Quote - Clearly an effort to increase their presence in the market. I was just commenting yesterday that Genesis is a big deal at the Daz store because it's THEIR store, but not much interest so far by vendors or buyers at other 3D stores. This could be an attempt to change that.

Or simply to expand the base of Genesis users so they'll come to the Daz store to buy Genesis stuff, to heck with outher stores.

Maybe the free Daz Studio Standard wasn't enough of an inducement because you had to buy a bunch of add-ons, or pay for an upgrade, to get very far with it. Now they're bypassing all that.

Personally, I have mild interest in the free Bryce but I'm afraid I'll get sucked into buying a lot of after-market stuff for it. Still don't need DS Pro, even free. I've already talked myself out of the "ooh shiny" thing with Genesis. There's plenty of "ooh shiny" right here that I haven't had time to get deep into yet, like V4-WM, Anastasia and Antonia!

It is a game changer in this corner of the CG universe. Those not decided about which software to use can get DS 4 Pro for free for 29 days. Poser Pro 2012 won't be free. Easy pick for most people in these tight times. And anyone wanting to try the Pro version will now have all the regular Pro features to play with. This will substantially increase their user base and gain them more folks wanting to buy content which is still their main business.

And I would bet that previous purchasers will get the future 4.1 release for free or reduced price (it's the version with the big render speedup). The freebie folks will have to upgrade for the render joy. That's my guess for the future.