Render hub

Yea, I noticed the drop in new items being posted. Can't you just create another account?

The men and women who create the items we share freely, spend long tedious hours
creating their vision and hope to someday sell these items and be paid
for their work.

There was a discussion on the discord server a couple of months ago about how much the sellers make vs how much the vendor sites take. Apparently, most of the sites take between 50% and 90% of the sale price of the item leaving the artists with peanuts, and also do things like put items on sale without any input from the artist. Vendor sites like 'rosity and 'rotica haven't updated their websites in decades and RH is okay with piracy as long as they are the ones doing it. Their only costs are hosting (which these days is cheap as chips) and payment processing yet they take the lion's share of profits from their artists and act like they're doing them a favour. Contrast that with how a site like Cults3D (a 3d printing vendor where I sell my side-hustles) treats their artists; a flat 20% fee, the artist has full control over sales price and discounts and the owners of Cults don't throw a fit if I sell directly to a customer off-site and roll out new features all the time both front-end like artist-set discount codes and back-end stuff like tax reports and multiple payment options.

While I'm fully aware that downloading an item from here is taking money from the artist, I find the predatory nature of the vendor sites and the way they treat their artists to be abhorrent and the only way I can protest their behavior is to not give them my money, especially money for content that I'll probably never use. I do still purchase items from them, but only ones that I use in my side-hustle and that's only because I can't easily send a payment directly to the artists. 90% of what I download from here will be installed into my temp runtime, tested one or twice and then deleted. If I use something, I buy it, while grinding my teeth that the vendor is taking the majority of my money for almost zero work on their part. As far as my conscience goes, I treat piracy like a library; I download something from here, test it and if I like it and can use it, I buy it. If I don't it gets deleted.

As an addendum, My 3D printables appear as printed models on sites like Etsy all the time without my permission, despite that being against the license agreement with Cults. Probably one in twenty Etsy sellers bother to contact me or credit me and less than one in one hundred offer any sort of remuneration, despite me being very clear on my store page that all they need to do is let me know what models they're selling and credit me and I'll give my permission to do so. It used to annoy the hell out of me but I can either spend my limited free time getting more and more annoyed while trying to police it, or relax by doing something I enjoy and creating something new.

Skippy said it best and ya, I agree that the main vendor's sites are a bunch of sleazy, self-serving crooks and parasites. Daz is the worst...
ARE YA READING THIS HASELTINE!
They delete any negative comments in their forums and continue to spew out lame code. Last week I saw them try to make excuses for Studio taking forever to shutdown. Some forum member wrote a script to automate and speedup the process. A week later that script was included in an update to Studio. The sleazebags stole his script!
I'm heartened by the fact that 3D Shards is offering artists space without gouging them. They only charge a small fee to pay for server space. It's disgusting that Daz is trying to shut them down. I feel strongly that we should promote 3D Shard and NOT permit their items to be shared here. If we're gonna be pirates, we should do it with our and their best interests at heart.

Unpopular opinions ahead.

If I recall correctly, the main sites have always taken a 50% cut (Renderosity only takes a 40% cut if you went exclusive with them.) Not sure on Renderhub and the smaller out-of-the-way sites though. Booth and Gumroad take a cut as well, but again not sure how much (or if its flat-rate). Once you get to the really obscure sites like ShareCG and DeviantArt, all bets are off as to how much they charge.

It was the same for the long-dead sites too (like PoserPros, Thralldom, 3DCommune, and others). Nobody I know of charged less than 40-50% of the take - at least not the ones which survived for longer than a year.

Vendors have always known this, and have planned accordingly. I know and have known a lot of vendors over the years (a disturbing number of them are actually dead now!), and aside from a small number of semi-famous exceptions, most considered their work as a way to supplement their income, but not something to live off of (I think PoserPros was started by a vendor and her husband as their livelihood, but it didn't last too long.)

Otherwise, I don't think anyone is dumb enough to think they're going to make a usable living at this today. Besides, the insanely high quality of the freebies coming out of Japan almost guaranteed that a Poser/DS vendor wouldn't get too wealthy.

To speak on behalf of the stores, they do all of the hosting, security, marketing, design and layout, and etc. DAZ uses some of their cut to fund DAZ Studio, and Renderosity is using theirs to keep Poser going (why? Nostalgia I guess.) Their terms are plain and public to anyone that wants to look, so it's not like they're ripping off the vendors. You know what you get going in.

I don't believe that Daz is doing anything with Studio other than keeping it (barely) alive. Any questions regarding Studio 5's release date are either deflected or deleted by that asshole and corporate shill, Haseltine. Just the other day, Nyghtfall, an old hand who's been around the Poserverse for decades, called Studio 5 vapourware and had his post deleted.
My opinion is that Tafi/Daz put all their hope in making a ton of money on NFTs and fired all but one programmer. When NFTs collapsed they where left with next to nothing to go forward with in regards to Studio and programmers. Now it's just putting out fires and Studio gets worse with every update, and they've even resorted to stealing free code from fans. When I saw THAT I PM'ed the author of it and urged him to demand money and recognition from Daz or sue the bastards.
I have zero sympathy for Daz anymore. I keep hoping that the Diomorphic plugin matures and becomes a viable alternative to Studio.

So where will that leave all of us with bazillions of dollars in items and software that barely works?
I can't see anyone buying Studio with AI eating the whole hobby. Poser could have been a contender if they'd included native support for Daz formatted stuff, but their corporate ego will never allow that.
I keep coming back to Diffeomorphic with great hopes.

The Japanese freebies have been out for decades... As far as a listing? Start here: https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Freebie_Sites

Renderosity used to have an ongoing thread in one of their forums that updated everyone on the regular when new stuff came out, right up until the site owners got pissy about posting links to external sites.

The market we're in overall is pretty tiny, not gonna lie. On the other hand, the secondary market is way larger: For instance, VAM (VirtuaMate) has a big presence, and most of the creators there use DAZ assets to make their icons with.

@ethiopia - will AI swallow the market? I don't think it will just yet. Most of us keep a stable of dolls (for lack of a better description) that we can use over and over again, because we've imbued personalities into them. AI has yet to show a consistent personality from picture to picture, let alone keep a custom persona that we can re-use later in another scenario or story (that could no longer be true, but I think it still is?)

Also, a partial thought of mine: once most people know what an LLM is and how it works, I think they would be uncomfortable with building a persona that some other random user could snatch away w/o even knowing they did it. I give away some of the stuff I make because it was fun to build and share, but I'm not most people.