As a vendor here I am in the habit of tracking the "most popular" list several times a day. I do see a trend that "free" items will float around on the top of the most popular items list for weeks or even months, even though the products they require may not be in the top 300.
I have no doubt that the majority of people grab free stuff for no other reason than because it's free, and that's fine, that's what free stuff is for! Some qenuinely plan to buy the paid product but forget about it over time, and I'm sure some grab the free stuff because they already stole a pirated copy.
But I wouldn't worry too much about that. As a vendor I have to keep things in perspective. Without the help of a great broker like Renderotica, I wouldn't be making 1/10th of the sales I make every week. I'd have no visibility at all, hardly any sales, and piracy wouldn't even matter because 50% of nothing is still nothing. I'm able to make money here, even with the added annoyance of piracy, that I could not make without the broker.
I will say this about piracy,
I have seen my sets on a couple of the pirate sites and have thought of trying to do something about it, but I would much rather spend that time making new products for the honest customers who support and appreciate my work. I'm not saying nothing should be done, but I also don't think it's healthy to spend too much time worrying about things you can't control at the expense of things you can.
To anyone who is justifying downloading my products by saying "they're just poses" or anyone elses products by saying "it's just software", I will counter with the following:
Making high quality, market ready pose sets is not "easy work". I spend on average 10 hours a day for 8-9 days in a row hunting down photo referrence, creating each pose, alpha testing, product production, QA Beta testing, fixing/tightening poses, QA re-testing, then all the marketing renders and depending on the set there may be other special additions, all before it even gets submitted to 'rotica testing. That's typically over 100 hours spent making a pose set so that my customers don't have to spend an extra 100 hours on their renders. I'm sure that most vendors put in the same time and effort, some even more than that. And all we typically ask is around $7 to $15, even less on sale.
That's $15 spent on a prop that would take the customer weeks or months to make for themselves. $10 spent that saves honest customers hundreds of hours of pose work. All so they can concentrate on doing what they love, making awesome renders.
It's not just software.
Edited by user Friday, December 14, 2018 1:05:03 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified