Ya. If anyone things we are making a lot of money on 3rd party stuff, they are dead wrong. Its all a hobby that can hopefully pay for itself.

Market = Everyone who has ever purchased a copy of MSFS, X-Plane, P3D, etc.

Addressable Market = That part of the market that is exposed to the internet, magazines, and other influences that expose it to add-on's, downloads, web sites, etc.

Capturable Market = that part of the addressable market that continues exploring the sim and that wishes to expand the capabilities of their sim system and WHICH KNOW YOUR PRODUCT IS AVAILABLE.

Capture Probability = The probability that the addressable market will purchase your product given PGO (The probability that they will actually purchase a product), times PWIN (the probability that your product beats its competitor). Example; PGO = 60%; PWIN = 50% (you have one competitor and your strengths are equal in this example)... Capture = 60% X 50% = 30% Probability (.6 x .5 = .3) you will sell your product.

 

That's all marketing "apple pie and motherhood" and is usually found in chapter 4 of Marketing 101 textbooks. The important point is that you need to understand your Capturable Market and that the Capturable Market knows that 1.) your product exists, 2.) that you have positioned it correctly against your competitors, and 3.) that it presents that potential customer with value, either intrinsicly or tangibly.

 

Fundamentally? If potential customers don't know your product exists, you do not have a capturable market. I look at apps for my IPAD all the time. When I sign in to the app store, all I see is "noise". Where do I turn? To those apps that are recommended by my fellow IPAD owners or ones that have been made visible to me by advertising, word of mouth, or reviews which I can get access to.

 

Expecting a gate keeper to expound the virtues of my app, download, add on, whatever, over that of a potential competitor is wishful thinking. A gate keeper will not favor one over the other without jeopardizing its role as "honest broker".

But a gatekeeper can filter total garbage, a valuable service for the customer blinded by a kaleidoscopic array of choices. A single store can also present a structured environment where all potential customers have the opportunity to view products on a relatively equal footing, and can present those products in a simplified format with a degree of standardization rare in the current idiosyncratic community.

 

A structured format for drilling downwards through choices, added to a healthy dose of positive (and negative) customer reviews, organized in a user friendly format can help customers triangulate even further on the best available choices, and companies that consistently deliver can rise on the most popular, or top rated or best seller lists, creating a sort of virtuous circle.

 

With so many Flightsim stores out there now, and so many of them very poorly organized, I admit that shopping at them is a chore. Very often I go directly to a designers website first, then follow links to a favored store, purchase the item and then get out fast, because the experience within the store itself is often cluttered, claustrophobic or confusing; with different payment interfaces for each store, multiple purchase history's to keep track of, utterly idiosyncratic download styles coupled with individual security measures to be aware of (and decrypted) coupled with the attendant passwords to be remembered........

 

This is not to mention a haphazard collection of innumerable items to trudge through with no centrally established or trusted yardstick for quality, compatibility or customer service reliability...... the list goes on. There are certainly many many very good products out there, but quite a few of them are likely hidden under the weight of a million other similar products; on the back pages of out of the way web-stores that only a minority even know exist!

 

I am a big flightsim fan, but it took me literally years to accidently bump into Aerosoft, and years after that to find Orbx. It's understandable, but it does not help that the largest and easiest to find sites often forbid mention of others products, which creates little islands in the darkness with only the most tenuous linkages for the curious and uninformed to backtrack into the larger community.

 

Steam became popular for a reason. It takes care of all the issues I have mentioned, and does it in an organized, streamlined and user friendly fashion that makes the purchasing experience simple. If Flight can set up a marketplace half as efficient, then I imagine it will be like nothing ever seen in the sim community. The picture of what such an environment might look like is........ indeterminate, because possibilities shoot off in every possible direction when you look at it, and one could probably write pages just about that.

 

But first and foremost it would be a place where all eyes would be concentrated and quality guaranteed. Ideally, it would be organized in such a way as to allow all products an equal chance to be seen, and where the concentration of customers would provide a market large enough to encourage producers to lower prices because they can still make a profit through volume. That's an almost unheard of combination in the current super-fragmented flightsim environment.

Yeah, everything HiFlyer said.

 

I do have to disagree with Tom's position that purchasing additional software for a software product is fundamentally different than purchasing additional software for a hardware product. They're both platforms being served in similar ways. I see little difference, from the customer's point of view.

 

But I do agree that having a single market doesn't simply drive sales. But it does at least facilitate the customer finding, purchasing and acquiring the product in a consistent manner.

 

No, I don't care for what going to a single-point of purchase would do to sites like AVSIM that rely on the other stores in the community, but I'm not totally convinced that is what's going to happen when/if Flight does start letting 3PDs in to the market. There are already two stores for Flight. There is only one delivery system, via MS, but you can buy the products from Valve if you don't want to deal with MS, or vice versa. It is not inconceivable to me that MS may permit 3PDs to operate their own stores and set their own prices (which may be different than the prices they set for the GFWL Marketplace), selling access-codes to their products, which are redeemed in the same fashion as current Steam purchases.

 

This would still leave MS collecting tolls in a gatekeeper position, with all the advantages that offers (to the customers, to MS, and even to the 3PDs), but it does reduce the impact of at at least one of the disadvantages.

 

And for a 3PD, the increase in your exposure to potential customers in exchange for 30% (or whatever the number is) of the proceeds may turn out to be a good thing. Based on the anecdotal evidence being offered by a few, it could even turn out to be a marvelous thing.

Another big problem on the table is piracy. Its something that is likely never going to go away, but its obvious after even the most cursory web search that a large number of the most desirable Flightsim software is freely available for download. A potential flight DLC store may not have an uncrackable encryption scheme, but it would likely form enough of an impediment to bring back a significant number of sales that would otherwise be lost every day. Just that might restore enough profit to the hands of software creators to be game changer.

 

That, coupled with (if it all works out) a greater number of eyes on the product from a larger and more varied customer base could make whatever Microsoft is asking as a percentage of sales pale in comparison to the potential benefits: such as not having to worry about advertising, running a website/store, paying for a server, dealing with credit card companies....

 

Its worked out well enough for Steam to become the behemoth it is, not just for large producers, but for tiny independent companies creating casual games as well.

Another big problem on the table is piracy. Its something that is likely never going to go away, but its obvious after even the most cursory web search that a large number of the most desirable Flightsim software is freely available for download. A potential flight DLC store may not have an uncrackable encryption scheme, but it would likely form enough of an impediment to bring back a significant number of sales that would otherwise be lost every day. Just that might restore enough profit to the hands of software creators to be game changer.

 

That, coupled with (if it all works out) a greater number of eyes on the product from a larger and more varied customer base could make whatever Microsoft is asking as a percentage of sales pale in comparison to the potential benefits: such as not having to worry about advertising, running a website/store, paying for a server, dealing with credit card companies....

 

Its worked out well enough for Steam to become the behemoth it is, not just for large producers, but for tiny independent companies creating casual games as well.

 

I met an FSX user who said "I really like the look of Flight but I can't get the DLC for free so no sale" I assume me meant he could not crack it. My hope is that the 3rd party developers get involved with Flight somehow and include the 3rd party distributors as well.

 

Regards;

 

Fritz

Thats another really good point. Having an internal store helps a lot with piracy. Currently there is no cracks available for GFWL, and not a lot of work arounds for Steam. Piracy hurts 3rd party's a lot, since its so easy in FSX. We need to pay a lot for even the most basic protections that wont disrupt our customers. When one of your products hits the pirate forums, you see sales plumit 75-80%, so the longer you can keep that from happening, the better your sales are.

When one of your products hits the pirate forums, you see sales plumit 75-80%, so the longer you can keep that from happening, the better your sales are.

 

Of course you will never know it this is really due to piracy... Seems to me a lot of products are sold in bigger numbers once they hit the shelves or once they become well know, but after a few days sales go down... that may happen at the same time as when the cracked version hits the forums... The way you say it now makes it seem that without pirates sales would stay at 100% constantly until your retirement. This can't be measured in any way, I think, unless you constantly keep a close eye on ALL pirate sites (forums, torrents, usenet) and monitor them all day and night, which seems impossible to me.

 

BTW Using systems like Steam and GFWL is indeed a great way to prevent pirating! And I have to say that after buying two games last week from Steam I like the concept... It's nice idea not having to worry about dvd's and serials when you need to reinstall your system. Everything is there online, updates and all. I like it. I hardly ever buy a game and I think that from now on I will only buy stuff from Steam sales. Apart from Flight DLC that is...

Honestly, neither GFWL nor Steam can stop, nor really deter, pirates. It can all be cracked and then stolen. If there are people who are literally offended that they would have to pay ANYTHING for digital material, then there's no hope for them.

I think that MS's business model is the best in piracy prevention. I've personally put about 200 hours into Flight, and spent...lets see....15+15=30 dollars. It's such easy math, 30 dollars for 200 hours of entertainment and that's only going to go up. Why on earth would I consider this unfair or too expensive?

However, I'm a grown-up (sometimes less-so than others, LOL), and don't have a particularly strong sense of entitlement.

Same idea with purchasing music. When a song is sold for a dollar or two, and comes in great quality with album art....and you'll probably listen to it dozens if not hundreds of time....why on earth would one feel the need to steal it? If the deal is reasonable enough, the incentive to break the law is greatly diminished I suppose.

I think that MS's business model is the best in piracy prevention. I've personally put about 200 hours into Flight, and spent...lets see....15+15=30 dollars. It's such easy math, 30 dollars for 200 hours of entertainment and that's only going to go up. Why on earth would I consider this unfair or too expensive?

 

Exactly! I am one of those guys who tends to buy / register everything, so I could never consider piracy, even more when I get so much joy from MS FLIGHT and have spent such a small amount so far.

 

I've been questioning myself and others if I should also give xplane10, LM prepar3d or Vehicle Simulator a go... or if instead I should buy additional scenery areas for ELITE. All this scenarios (well, less Vehicle Simulator at $30 and ELITE which is stable and doesn't really require any tweaking to work on my system...) would represent much more, and probably give me for the same period of use a lot less of flying time and a lot more of simmer/tweaker time....

 

I'm staying only with MS FLIGHT and ELITE I believe, buy all Deluxe DLCs for MS FLIGHT and skip all of the cockpitless proposals... I miss some of the detailed systems, ATC or at least ATIS, but I can perfectly live with that, and start ELITE - just as most certainly many of you start FSX or FS9, Xplane or Prepar3d, DCS, etc... - for the other stuff...

Of course you will never know it this is really due to piracy...

 

Not true at all. When something is purchased, we see the date and time of the purchase. Sales do taper off for weeks after launch, but once it hits the torrents, you no longer see a taper effect, but a sharp falloff within an hour of the torrent hitting the web. If fact, you can tell your product is getting pirated just by watching sales. Once you see that sharp drop, you know what happened. I havent seen this with KCFS, since luckly we slip under the radar for the most part, but I have seen it over and over when I worked with the bigger dev's like Milviz, A2A, and Vertigo. There is no mistake once you see it happen, what the cause is.

Why would you pirate a free game?

 

And then, when you find out that the game isn't all that bad, and you just _need_ that Maule to do those jobs that are taunting you..And it's only 8 quid..you're hooked..as are we all..

 

I think that, not only are cloud-based products (of all flavours) the future; I think DLC-based ones, like FLIGHT are a good way of drawing in people who, otherwise might have pirated a game..Having said that, I doubt that was/is forefront in MS' mind, as it's just a better way of getting your (sometimes unfinished/still in development *cough*) product to the masses

 

Having said all of that, some people won't buy anything; you'll never crack them (pun intended)..

 

who cares about them anyway; they're losers..Everything will be cloud-based and partly free soon..you'll just need to cough up to use it properly..Like it or not..

 

EDIT: I think that was a great interview, and bodes well for FLIGHT..;) sorry Jeroen..off topic again

The day cloud based gaming becomes mainstream is the day I stop gaming.

Not true at all. When something is purchased, we see the date and time of the purchase. Sales do taper off for weeks after launch, but once it hits the torrents, you no longer see a taper effect, but a sharp falloff within an hour of the torrent hitting the web. If fact, you can tell your product is getting pirated just by watching sales. Once you see that sharp drop, you know what happened. I havent seen this with KCFS, since luckly we slip under the radar for the most part, but I have seen it over and over when I worked with the bigger dev's like Milviz, A2A, and Vertigo. There is no mistake once you see it happen, what the cause is.

 

I stand corrected.

I am feeling very well with this Cloud-based/DLC-based MS FLIGHT model and now FSWidgets GMap too. Having 'histericaly' uninstalled ms flight twice, and re-installed ASAP with the easiness of doing it through GFWL, I couldn't really ask for more.

 

I also appreciate knowing that there is a direct correspondence between #DLCs sold by MS or Steam #users using it. I allways felt very bad about seeing some friend flight simmers exhibiting their cracked add-ons, as if they were giving them even a bigger joy exactly for being cracked :-( This is the sort of thing that will not happen, so I hope, to MS FLIGHT. Believe me, at least one of those guys to whom I tried to "sell" the MS FLIGHT way of enjoying flight simulation in a new perspective told me he wouldn't even consider it given there being no way to crack the thing... what's the point(?). Well....