and even then, the first few years were very lean.
If someone is serious about wanting to do this full time, they have to plan way in advance and put at least a decade into building a catalog.
...and most of all, you have to treat it like "a real job" and be there producing every day.......because in the end, if you don't work, you dont make money. It is all up to you....so that is a stamina that many people have a tough time wrestling with.
Best thing to do is dip your toe in and see what you make. It varies widely. I've been doing some work on one of the ther sites and was surprised.
I will say that nobody can really give you a reliable number because it varies from month to month and from product to product. If it's something you think you'd enjoy doing then just do it, but keep in mind that getting your foot in the door is probably the hardest part, so make sure the promo art for your first submission is stellar.
You could submit Stonemason level quality of product and still get rejected outright if the submission art is garbage.
Good luck! :)
Hopefully i'm somewhat qualified enough to speak on this. I don't think we're actually allowed to put numbers out there, pretty sure it's part of the NDA. I've been a PA at daz for two years though, and when i started here i was working a minimum wage job (UK which is around £1k p/m) and doing game dev (Which didn't pay most of the time). If i have a good month i can earn over x5 what i was earning back then, and i out-earn the rest of my family combined. I bought a house too, which i wouldn't have been able to do before daz, so i'm pretty grateful to be here. It's worth noting that i'm not the top seller here, but i'm very much among them. I can safely say you can make a decent living here if you know your stuff.
There are a few caveats however. Getting stuck in the wrong specialty can leave you a with less, especially if that specialty takes a heck of a long time. For instance, i'm an environment artist, and that can often have a high time investment. If i were to work on a product for a long time, and it didn't do well on the store, that puts me in a bad place for the month. Also, as mentioned above, there are certain categories that pay less than others, like mens clothing. I find that this isn't set in stone however, since when i first joined arch was a popular genre, but now it's rather middling. Supply and demand still dictates the market here, and if a category is underserved for long enough, it may see a resurgence. On the other hand, if a category is saturated, it's going to take a dip. I guess the moral of the story is it's good to have a specialty, but unless you can shift units on your name alone, it's best to know a little bit of everything.
Marketing and efficiency are also important. Don't rely on daz to sell your gear, because it won't work. I know people who have dropped an item onto the store and have barely eeked out ten units, simply because their products weren't showcased very well. Put effort into your marketing materials and you will reap the benefits. Study color theory, composition, lighting and post-work (i'm speaking more generally here, not to yourself). This feeds into efficiency, if your product looks good, daz will almost always take it, so you just need to make sure nothing will flag in QA. The last thing you want is to get stuck in submissions or QA, because that can knock days or sometimes weeks off your turnaround time. So make sure your sets are clean, well presented and work correctly. Do this and your balance sheet will look much better.
I could keep rabbiting on about this topic all day, but i don't want to bore everyone. So as a conclusion, it's a bit of a rollercoaster really. I know PA's that have built their own houses and take care of massive families all on their daz income, but i also know PA's who struggle month to month for a variety of reasons (mostly the ones listed above). It can be incredibly beneficial for you - provided you know what you're doing, you take it very seriously, and don't depend on daz to shift your wares. I know people would rather see numbers and do a cost/benefit, but there really isn't a standard here. If it helps, i replaced my monthly income and quit my job within five months of working at daz. Again, i don't know if that's typical, it's just my experience. Some people take a very long time to work up income, and some people can draw a years salary with their first product. My advice would be to just do it, you won't know if you don't try.
Hope that helps!
It can also vary month to month. I've ranged from as low as two digits to the high four digits in back to back paychecks.
Long and short-- you get out of it what you put into it. The more work/effort you put in, the more you make. Consistent income takes more than a month to build.
The odds are pretty good that you will have to make a number of products before you find your groove and consistently deliver products people want and need. You'll have to churn out at least a couple products a month to develop a catalogue that will allow you to earn a reasonable return. As with anything there is a learning curve to package and setup products. There is also strict QA and review committees that may or may not accept your products for a variety of reasons. Even with a finished product, there is no guarantee they'll want it in the store. You wont be giving up your day job for a while.
read this
https://www.daz3d.com/community/community-publishing
One thing I’ve noticed over my short career here is that new releases often drive sales of older product.
So you need to get stuff out not just because new stuff makes front loaded money but because it revives everything else.
This is very true. I see my earnings drop drastically if I don't release at least one new product a month. When my day job is busy and I can't meet that deadline, my earnings here suffer, but they come back up after the release of a new product.
Thanks for the info/advice guys, interesting stuff. I've never tried scultping/modelling, the only thing i could imagine selling would be poses, which probably don't sell well compared to environments and characters and props. It just might be something to earn a bit of pocket money if needs be.
It is illegal for an employer to require employees not to discuss their salary in the United States. There are a couple of exceptions, like payroll workers and certain government employees, but those do not apply to employees of Daz3d. So I certainly hope that is not in the text of the NDA.
Maybe things are different in the UK, but I've never been told if you guys are getting a different NDA than the rest of us.
With that said, everything else @KindredArts has said here is spot on. I could tell you my salary for last year, but that would be an incorrect impression of what most PAs earn. This is my full time job and has been since 2012. When I started in 2009 I was working part time for peanuts at a smaller broker. It took more than a year for this job to be able to equal the (tiny) income from my other jobs, and then I quit, started doing it full time, and my income grew gradually as I built my business. It's a very good living now, pays the mortgage, the car payments, and a nice upper middle class lifestyle, but it took some time to get here.
As KA said, the ability to pivot with regard to where the market is will be what makes or breaks most PAs. There are specialists who will never need to shift category - Rawn is probably one, in fact, and Goldtassel, and there are others - but for most of us, there's going to be a lot of research and number-crunching involved in deciding what to make. I constantly canvas my records and diagram out what's earning more for me and what's not.
There are things I make anyway - the Faces of Africa sets, some male items that don't do as well - because I want them for myself or I feel they should be made, but I have to "pay" for those with more popular choices.
It's not that we're talking illegality, that's an extremely personal question. You simply don't ask someone how much they make. A better way to ask is the more generic, such as "can someone make a living from making 3d poses from figures"
Right, but he was saying he thought it was in the NDA.
Yeah it's not there, it just a question you don't ask strangers.
This topic is very much a "how long is a piece of string" type of thing.
Some PAs rely on a very large back catalog, or a very small, very specialized catalog. Some do constant small releases, some do occasional big releases. And every vendor's experience is going to be very different.
I admit I don't understand the market. Like, at all. I have no clue what people are using DS for beyond creating personal artwork, so I just focus on makings things that I think are cool and fun and (hopefully) stoke people's creative fires. Things that I would personally use. Maybe like SY said, that I'm "paying" for that choice by not focusing on broader use projects, but another factor is making sure the motivation is there to actually finish a product so I tend to just work on stuff that personally excites me.
Now I need to find out how to save poses, and then how to try and put them up for sale.
I'd be happy to walk you through saving poses and packaging them for sharing and for sale if that would help you, SteveM17. Just send me a PM if you'd like to talk. Maybe one of the other PAs following this thread knows where the webpage that talks about submitting a first product to Daz is. (Does it still exist?) I remember having a hard time finding it when I needed it.
@SteveM17
There are several PA's that "specialize" in poses and yet there is significant overlap in many pose sets from single vendors and between vendors. As part of your "market research" you might ask your self what you would bring to the market that isn't already there.
More overlap maybe?
I really appreciate the comments in this thread. I don't want to become a PA, but it is an interesting conversation.
Thanks. I think I saw the webpage you mentioned yesterday while looking into this.
linked up-thread by FirstBastion ;)
Basically send an e-mail with some promo shots (don't send the actual product zip) (make sure they look like they'll sell, but they don't need to be the final promos) - then wait.
You get a response saying "we'll contact you in 3 business days if we're interested" but then, depending on time of year, I heard in another thread it can take a month or even more. (I'm not a PA, just sharing my experience - still waiting LOL). If they like the look of it, they'll set you up to submit the product for a detailed review and final decision.
Sure ya can. :) But they don't have to answer. :)
Probably the best way to make a living by using DAZ is to gain some skill at Renpy, too, and then start making an "adult game" with graphics done in DAZ, distributing it at Patreon (or any other site for adult games). There'squite a few of those and some seem to be rather successful, with monthly income in the $ 2000.- plus region.
Actually in the Unity forums, and I don't read there anymore so maybe there are other there by now that have been really financially successful, but anyway, among the gold rush of CEOs making their ticket to gaming development riches in those forums was a person that claims she 'almost' makes a living using DAZ Studio, DAZ Store models, and Unity to make porn games. I looked at her video demo once and I can till you I am astonished she made a $1 off of that game. She says though she & her wife still have to fall back on California / USA social services assitance from time to to though. I think she said about mid-30Ks per year which in just about all of California I think will require social assistance help due to housing costs or maybe that's lower middle class earning there?
There are other more competant games out there using DAZ models & Unity but I've not heard of a one making a substantial amount of money but that's not a surprise. It takes more than good art to make a good game. A good original game is much more difficult than a good original story.
Never heard of Renpy before. I will look into that, thanks.
Some of the PAs here are so talented, I seriously wonder why they are not at Pixar or Disney or working at major architecture companies. I suppose there's something to be said for making your own hours, but I'm sure they must be doing very well financially or they could easily work anywhere else...