Add-On Future with MS Flight

[Guest veeray]

Yes, you CAN through time and money at a project and come up with PMDG quality stuff. The fact that non of the current developers have the money or the resources to make this happen is beside the point. For argument's sake: If I sell 1000 copies of a product at $80. I make $80,000. If a Flight App Store allows you to sell 10,000 copies at $54 (at a require 33% discount as you say) then I make $540,000...ummm, yeah PMDG would hate that.

Yes well here's the problem.. you are predicting increased demand based on Microsoft opening an appstore. I have steam, how many games did I buy because it was featured on Steam? Zero. How many train sim addons did I buy through steam? Zero. Which train sim addon do i expect to buy? Aerosoft's Germany addon.. Where will I buy this addon? Direct from Aerosoft cutting out the middle man. Here's another example.. paraphrasing the keynote speech at last years Quakecon. "how many of you own Iphones?" 60-70% respond favourably. "how many of you bought an Iphone app?", roughly the same number that own the phone. "How many of you own an Andriod?", roughly 25% of the crowd cheers. "how many have bought an app" 2-3 people respond , otherwise pretty much dead silence in a room of a 1000+ geeks. Two different stores, two totally different outcomes. And most important of all two different mindsets in the owners. Not to mention the enjoyment you get out of an flight sim addon is directly related to your clock speed, "apps" give everyone the exact same experience.

[n4gix 4,955]

Yes well here's the problem.. you are predicting increased demand based on Microsoft opening an appstore.

Of course having one's product in a Live appstore won't guarantee increased sales. What it will do however is hugely increase the exposure of one's product to a larger number of potential customers.It's a phenomenon known as "market opacity." Anything which decreases the opacity of the market is a Good Thing.But, beyond even than that, the very existence of the World Wide Wasteland creates a glut of information, which in turn leads to two conflicting phenomena:1. information overload2. information dilutionIt is a demonstrable fact that the majority of even "frequent users" of flightsim sites do not know how to use the "Search" function every site has for "finding answers quickly."These folks are also the least likely to know how to use Google.com (or Bing.com, Ask.com et alia) at all, much less effectively!All of which completely avoids the major premise. The opacity of the flightsimmer market -and by extension the vibrant community itself- is the problem... It is my "guesstimate" that at best only ~4% of all purchasers of any flightsim product are aware of the existence of such communities and addon products, much less more expert at "googling" for information than our current crop of active simmers... I see evidence of these two phenomena constantly. New people arrive every day asking how to program this, that or the other in a gauge, how to backlight VC gauges, how to embed XML into a model, and so forth. Many of their questions were asked and answered years ago, the information is available to anyone to locate via "googling" or simply reading/searching forums......but, they have never been taught how to "data mine."In summary, having a centralized "store" that's available directly from the sim's Toolbar would address all three points rather neatly!

[january 19]

---------------------It's a phenomenon known as "market opacity." Anything which decreases the opacity of the market is a Good Thing.---------------------

Fr Bill- you did mean O'Pacity, did you not? (I think he runs a small computer shop in Limerick!)After all, today IS the 17th of Ireland !!!!!AR

[n4gix 4,955]

Fr Bill- you did mean O'Pacity, did you not? (I think he runs a small computer shop in Limerick!)After all, today IS the 17th of Ireland !!!!!AR

Of course... Shaun O'Pacity, the seventh son of a seventh son. :(

[Guest veeray]

n4gix: Well I have the same problem. how many times have you fought something until you realized you should have googled it 20 minutes ago? But yeah if you have to ask on a developers forum, I agree you should have searched for it first. Personally I love how people ask the same question over and over in the AVSIM Simconnect Developers forum when they could just as easily asked the same question in the FSX forum, where it belongs. Sorry if you can't install Simconnect, don't be asking how in the dev forum.