It is great that someone responded. I hope that they will keep the dialog going. I wonder if they look at what is being created on this site and the contributions of so many people who add characters and scenes? This is a great community, and I hope they will continue to support the users here, and we will continue to support them.

I want to start by saying that I love this software. Whoever conceptualized it and created the amazingly intuitive interface is brilliant! At the current price it is by far the most affordable and usable product of its type on the market. In my opinion, you haven't even scratched the surface of your earning potential. If you focused on making money through sales of add-on products (and if you actually dedicated resources to CREATING useful add-on products) you could arrange deals with all sorts of hardware manufacturers to include Muvizu as bundles with their products. Every video card should come with Muvizu. That would position you for a huge active user base who would all want to buy your accessory packs.

Instead, you dedicate your development resources to create 3D rotation packs and Oculus rift viewer packs that are useless to 99.9% of the people who use your software. That's not good marketing strategy.

I have to wonder why the dev team would spend resources to develop useless stuff when there are features we've been asking for and which we are willing to pay for! It had to cost Digimania a fair amount of money to pay for the man hours involved in the development of the oculus and 360 degree rotation features, neither of which is really useful in the world of video creation. I have to guess its because Muvizu is based on a game engine, and you probably hire developers from the gaming industry, who come to the workplace with ideas and skills that are useful in that environment. But although there is some overlap, they are two different paradigms. Your customers are basically film makers, and until Muvizu starts catering to the specific needs of video production the products you release will continue to be useless to us, and money losers for the company.

Given the low price of the base product, the expansion packs are where you stand to make money. Develop what we want, and we'll buy it. Develop things we can't use, and we won't.

My suggestion (if anyone at Muvizu gives a d@mn about what the users think) is:
1) Devote resources to providing accessories for the new characters. Cool as they are, they remain fairly useless without the ability to change their outfits and appearance.

2) Also a utility character that has the best features of the potato heads (lots of skeletal attachment points) and of the newer characters (ability to turn off the various body parts we don't need) would be useful. We could use such a character to create our own specialty creatures without all the constraints we have when trying to modify the current characters

3) And finally, in the absence of dev team involvement with the forum, users have started experimenting on their own. We now know that it is possible to create quadrapeds by editing the XML files. True, we are prohibited from doing so by the user agreement... but knowing that it is possible changes our expectations for the dev team. You can no longer tell us that it isn't possible to do what we've been asking for.

We want at least one professionally designed quadraped that has enough attachment points that we can morph it into other creatures with a little modelling skill. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd pay whatever you asked for such a character! I think just about everyone would.


In summary: expand your user base with bundling deals, then fill the store with useful accessories, and I predict your revenue will take off like a rocket. Or not. Your call.

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edited by PatMarrNC on 01/09/2016

MuvizuTeam wrote:


Jo, thank you for commenting!

I hope this thread is not discouraging to anyone at Muvizu. It is intended to show our interest in the product and to point out that what we all want is really pretty simple. We don't want you to work overtime or jump through hoops. We just want you to redirect the same amount of work that you're already doing into features and expansion packs that we can use.

We recognize that Muvizu is one of many tools in the toolbox, and as such we don't ask you to recreate features that we already have in other products.

The most productive and most money-making thing for Muvizu is to take the existing paradigm and refine it:

• Where there are bugs, fix them.
  
• We love the actions so much, we'd rejoice if we had more.
• expansion packs!
  
• outfits!
  
• characters that are modifiable! (this is why most of us still use the potato heads... they are more modifiable)
  
• timeline enhancements!
  

the list could get long and overwhelming. But pick one and run with it.

We'll buy it. You'll make money. Everybody will be happy
.

MuvizuTeam wrote:


Oh hello Jo!
And what do you do in the land of Muvizu?

I reposted this to some other animator sites on Facebook. As far as having a variety of tools in the ol' tool box, Muvizu is already the best deal in town... when it's on sale, it's downright foolish NOT to buy it!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/457269884316345/

I think you need a www. in the url there.
Will there be development for the Vive too?