Premier: The Beginning of Rent-a-Software?
animsakari_38ac6442c6
Posts: 15
Daz Premier seems to move Daz towards a subscription based application by slowly putting the new & desirable features behind the subscription fee and leaving a stripped down free application more on par with a trial version.
ManFriday announced MeshGrabber 4.0 will not be released. It is now a Daz Premier feature locked behind a $240/year rental price tag. This acquisition shows a clear potential path for Daz Premier to absorb many nice upgrades and new features into the Premier tier.
MeshGrabber & plugins like Advanced Collective Transform Tools filled holes and solved bugs that Daz never addressed. If Premier is going to snatch up these nice-to-haves and prevent users from purchasing these types of plugins this is a huge strike against the usablility of the application for those of us who do not want to rent software that we also have to buy PA assets to use.
The Daz+ price hike (and disappearance of discounted annual plans) with no additional benefits also seems to show where the priorities are with the future of Daz.
I do not like the direction that Daz Premier takes Daz. After a year I probably have ~$1,000 invested in Daz PA assets, and this will make it tempting to cave to the subscription but I do NOT want to continue using Daz as a subscription product. At this point I'm considering cutting my loses and investigating other platforms and tools.
If you feel similarly, I'd encourage you to express your objections through this forum or other Daz contact channels.
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Comments
You can find ManFriday's official confirmation of MeshGrabber 4.0's absorption into Premier here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/686101/coming-soon-mesh-grabber-4-0-commercial/p7
Is there any place where we can find a complete description of DAZ Premire along with detailed explinations of the new functions?
Thanks.
Did you see this page already? https://www.daz3d.com/daz-premier
It could be the beginning of a move toward a pure subscription model, though it isn't necessarily a move toward that. For now, I think most users will find the sort of features available in the free version to be adequate to their needs, and only a minority of users will derive much benefit from the paid features.
I'm willing to give Premier a chance for a while. We'll see what Daz/Tafi chooses to do with the income. If they plow the income into improving an app that has been stagnant for years, then moving to a business model based upon paid subscriptions would probably be a good thing. Other potential good uses include:
(1) Maintaining and publishing proper documentation, including a proper manual.
(2) Commissioning or subsidizing the development of content that fills gaps in what PAs are submitting. Do we really need more throne rooms, temples, or bunny outfits?
(3) Improved quality control practices.
Of course, given their track record, they may do things which provide no benefit for the Daz Studio user:
(1) Ownership could just pocket the money, or just blow it on executive compensation.
(2) Throw money at some initiative to transform the business on the cheap, like the NFT thing (Stop laughing!), chatbots, paid text-to-image subscriptions, etc.
(3) Have the marketing department blow the money on badly targeted advertising.
It's a steep monthly fee, and it's a bit odd that they didn't offer a discounted annual subscription. As usual, the execution of the rollout was poor and plagued by glitches.
I will be fine with them trying the subscription model as long as they don't make the existing products stop working.
No matter how great the new features may be, I just can't afford it. If I were to pay $18 a month for membership, I would hardly have any money left to buy any products anyway. With all due respect, I have other hobbies too. I can't and won't pay the $9 for DAZ+ either.
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-premier
There's a blog post about 4.23 too: https://www.daz3d.com/blog/daz-studio-premier-and-daz-studio-4-23-updates
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think many of ManFriday's newer plugins have disappeared out of the Daz shop sometime since last week. His G9 character converter and new Render Queue (v3 I think?) were in my wishlist and are now no longer visible. So it appears that Premier has gone from finding new updates and putting them behind the subscription to actively taking some of the best existing plugins for advanced users (or even those wishing to convert their older version characters to G9) and making them features you must rent.
I agree ManFriday should get boat loads f cash. MeshGrabber was one of the best things ever created outside of Daz proper development. It allowed you to workaround so many poke-through issues that built-in Daz features could not fix. It always seemed like it would be awesome if he actually worked for Daz.
So maybe this is just a misperception on my part and we are catching things in the middle of some transition but it feels like Premier is becoming the "advanced features" version of Daz and possibly the only way to get features you might want if you use Daz in a more involved workflow.
There's probably nothing in any licence agreement that means the current plugins we bought will work in future versions either. You might find that you upgrade to 4.25 and up pops a message to say that your V3 mesh grabber is no longer supported and you'll have to buy Premier. No honest company would do such a thing of course, and I'm not suggesting Daz would do it. I'm just saying that legally, they probably could (?)
I believe it has been confirmed that all plugins will be unusable in DS5 (if/when released) due to the jump in the framework used. However, it has also been said that DS5 will install alongside DS4 so you can run both side-by-side presumably.
and this is why we do not allow speculation. Closing, with the observation that one data point is insufficient to detect a trend.
The discussion of Premier in general has all been removed, since there are already multiple threads on the topic, and so have a number or other posts.