I was just wondering if anyone knew how much it costs to develop a typical addon FSX plane (rough estimate). I hope someone from PMDG, etc. answers this. Thanks

It's priceless for a linersCount 7 to 12 mounth of passion in 3d,texture and coding.Now the quality make the diffrence so imagine some professional work on a project and realize how much they should earn in that period.But what is important to understand is what it take to make it working in fsx there is also experince that should take in count.Otherwise framerate and system implementation will make it useless.

I was just wondering if anyone knew how much it costs to develop a typical addon FSX plane (rough estimate).   I hope someone from PMDG, etc. answers this.  Thanks

Why? Are you willing to foot the bill for a requested aircraft development.   IF so, I will start a company and make the aircraft for you.  :(

LOL, was just wondering!

Wondering about this too. But guess we will never know :)

Dare I say a few thousand dollars I don't know think its maybe around 900- too $5000 dollars?

The actual dollar amount depends on the production process , IF the production is developed with an in-house team working on all elements themselves the cash outlaycan be near 0 with each member of the team receiving a percentage of sales.On the other hand should project be financed and all development aspects paid for up front then i have seen expenditures attain a maximum of $100.000 dollars CDN, dollar amounts of $10.000 to $16.000 have been paid for just the mesh and artwork to be completed .The cost of production in general is not recouped these days, sales of addon aircraft rarely exceed 300 units in the first 6 months with few exceptions, so if your question relates to the profitability of the Sim Business then the answer is you are lucky to recoup your investment of time and money, the majority of full time developers do this work because they enjoy the work itself, it’s not about money.

The actual dollar amount depends on the production process , IF the production is developed with an in-house team working on all elements themselves the cash outlaycan be near 0 with each member of the team receiving a percentage of sales.On the other hand should project be financed and all development aspects paid for up front then i have seen expenditures attain a maximum of $100.000 dollars CDN, dollar amounts of $10.000 to $16.000 have been paid for just the mesh and artwork to be completed .The cost of production in general is not recouped these days, sales of addon aircraft rarely exceed 300 units in the first 6 months with few exceptions, so if your question relates to the profitability of the Sim Business then the answer is you are lucky to recoup your investment of time and money, the majority of full time developers do this work because they enjoy the work itself, it’s not about money.

Interesting insight Chuck, hopefully it might change a little bit with msflight if they manage to do in online store. when I first started simming years ago I had no idea on were to go I didn't even know that add-on software was created and available.

The actual dollar amount depends on the production process , IF the production is developed with an in-house team working on all elements themselves the cash outlaycan be near 0 with each member of the team receiving a percentage of sales.On the other hand should project be financed and all development aspects paid for up front then i have seen expenditures attain a maximum of $100.000 dollars CDN, dollar amounts of $10.000 to $16.000 have been paid for just the mesh and artwork to be completed .The cost of production in general is not recouped these days, sales of addon aircraft rarely exceed 300 units in the first 6 months with few exceptions, so if your question relates to the profitability of the Sim Business then the answer is you are lucky to recoup your investment of time and money, the majority of full time developers do this work because they enjoy the work itself, it’s not about money.

Chuck, I would be interested in the source for those numbers.

Chuck, I would be interested in the source for those numbers.

I would surmise that, like myself, Chuck's "source" is his own personal and professional experience!My professional rate for custom modeling and programming is $85/billable hour. This sort of work is done on contract for specific, one-off projects for commercial/professional customers.However, for "flightsim projects" a percentage of sales is typically negotiated. In every instance thus far, if I eventually receive as much as 5% of the actual time invested, I consider it a "success..." :(

As Bill surmised the figures quoted are from personal experience, having been associated with a lengthy list of flight sim releases, debugging pre release problems, consultations, assistance, model production , textures and coding for a number of companies, as well as donating time to freeware productions, i have seen a broad spectrum of the field in action , the $100.000 is an actual FS release that was financed by TeleFilm Canada, it was the most expensive product i have seen done , but not by much , sound sets cost 1200 Euro's , the Airfile & .cfg about the same, the costs add up fast , the sales don't . If you added up the value of the hours spent on an FS production and did the math you’re going to see it works out to about $45.000 per thousand hours invested , a thousand hours being about normal for a release , PMDG tube liners probably take about three thousand hours to produce i would imagine, the only tube liner i had on my desktop was Reality XP's Airbus and it wasn't released after years of development, leading me to remember another hidden cost " Vaporware " ....

Thanks for the feedback, those numbers are real 'eye openers'

the only tube liner i had on my desktop was Reality XP's Airbus and it wasn't released after years of development, leading me to remember another hidden cost " Vaporware " ....

Yep, one of the best looking airbuses at the time..... such a shame...

Guess this thread validates the reason why the top end addon planes run from $60 to $100. per copy. With profit (if there is one) margins so slim, I would be sweating if I was a developer. Makes me remember the bliss when I designed my own airplanes way back in the Sublogic/Mallard/BAO days.

I think freeware is alive and well then :( There must be a whole lot of freeware in every payware project :)A $100,000 budget would make a premium aircraft 2/3 freeware in my mind.A developer could publish something paying an honest wage with that budget…but what I don't know?Looking at all the recent high-quality FSX releases - I have to think there’s a massive amount of hours that aren’t being accounted for. And what about incidental costs, like research and training? Geesh :(