I dont only play FSX but i play Half Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV and i noticed that all these mods for both dont cost a dime. Now when i say this im not just poking at PMDG but at carenado, CLS, and all those other other payware plane addon developers when i say: Why must these addons cost? Look at Black Mesa Soruce: It is a game "mod" being made as a re-make for Half Life 1 and even though the developers legaly have to make it free they're still working hard on it. Go to Blackmesasource.com to take a look at all this.HL2 has a mod called "Resistance and Liberation". It is a WWII simulator GAME that immerses you into battle with real weapon sounds and high detail world, weapons, and player models. All this for a price of $0.00. It can be viewed at resistanceandliberation.comNow for GTAIV and all the other ones. The same thing. There are some high detail addons that are free for it such as cars, weapons, and entire game mods. No body even goes near when they release something to say "this Crown Vic cost $20 just send me it via paypal". Most GTA mods are found at GTAinside.com.Now this is some sweet stuff for these games and i mean like extremely high download count for this stuff and thats not even close to the other mods out there. It struck me last night about most the stuff im using in my games are freeware high detail addons. What im trying to say is my must every plane that comes out for flight sim have a price tag on it. I not only saying that, and im not saying make the NGX and ###### free thats just crazy detail, but what im also saying is why should i pay for addons that cost more then the original game itself. (i.e. FSX Deluxe i payed for $70)Now i know that making the addons cost too such as a website and all but the developers of the examples above all run off of donations.

Check out the Avsim File library for tens of thousands of free airplanes, scenery, sounds, and other resources.

Hi Brian, there is one thing you totally missed :) Microsoft is the developer of FSX, so they're the only ones who can create Add-Ons for free as they're making their money out of the FSX. PMDG and others aren't getting anything from that. So they are building Add-Ons for a Product that they didn't released. Howelse should they make money? Ads in planes?Valve is making addons for their own products. Microsoft doesn't for FSX - so others have to do that - and its just fair to charge money therefore. You can try lots and lots of freeware planes in FSX but these are mostly private projects for fun. Commercial add-ons are serious business and PMDG's are worth every penny. Don't compare a highly realistic simulation with some computer games (no offense on them).

You also have to remember that making Mods for Half life, GTA, BF2142 do not require 3 - 7 years worth of developers time coding realistic systems that will be scrutinized down to finest detail, just have a read through the QRH and you can see how tedious it must be to sit day after day coding that stuff. To be honest I'm surprised the high end add on market is so cheap, I doubt most of these guy's are doing it for the Money. I used to own a program called Airline Simulator many many years ago, it cost me

Brian...You're going to compare Half Life 2 to a flight simulator? Do you have any idea how many copies of HL2 they have sold? The market sizes you are talking about aren't even close to being comparable. Sure, if PMDG had a market of 50,000,000+ people worldwide they could get by on donations.Why should you pay for them? One, because legally you have to. Two, to support the hobby. Three, to put food on the developers' tables. Some developers do this as a full time job. No sales money = no income. Essentially no sales = unemployed. I'm sure many of us have been in that situation in the last couple years.

I'm very familiar with modding for FPS games and the like - there's a few things you need to realize before you compare it to what we do:1. A lot of FPS mod teams are very young - some even high-school aged kids with a knack for development. Many do it from their college dorm rooms. The point is that they have other sources of income - parents, scholarship or loan money in college etc. No one is working full time development jobs with no source of income - that's the whole point, they have other sources of income and in many cases drastically lower levels of responsibility in their lives than a working adult does.2. The goal with a lot of mod teams is actually to get the attention of the developer who made the base game in hopes of getting a job there. This is what happened with a number of famous mods - the original Counter-Strike (HL1 mod) devs went on to work at Valve and make Counter-Strike: Source, which certainly wasn't for free, and the devs of the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 went on to join DICE and help make Battlefield 2, which again, they were certainly paid for. I have a very good friend who's a map designer at DICE now - he did a lot of the maps in the new Battlefield Bad Company 2 game, which has sold 5+ million copies in the past couple months - he got his job there through releasing free maps for their older games. They were really good and got DICE's attention and they hired him. He's certainly not working for free now.You may not realize it, but this HAS happened in the FS community too. One of our 3D modellers, Jason Brown, created some freeware models a while back that impressed us and we hired him - he made our J41 and 747-8 external models, certainly not for free.3. Games like the Source Engine ones, the Crytek games, the STALKER series, and so on release full featured tools for modders to use in making mods. It gives you everything you need right there, fully documented and easy to use. This is not the case with the FSX SDK for what companies like us do. What we do is actually more akin to writing our own simulation engine - we don't even use 90% of the default FSX functionality as far as the aircraft systems, autopilot, sounds, etc. We write that all from scratch. It'd be like a mod team for Half-Life 2 actually writing their own physics engine or renderer.4. It's funny that you mentioned Black Mesa Source - that's been under development for something like 6 years now and a lot of people don't think it'll ever actually be released.5. On the general subject of why addons cost more than the base sim, that's just because of the economics of the addon market. It is MUCH MUCH smaller than the overall market Microsoft has for selling FSX. They sold millions of copies of FSX itself, but addon developers are lucky usually to get a few thousand sales of a high end addon. High end addons are a very small niche market within the overall group of people who bought MSFS. If Microsoft was only selling a few thousand copies of MSFS, you can bet it would not cost $50, it would be much much more. This is the same reason really specialized content creation programs (Photoshop, 3DS Max, AutoCAD etc) can cost many times more than the Windows operating system itself too.

Wow you really brought me back in time, I remember playing the counterstrike and BF1942 mods when they came out. By the way tell your buddy he rocks. I have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of Battlefield Bad Company 2 online.

a lot of you are not getting it.... valve didn't create these add ons, the community does. And ryan,i understand your point. but i noticed that a lot of PMDG's products are equivalent to the price of the sim at which it runs of off.. whats the deal with that?

Gee Brian, as Ryan said if FSX only sold 10,000 copies it would probably cost more than $100 if they'd even bother with a market that small. I absolutely fail to see what the price of FSX has to do with the price of a PMDG product?? That would be like comparing the price of Word to W7.

a lot of you are not getting it.... valve didn't create these add ons, the community does. And ryan,i understand your point. but i noticed that a lot of PMDG's products are equivalent to the price of the sim at which it runs of off.. whats the deal with that?

If you're not going to even read my reply then I'm not sure what to say, I already addressed everything you just posted about again.

a lot of you are not getting it.... valve didn't create these add ons, the community does.

Go to Project Opensky. There's some pretty high end, free airplanes there, made by the community.

but i noticed that a lot of PMDG's products are equivalent to the price of the sim at which it runs of off.. whats the deal with that?

What does that have to do with anything? FSX market = huge. PMDG market = not so much. How many people that actually have FSX use it the way it's supposed to be used? Lots of people buy it, take the default 747, go do some barrel rolls, crash into things then never touch it again.I also think, for what you're getting with PMDG products, that they are very cheap. Programming all an airplanes systems, then the external model, then the cockpit, then writing the 300 page manuals, all for $70 or $80 or whatever they cost is extremely cheap. Just the manuals are probably worth a couple hundred, but there's the problem that if they did cost that much then more people wouldn't buy them.I do not see the point of this topic. If you don't even use FSX or PMDG products, then why are you here? If you had a passion for airplanes and how they work you'd understand why these addons aren't free and why people like me will fork over whatever they cost to have them. We want PMDG to keep making these things so we're going to pay to use them.Jeff Calder

Every PMDG addon has a little pinch of love in it. Right next to the pogo stick. THAT'S what you're paying for. The gents at PMDG do all the rest for free. Cheers, Chris Dalgarno

While I will not pretend to know what modeling program PMDG uses for the creation of their models, 3dSM runs just shy of $3500. They could be using Gmax which is free, but not as fully featured as 3dSM or able to export in a variety of formats. Valve, as did Microsoft, released an SDK for anyone to use so they could make mods. As someone who plays FPS games too, I know that most companies release the tools to create mods, all for free, in order to create them be it characters, weapons, levels/maps, objects and skins. Still, one may need to buy Photoshop ($700) unless the free tools offer ways to make textures for mods. Epic has even released Unreal Ed to be used to create games that can be sold within certain limitations. Red Storm Entertainment released tools that they created for use with PS and 3dSM that they used to create in game objects, but you had to have the proper programs to use the tools. PMDG has people around the world working on the projects they build and from all appearances, some of them do it as a main source of income. The quality of a PMDG add-on is of much higher quality that what many in the FPS community produce (there are a few stand outs and they have been hired by developers of AAA games already). Would I pay for a quality product from PMDG? Certainly as they fulfill the requirements I seek in an add-on. PMDG does not sell to the number of gamers who bought FS9 or FSX and does not make the kind of money MS did with either. $70 for a well researched and developed plane from them is a small price to pay compared to what you get. Go out and buy Steel Beasts Pro or VBS or VBS2. They all cost in excess of $150, especially if you buy the add-ons for it from BIA.

We own multiple copies of 3dSM, Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server and a couple other very expensive tools.

Don't forget that addon developers like PMDG, LVD, DA etc. needs to get permission from Boeing, Airbus, Fokker etc. I believe that cost abit.