So, what are the top items on Renderosity? Rendo provides a page where you can find such things out. The top four are pretty much as you might expect.
Followed by a superstore’s-worth of skimpies and silkies, page after page, and just a couple of other quality G8 female characters. You have to scroll a long way down to get to something like “STZ Cleaning accessories”. It takes a while to puzzle that one out, but then the penny drops: hardware accessories for the maid costumes.
Way way down after many pages you start to see occasional other things, like “Photo Props: Fire Effect Maker” and the “Poser 12 – Upgrade”. Eventually, after a very long time of scrolling the first male item appears. G8M realistic body-hair strips, and then after another few pages another in “Karl for Genesis 8 Male”. Hurrah for Karl, but… he has no other mates down there.
Eventually we start to get a couple of animals, with the HiveWire Horse, Songbird ReMix Corvus (crows). Also a few very scattered sci-fi sets. Even further down up pops La Femme Pro V.2, along with more Hivewive Big Cats, Hivewire Housecat. Also Poser 11 at the Renderosity price.
So basically it seems that if you want to sell to the masses, G3F and G8F is where it’s at. Specifically clothing and the slinkier and more enticing the better. However, it’s obviously a very crowded market. I’m guessing the ‘work to hit product’ ratio might be high, and you could have to produce and shout about twenty or more items of new clothing to get one breakthrough product that sells well. The rest are likely to be lost in the tidal waves of similar items, because back of these best-sellers must be thousands of others that didn’t get the traction.
Hair obviously has to be really really good to make it up the charts. I guess many people already have their favourite go-to hairs. Also, hair is a risky buy, so buyers may be averse.
There’s a surprisingly lack of scripts and add-ons, but I guess such things are beyond the ability of the mass market and so don’t sell a lot.
Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that the kind of stuff that sold twenty years ago is no longer selling. It probably is. It’s just that such things are being drowned out in the charts by the new mass market.
What of the DAZ Store? So far as I can tell the DAZ Store’s “sort by most popular” is not an all-time or yearly tally, and only seems to give you the most popular this week.