Dovetail Games releasing Flightsim

[G-RFRY 1,712]

The fear I have is FSX:SE on steam was optional for add-on developers in FSW it is not and may drive some into the arms of the competition and there users with them, they have more choice now than there ever was.

 

Ray Fry. 

[vololiberista 205]

Strange but true that developers still prefer to use the FS9 XML schema for their gauges and control systems because of its comparative simplicity. It's clear that DTG are hot on publicity whereas P3D are not. My money is with the latter. TSW was more than over hyped. Everyone has returned to TS2017! I can't think why.

[n4gix 4,947]

10 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

This situation might also leave a wider opening for Aerofly FS 2 than might otherwise have been the case. Honestly, I was fully expecting inertia and long familiarity to almost automatically lock many developers into the DTG camp, but instead, P3D64 will likely be the great hope and some who might not have previously given Aerofly a fair chance might now take a second look.

Having followed the travails of Bill "Lionheart" on just trying to get his first aircraft into FS2 I'm not nearly as sanguine about developers suddenly jumping on board. The overly complicated way that one has to build the model animations and systems in a text file seems to be an ackward and overly labor intensive methodology.

[n4gix 4,947]

10 hours ago, rjfry said:

The fear I have is FSX:SE on steam was optional for add-on developers in FSW it is not and may drive some into the arms of the competition and there users with them, they have more choice now than there ever was.. 

Ray, it's already been confirmed by DTG that developers are free to sell their product via their own website or other distribution channels, as long as they also make it available via the Steam portal.

It's the 30% for Steam and the 30+% for DTG which only leaves a paltry ~40% to the developer that is a major sticking point. Well that, and that they only pay quarterly...

[Boomer 1,619]

1 minute ago, n4gix said:

Ray, it's already been confirmed by DTG that developers are free to sell their product via their own website or other distribution channels, as long as they also make it available via the Steam portal.

It's the 30% for Steam and the 30+% for DTG which only leaves a paltry ~40% to the developer that is a major sticking point. Well that, and that they only pay quarterly...

Good luck with that cash grabbing business model.  If that is so I wish DTG no success whatsoever.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

23 minutes ago, n4gix said:

The overly complicated way that one has to build the model animations and systems in a text file seems to be an ackward and overly labor intensive methodology.

I followed not only his infrequent posts at FsDeveloper, but also his very enthusiastic posts at the Ipacs developers forum. Overall, my impression was that he found the process logical, but that he needed better sdk documentation of specific features.

Quote

I am firing shots in the dark. I have no concrete settings to go by. This is, for me, all guess work. I need to go on vacation from this for a while. Maybe in the future, the SDK will have information on exactly how this works.

Hardly shocking when switching from years of working on one sim to teasing out the secrets of a completely different way of doing things. (especially after only about a month)

I think overall the developer community may have gotten a bit too accustomed to essentially only having one mostly static target. The question is how adaptable people will be, and my money is still on Lionheart. He is one of the few I noticed who expressed a real excitement for trying something new.

On the other hand, I wish Ipacs was a bit less passive in some ways. If I was them I would have had somebody assigned to pretty much handhold new developers through the initial learning process.

Still, I think some devs will relish the challenge.

 

[Torg Smith 31]

3 hours ago, n4gix said:

Ray, it's already been confirmed by DTG that developers are free to sell their product via their own website or other distribution channels, as long as they also make it available via the Steam portal.

It's the 30% for Steam and the 30+% for DTG which only leaves a paltry ~40% to the developer that is a major sticking point. Well that, and that they only pay quarterly...

Now if you get to set the price on Steam; you can set it to $40 on your site and $100 on Steam. The payout is the same.

[Paraffin 2,197]

14 minutes ago, Torg Smith said:

Now if you get to set the price on Steam; you can set it to $40 on your site and $100 on Steam. The payout is the same.

I don't think that will work. Not that it won't be allowed, but anyone who buys DTG FSW on Steam will naturally look to that platform to buy associated DLC. It's just too easy to click on it right there, using the same account. They may not even know it's available for less money elsewhere. And on Steam, they get a 2 hour free trial period with a refund if they don't like it. How many add-on developers offer that?

[Torg Smith 31]

10 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I don't think that will work. Not that it won't be allowed, but anyone who buys DTG FSW on Steam will naturally look to that platform to buy associated DLC. It's just too easy to click on it right there, using the same account. They may not even know it's available for less money elsewhere. And on Steam, they get a 2 hour free trial period with a refund if they don't like it. How many add-on developers offer that?

The purchaser would be paying the markup for the other cuts of the price. If they do a refund, it may be to purchase at the developer's site.

 

Another factor that would need to be considered on setting a price on Steam. If the developer thinks they will get more that 150% more sales on steam than they woud get on their site, they have an insentive to price the same at both places. They can scale the price to what they expect Steam sales to do for them.

[Paraffin 2,197]

5 minutes ago, Torg Smith said:

The purchaser would be paying the markup for the other cuts of the price. If they do a refund, it may be to purchase at the developers site.

Good point. Although that seems like a convoluted way to buy something. 

This must have occurred to the bigwigs at DTG, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are agreements about a fixed price for outside and Steam sales in the contract.

[Torg Smith 31]

Just now, Paraffin said:

Good point. Although that seems like a convoluted way to buy something. 

This must have occurred to the bigwigs at DTG, so it wouldn't surprise me if there aren't agreements about a fixed price for outside and Steam sales in the contract.

I suspect the DTG thinks the developers will get a large number of sales on Steam with the convienance factor you noted above. How the developer prices will affect those sales. The true number is over all revenue. 100 units at $100 is $10,000 and 1000 units at $40 is $40,000.

[Bobsk8 12,735]

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

36 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

 

There is one bit in that video that I strongly disagree with.

Froogle says about the move to 64-bits that "... It's not that big a deal really, when talking about a new platform." 

And then he says he asked the DTG devs about this, and they said "64-bit doesn't make the sim look or automatically perform or act any better."

Well, maybe not with FSX code massaged into 64-bits if you don't push it into actually using that address space! But it's categorically untrue for sims that do use the RAM space.

And yes, I have to mention X-Plane here. The minimum system requirement is 8 GB RAM, and the recommended system is 16-24 GB of RAM or more. Laminar made extended scenery tile loading a default feature in XP11, which pre-loads distant terrain in RAM. It's why you don't see pop-in or blurries. There is also a free set of ultra-high resolution terrain mesh available, which will strain your system if you don't have at least 16 MB RAM, and 32 MB is better to avoid taxiing your system if you're also running background programs. There is a reason why "modern" sims like Aerofly FS 2, X-Plane, and (presumably) the 64-bit version of P3D are moving to 64-bit, and it's not just to eliminate OOMs.

The idea that a move to 64-bits "isn't a big deal" is nonsense, unless you're not actually taking advantage of that huge memory space.

[Buziel-411 4]

30 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

There is one bit in that video that I strongly disagree with.

Froogle says about the move to 64-bits that "... It's not that big a deal really, when talking about a new platform." 

The idea that a move to 64-bits "isn't a big deal" is nonsense, unless you're not actually taking advantage of that huge memory space.

I wonder if Froogle meant that the move to 64-bit isn't notable because it should be a given for a new platform, not that 64-bit doesn't make a difference in the sim. 

[Christopher Low 5,354]

From the Frooglesim YouTube newsreel above (with respect to airliners in Dovetail Games FlightSim World)......

"They haven't made a firm decision yet"

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