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DAZ Productions, Inc.
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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Recent changes here have certainly pushed my purchasing down. Probably a good thing. I still love some of the new products, but mainly to wishlist. I'm sure I bought something that offered a discount on the next bundle, but if so, I have missed it: no banner, nothing in cart, no message.
Then the Season Pass.
I passed on the First and I'll pass on the Second. I find it off-putting.
So very positive for my bank balance. I assume the Season Pass must appeal to enough people to make up for this.
I'm not fussed about Season Pass. I hope people who buy it do enjoy it.
I'm more of a cherry-picking deal snatcher and that has yielded more content than I'm ever likely to use. There is still plenty of older content (V4/M4 to G3 and some G8) that I've not gathered and I'd like to have. I'll likely still buy content when the time is right. But I doubt people with my purchase habits will turn Daz into a mighty commercial empire unless there are thousands and thousands of us. It would be great if that were different, but it is what it is.
I find the current resource-intensive and hardware-scarce environment makes 8.1 a no-go for me. The gross amount of hard drive space required to store a lot of recent offerings is also a turn-off. That's probably more than anyone wanted to know.
I think I’m going to have to take a break from purchasing. All the incentives are items I already own. I don’t get orange banners like I used to and I stopped buying bundles at release time a while ago because of that. I do end up buying them later at a better discount but that doesn’t seem to trigger orange banners for future bundles. Most often bundle deals seem aimed at newer buyers. I can wait. Or I should really stop buying completely. I haven’t even used most of what I purchased, I just purchased them because of a great deal at the time and I keep getting sucked into that. But I’ve really got to stop. Even all the $1.99 items add up. Shopping here has really become an unhealthy addiction but it’s so hard to go cold turkey!
All DAZ promos are jpg, sometimes png, (I've seen one webp out of 100.000+ promos, probably a mistake). It's easy to set Firefox not to convert jpg to webp when downloading pictures.
@Toaz Please explain how to download jpg. I hate the webp, too.
Yes, I've got to agree that there are artists where I'll buy pretty much everything they put out still because I love what they do. So that spending hasn't changed, but the impulse DO stuff has changed big time.
The advantage of Daz's new approach is that my compulsion to buy is diminishing. So I will try to encourage myself to use the wishlist, then just sit it out. Perhaps I am regaining control. I may even render something.
The webp version is downloaded when you try to save the image with webp enabled. To disable webp support just set "image.webp.enabled" to false in about:config section.This would allow saving the image in the original format in Firefox.
Or
If you want the original image format, in Firefox on any promo image popup right click > open image in a new tab. This should show the complete url of only the image ingnoring the webp version. Once you have the url use a download accelerator like IDM to fetch the image in the original format.
To disable webp support just set "image.webp.enabled" to false in about:config section.This would allow saving the image in the original format in Firefox
Great tip! Thank you! Didn't know that and it works!
I always converted webp with xnconvert, but your hint is much faster.
Thank you very much. I hate webp too. And apparently, Adobe hates it too, as it is not supported in Photoshop.
Webp is a Google thing. Don't be surprised if it gains greater acceptance in the future. I'm not in love with it, but jpg and png both have compression issues - jpg with its ugly jpg artifacts and png with sometimes huge file sizes - It really depends on the compressor with png. If webp were more widely accepted as a normal image format, it's likely resistance would soften. But it would also depend on the effect of webp converters on image size and quality.
And you get the original jpg instead of a jpg > webp > jpg conversion, with the unavoidable quality loss. Webp is OK as an original save format but converting other formats to webp during download is silly, they claim it reduces the size and saves bandwidth but in return the conversion uses extra server resources. Besides, the converted webp's may actually be larger, I checked the other day with a random jpg that was converted during download and the converted webp was actually over 50% larger than the original jpg.
I just got into Daz at the end of May/start of June, so after a few weeks as I was starting to understand the software and buy assets, these crazy sales were going on and I was getting into the BYOB and PC+ deals.
And then... it stopped. After I pulled my face out of the brick wall I had just slammed in to, I realized that those sales weren't super common and now I'm using the browser exstension and watching my e-mails wating for deals and drops that make things worth it again for me. When you get into something and everything costs a dollar or so, paying $5 to $15 or more just seems insane.
There's always another sale! Don't like what you see today? Wait a little while and you'll see something else tomorrow. Historically best sales of the year are still to come. So relax and enjoy the ride :)
Go to something like Turbo Squid or Kitbash 3D (which I do love their stuff) and five to fifteen bucks won't seem insane at all.
Oh? So if I were to anticipate the best sales of the year, what dates on the calendar would I be looking at, hypothetically speaking, asking for a friend, just out of curiosity, if one were looking forward to that kind of thing?
Way down but not because of anything Daz did I'm saving for new PC parts. I already have the motherboard so next I'll buy a case then cooler then the processor (Ryzen 5 5600x) then 64 GB of RAM and after that a 3060 then an m.2 SSD
There's so much good new stuff out at Daz too
Really slowing down. This is for several reasons.
1. The economy is fragile and I"m a doom and gloomer - a crash is coming, its only a question of when the business cycle resets. The stock market can't remain this high forever, and inflation is already a serious concern and will likely get worse. I want to have plenty of cash on-hand when that happens, so Daz purchases really aren't all that necessary. Needs versus wants, people.
2. Prices in The Store have gone way up, far too high for my blood. As a result, I'm stashing that money away, or putting it towards food, paying bills, or saving up for a vacation in the future. Seriously Daz, the recent price hikes have really made even periodic smallish purchases far too spendy. You're pricing yourself out of many casual users' budgets.
3. I'm not convinced that the quality of items in The Store is as great as it once as, and certainly not unique. I mean, how many more Aiko-ish pixies does one need? I'm finding that Rendo has much of what I'd like at more competitive prices and comparable, if not far better, quality. I view the Genesis 2 to early Genesis 3 era as a high water mark in terms of creativity and quality of items in the Daz Store. I'm just not convinced that I'm seeing the same nowadays.
Pretty much the last 4 months of the year are almost continous major sales. September till roughly early October is the PA sale, then comes the PC+ annual sale, which recently has run until early-mid November (normally a bigger sale than June's PC+ summer sale), then there might be a week or so for your wallet to recover before the Black Friday sales, and then comes the end of year December sales.
As Havos said. +1 Thanks Havos :)
Daz's business strategy since the pandemic has apparently shifted from milking casual users to focussing on "whales". Earlier the deep discounts used to cover a larger spectrum of the product catalog, but now they are applicable to only very limited collections. Running deep discounts on a larger collection makes a large number of products accessible for purchase to the casual users. But their numbers are reducing with people cutting down on their disposable income in the current situation. On the flip side, doing so has the negative side effect of losing the higher margins on those products, which they could milk from the whales who are going to buy them anyway.
Note: This strategy of focussing on whales is common in online gaming where in-game cosmetics are sold at exorbitant prices. With increasing number of users cutting down on their disposable expenses its natural for them to incline towards high spenders and bulk purchasers/collectors.
Not a speculation, but a plausible theory based on observation and logical deduction.
Here's an interesting video ftrom the gaming industry that you need to interprete in the context of Daz sales strategy.
Bread and water for the next month. Got it! ;)
Thanks!
Shopping at Daz is really a game and I’ve learned over the years how to “win” lol. Here’s suggestions for total newbies:
1. Whenever you have free time, if you have insomnia, if you’re waiting in a doctor’s office, whatever, check out all the new arrivals or as far back as you’re interested and wishlist anything you MIGHT want in the future, even if it’s not a priority. It’s a shame @Ati’s browser extension isn’t on mobile because it’s the best way to look at forum comments and renders. I often check out items I initially have no interest in based on the main promo, but then find something interesting in the other promos or description. This is really a great cure for insomnia lol although you may find you stay up way later than expected!
2. Whenever there is a flash sale that’s at a percentage off that works for you (mine is getting higher and higher because I already own so much) you can quickly find things before time runs out because you now have everything in your wishlist.
3. There used to be a lot of stacking of sales, but it’s rare now. But if there are several sales going on at the same time, you can experiment putting things in your cart and sometimes you’ll get a nice surprise that is not obvious until you put it in your cart. Sometimes I just throw a bunch of things in my cart just to see if there is any random stacking, then put everything back in my wishlist.
4. Think of the convoluted Daz sales as a puzzle game or it can be really frustrating. If you make it a fun challenge, it can actually be rewarding to play and get the best prices. I like puzzle games and if shopping here wasn’t in a way fun for me, I’d buy a lot less. This may actually be one of the ways they have me hooked. The more convoluted, the more I look at it as a challenge! If you don’t like puzzle games, it can be very frustrating though.
5. If you have to buy one expensive thing to get several cheap or free things, make sure you add everything up and divide it by the total. I usually make sure the average is about $4.00 or under unless there are PA items that rarely go on sale that I really want. Check the browser extension graphs to see how often they go on sale.
6. Buy gift cards when they are on sale! The bigger the discount, the bigger the gift card if you can afford it all at once.
7. Stock up on PC for a day $1.99 items, they may or may not be repeated. Especially PA items. DO items will always go on deep sale or free and shouldn’t be a priority. PA items at deep discounts should be a priority. Except bundles. If you can get a bundle for 80% + off, go for it. Individual items might come out to about $2.00-$3.00 a piece, including core characters, if divided equally. If you don’t have older bundles and they are offering them free with purchase, it’s probably worth it to buy the bundles at release. Just add everything up and divide by the total to see if items come out to $2.00-$3.00 each. I would avoid getting core characters individually because you can always get a whole bundle eventually that includes the core character for less than the core character alone (or free!)
8. There are often random deep sales, flash sales, just to keep you hooked. At any random time. In some ways their marketing is brilliant, but I feel the marketing has gone downhill for maybe the last year or more as they end up pissing off more customers with errors, raising prices and bad deals.
9. Don’t be like me and buy way too much just because it’s on deep sale and never use it! Try to use what you have and test it within 30 days of purchase. I always wait too long, and then of, course, can’t return faulty items. They do refunds pretty quickly but it can take YEARS to fix things or they never do.
10. This is all for people who are willing to take the time for the best bang for their buck. If you have more expendable income than time, just ignore everything I said.
So that’s my summary of shopping at Daz for Newbies 101 lol!
Thank you for explaining such a wonderful and simple fix.
...excellent advice.
I've been cutting back as I'm running out of space, but Daz has made it especially easy this week. No banners for both new 8.1 figures? I'm holding onto my cash.
well 8.1 stuff I avoid but lots has been 8 as well as 8.1 so they still manage to squeeze a fair bit out of my protesting bank account.
Also more tools by PAs to help me use stuff in other programs than DAZ studio such as Dforce2Morph have helped keep me spending.
(the created morphs work fine in Carrara)
I am avoiding the strandbased Dforce hair like the plague though
Dforce cloth hairs (opacity mapped strips) are fine but not as common as I would like
If you want to bulk up your content library, think @Wonderland pegged it pretty well.
My purchasing habits are pretty consistant even though I have a fairly full library there's always something that I don't have or something new that catches my eye. The biggest difference for me in the last 6 months or so has been that since I've discovered other sites that sell models and learning how to import .obj's, I'm spreading my purchases around more.