We to 10th post yet hahaha. 

thank you DTG, much appreciated

Thats an impressive gesture from DTG. Well done

Really? What's the catch? LOL.

10 hours ago, CaribbeanCLANK said:

Really? What's the catch? LOL.

They'll make most of their revenue from DLC sales. The more people who own FSW, the more potential customers.

16 hours ago, CaribbeanCLANK said:

Really? What's the catch? LOL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model

Not a catch, a well established business model. If only I could come up with one...

11 hours ago, fsxkitty said:

They'll make most of their revenue from DLC sales. The more people who own FSW, the more potential customers.

True...but it all depends on the dlc/addons for sale. If devs like flightbeam, flyTampa, fsdreamteam, PMDG and many other we have come to love do not support the sim I do not see FSW being successful. 

What most people seem to forget is that all the various devs we have "come to know and love" came about in the first place as a result of a fairly terrible base game.  Why would anyone spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, if the base game is good to start with.  

If DTG can make the basic game close to the quality of FSX or P3D with our beloved addons, then they will sell a truckload of them, I suspect.  And I'm willing to bet that how close they have to get to entice people to buy isn't all that very close at all.  Many people may opt for a $50 pretty good sim, rather than a $50 fairly crappy sim + $1000 of addons.  

If FSX weren't 10 years old, and we all didn't add to it $50 at a time, then I suspect no one would buy it.  I wonder how many copies of P3D have sold to people that don't already have FSX and a lot of addons.  

 

 

On 2017-5-7 at 4:40 AM, CaribbeanCLANK said:

Really? What's the catch? LOL.

3rd party developers with high costs (i.e. full time staff creating high quality and complex add-ons) won't distribute thier products on Steam due to reduce revenue, so will be excluded from FSW.  Unless DTG has plans to devleop FlyTampa level scenery or PMDG sophistication we're going to have a very limited platform in FSW.

Again, people are basing their thinking on a model in which the base game is kaput and developers necessarily develop after the fact and must sell separately. As we can see, several big developers are working with DTG since the sim itself is in ongoing development. There are numerous business models possible now not possible in FSX. 

LM, for whatever reason, decided to stick with the de facto model of FSX, offering basically an updated version of FSX with some efforts to ensure addon compatibility (not without a fair bit of hoop jumping for 3rd parties). 

Developers can, it seems, sell or license their tech directly to DTG for inclusion in the sim itself. At least some devs are clearly finding this an appealing option. 

All this hand wringing because the model of interaction between developers is changing!  We can't have new and everything remain the same. That's wanting two opposite things at the same time. 

15 hours ago, Griphos said:

Many people may opt for a $50 pretty good sim, rather than a $50 fairly crappy sim + $1000 of addons.

But that "$50 fairly crappy sim + $1000 of addons" is probably a lot better than the new "$50 pretty good sim" which, although it may have potential, you'd then have to start adding to to get it up to the same standard as the old sim. I found exactly this with X-Plane 11 recently. I downloaded the demo to compare it with FSX:SE with a lot of payware add-ons. The bottom line for me was that X-Plane had some good features (apart from ATC, seasons, AI and weather), but was not as good, overall, as FSX with quality add-ons (which I already had) so not worth buying. What I was looking for with X-Plane 11, and now with FSW, was that it would be at least as good as my customised FSX or what would be the point in changing?

I agree about X-plane completely.  The point of buying FSW would be getting a good chunk of the way to FSX with quality addons in the base game + NONE of the problems of using a 10 year old game with addons made for it after it died and that push it beyond its capabilities a lot of the time.  

Plus, I'm not paying for FSW, since I bought FS on sale (for like $15) and so will get the new sim free.  

But I was talking about new people.  A new flight sim's success depends on attracting new people, not merely enticing those of us already in the genre.  New people, people who don't have FSX and tons of addons, are much more likely to go with FSW.  MUCH more likely, than to try to find a copy of FSX and start buying addons, or even to buy an Academic license of P3D and start buying addons.  

And I suspect plenty of people who have FSX and tons of addons will be willing to try the new sim, if it comes even part of the way toward the quality of our current games/addons. 

Shoot, I'm just looking for a 64-bit sim that doesn't have any of the headaches of our current offerings.  I don't necessarily need some kind of exact duplicate of what I have now.  I don't even use half of all the addons I've bought over the years.  

 

On 09/05/2017 at 6:15 PM, Griphos said:

New people, people who don't have FSX and tons of addons, are much more likely to go with FSW.  MUCH more likely, than to try to find a copy of FSX and start buying addons

Unless Steam/DTG pull the plug on FSX:SE, which is unlikely given the number of users, it will be just as easy to find as FSW. Plus, there are already many add-ons available for FSX from the same source. New users tend to read the customer reviews on Steam so anyone unfamilar with the flight sim world will probably be relying on those to decide whether or not to buy it. I think that FSW will have to impress enough people, out of the box (even in early access), or it won't achieve the sales that DTG and the potential developers are looking for.

On 5/9/2017 at 1:42 PM, vortex681 said:

But that "$50 fairly crappy sim + $1000 of addons" is probably a lot better than the new "$50 pretty good sim" which, although it may have potential, you'd then have to start adding to to get it up to the same standard as the old sim. I found exactly this with X-Plane 11 recently. I downloaded the demo to compare it with FSX:SE with a lot of payware add-ons. The bottom line for me was that X-Plane had some good features (apart from ATC, seasons, AI and weather), but was not as good, overall, as FSX with quality add-ons (which I already had) so not worth buying. What I was looking for with X-Plane 11, and now with FSW, was that it would be at least as good as my customised FSX or what would be the point in changing?

The comparrison with X-plane has nothing to with his observation. x-Plane is no different than fsx and p3d.. just "ok" out of the box and you have to add to it to get decent stuff.. it's not like what he speculates they might be trying to do with this one. 

9 hours ago, vortex681 said:

Unless Steam/DTG pull the plug on FSX:SE, which is unlikely given the number of users, it will be just as easy to find as FSW. Plus, there are already many add-ons available for FSX from the same source. New users tend to read the customer reviews on Steam so anyone unfamilar with the flight sim world will probably be relying on those to decide whether or not to buy it. I think that FSW will have to impress enough people, out of the box (even in early access), or it won't achieve the sales that DTG and the potential developers are looking for.

Of course it will have to impress people to get sales.  That's the general rule of all sales.  

I'm still betting that people will be attracted to a new sim that's got more features in the base game for a decently low price, than an older sim that you have to spend a lot more money on DLC for to bring it up to the same quality as the newer sim, whatever that quality will wind up being.  Particularly if both are on the same sales platform.