1 hour ago, Treetops45 said:

I am not absolutely sure, but I thought I read somewhere, (possibly in the PMDG comments), that if you sell elsewhere, it can't be lower than the Steam price?

TT

They did not make reference to price requirements, only that it needed to be sold on Steam as well as the third party site.

 

 

So much speculation.  About what the market does and doesn't want, will or won't do.  About what DTG must do, or must not do, in order to succeed.  I suspect none of these crystal balls are worth the glass they're made of.  

16 minutes ago, barrel_owl said:

Indeed, they are not alive and kicking. 

Lots of great stuff in this post.  Didnt quote the entire thing since it all the good stuff was the entire post!  

Yes, if MS was still making FS##, they would of jumped onto the DLC bandwagon.  How do I know this?  I was on the team!  The software industry in general is going to a more peace meal approach for development.  Its a single maintained product paid by DLC/Add-on's and not a 1 and done package.  Think im wrong?  Look at your phone!  Your iPhone or Android is subsidized by apps.  Apple and Google make more money on apps then the phone itself.  Then you have games like World of Warcraft that is kept alive by subscriptions and DLC.  Even Windows itself is going this path with Windows 10 being the last OS Microsoft has planned, subsidized by its own storefront.  Its the way of the industry, and the old way is gone.  I mean look at Star Citizen!  It hasent even been finished, and its already fully supported by $2000 space ships.  

I think this is viable for a flight sim, if done properly.  The problem is that you need content to sell a sim.  Dovetail are not in a position to provide that content themselves.  They need to rely on 3rd party dev's.  Thats a good thing!  Means more opportunity for someone like me.  The problem as I said before is the requirements for a license to sell through Steam.  If you want to sell your apps on Apple or Google's phones, you dont need a license.  They dont care frankly.  If someone whines, they pull your app and say "whoops" and carry on.  I dont think Dovetail has that luxury when Boeing or someone does not like a 747 they didnt license on FSW's market.  Thats were a 3rd party market could come in.  Then Dovetail can compete for dev's to sell on its own system.  I think, given the benefits listed, 3rd party dev's would choose Steam if given the option once FSW gets enough users.  

Chicken or the egg?  Content or Customers?

9 minutes ago, Griphos said:

So much speculation.  About what the market does and doesn't want, will or won't do.  About what DTG must do, or must not do, in order to succeed.  I suspect none of these crystal balls are worth the glass they're made of.  

You do know that investors invest billions daily on nothing more than speculation, right?  Its all we have right now.  

Oh to have a nice detailed Fairchaild FH-227B, doesn't matter the sim FSX, P3D, FSW, X- Plane, no developer has offered this aircraft.....

Thank you for your insights and information Gibbage. I really learned a lot and many other things were put into perspective for me as well.

46 minutes ago, jymp said:

Oh to have a nice detailed Fairchaild FH-227B, doesn't matter the sim FSX, P3D, FSW, X- Plane, no developer has offered this aircraft.....

One of the more interesting aspects of sim dev work is when I see a questest like this go unanswered, and the guy requesting it goes "You know what?  Ill just make it myself!" and becomes a 3rd party dev himself.  You would be amazed at how many of us dev's started out that very way!  

Please dont misunderstand me as saying "go do it yourself" but just commenting that many of us started out just like you, with a passion to see what they love in a sim.  =)  

But ya.  I looked up that aircraft.  Not a lot were made, not very famous, and not a lot of resources.  Dont hold your breath.  Hehehehe.  But sometimes its these vague aircraft that can make a sleeper hit. 

 

Kevin

Just because a product is no longer being updated, certainly does not mean it is dead. They are very much being kept alive by the developers, both free & paid!

So what if the engine is 10 years old. It still works, & developers are still finding new techniques to keep us excited!

It is common knowledge that Microsoft exited the simming market because it was not profitable for them to 'service' a niche market, &, like any other business, they are answerable to their share-holders, NOT to us fickle simmers/gamers. (As what happened to Flight! & the closure of Aces Gaming Studio)

A platform cannot be dead when there are many thousands of add-ons out there, & hundreds still coming onto the market.

You also cannot guarantee anything that Microsoft could have done. Their sims were always open to developers.

Remember, DTG IS a gaming developer, Trains & Fishing, so, let them do what they do best. Once again, as what happened when each & every previous sim was released, the demands started.. I will only buy from them if......, I will not buy from them because .......... and so on. It is pretty obvious. by now, that DTG is targeting the new simmers/gamers, of which there are far more than us 'jaded' 'players', & their FSW is obviously a lead-in from their Flight School.

Yes, LM has their own business plan, As DTG has. Two totally different streams, as it were.. So, more choices for both users & developers.. 

Maybe the best marketing method is to release a working, NOT beta or early access, sim/game, reasonably cheap, to get the great masses to buy in, then charge for add-ons. That is where the future development money will come from. DTG's business plan is actually well thought out, & it is wrong for us to compare what they want to do, with what we are used to.

The times, they are a çhangin'
 

Kevin,

to start, - Thank You ! - for sharing with us your knowledgeable insight into DTG's FSW. I remember well your contributions to MS FLIGHT at the MS FLIGHT forums here at AVSIM, as much as I remember using MS FLIGHT which was actually the sim which brought me back, for the good and for the bad, into flight simulation after I had left around 2007.

Well, 10 yrs after returning, and after what was probably my biggest disappointment - MS's decision to close MS FLIGHT development and support - I see in DTG's FSW a new light at the end of the tunnel, in all of the aspects you mention.

While I was initially concerned with the statements by some well established developer, my position has shifted and while I understand that developers who are going to embrace this project have to move cautiously, I also want to believe that their efforts will, sooner more than latter, be returned.

"TheFlightSimGuy" has put better than I could even imagine to write what I think about this project in the very first place: 

Then, everytime I look at the footage / screenshots already available all I see is a very nice looking flight simulator, with 7 nice default aircraft I actually ( apart from the Cub ) never owned for FSX / P3D, so, they're all a win for me. 

The fact that DTG shares, for a start, FSX's flight dynamics core might be the only "negative" aspect for me, but truth is, the sim I still log more time in when I have it installed is FSX, and success with this platform could pay for a good team of flight dynamics experts to try to add the necessary hooks for rotary wing and other types of aircraft - only time will tell...

OTOH, I am a supporter of the closed circuit model. I would rather prefer to buy my add-ons from a restricted distribution point than have to pay and have accounts at multiple stores. I also never appreciated having to pay twice for add-ons in order to be able to run them in FSX and P3D, and paying $190 for P3D is out of question for me, specially now when I can have pretty much the same for around €30 !

I strongly hope DTG's FSW can finally bring me back to civil flight simulation, and away from DCS or IL2 where I honestly never feel confortable playing war games just to be able to taste nice flight dynamics :-)

Ah! And for those who might forget that - at least DTG's FSW brings for free an updated airfield World database, where, in Flight School, even my small LPMN was already portrayed !

12 hours ago, Gibbage said:

 

Being "locked in" into FSW.  I can’t comment about my deals with Dovetail or anyone else, but Dovetail has stated on this forum that there will be no external 3rd party stores.  So no "competition" and a monopoly.  To some, that may be a good thing, but competition is the core to a free economy.  It drives down prices for the consumer, and increases the quality.  If there was external stores I could sell my products for FSW, I could maybe demand a better contract as a 3rd party developer.  

 

Kevin "Gibbage" Miller

 

Hi Gibbage, i am missing something here. How are you being "locked in" when DTG itself stated on this same forum that you are allowed to sell your content anywhere you want, AS LONG AS it's also sold on their official channel (which i assume will be via Steam, as experience says from FSX-SE and Flight School)?

If anything, the old simmers, which you should be known by, are likely to buy directly from you while your product is also gaining access to a little thing which, most likely, kept pc gaming alive to this day and holds over 10 millions active users DAILY. It's a new market you woudn't otherwise penetrate in.

 

@Wobbie

Remember, DTG IS a gaming developer, Trains & Fishing, so, let them do what they do best. Once again, as what happened when each & every previous sim was released, the demands started.. I will only buy from them if......, I will not buy from them because .......... and so on. It is pretty obvious. by now, that DTG is targeting the new simmers/gamers, of which there are far more than us 'jaded' 'players', & their FSW is obviously a lead-in from their Flight School.
 

 

Who do you think FSX was for? Real life pilots? Do we even remember what the FSX default planes are like and how "realistic" they are? :P

DTG made a very successful Train Simulator. Microsoft did a very successful Flight Simulator. Does one offers, in its vanilla state, a much more realistic look at it than the other? I do not think so.
The difference was made by third party addons.

Of course FSX was for the entertainment market, it DID say that on the box, unlike P3D.

Yes, thanks to freeware & payware developers, our vanilla sim was taken to great hights, that, I'm sure, the original defunct developers, Aces Gaming Studios, did not foresee. As said before, a business decision by MS to close down a non profit part of their business. 

3 hours ago, Wobbie said:

Just because a product is no longer being updated, certainly does not mean it is dead. They are very much being kept alive by the developers, both free & paid!

So what if the engine is 10 years old. It still works, & developers are still finding new techniques to keep us excited!

[...]

A platform cannot be dead when there are many thousands of add-ons out there, & hundreds still coming onto the market.

You also cannot guarantee anything that Microsoft could have done. Their sims were always open to developers.

It is not alive. It is still being used by hundreds of users like you and me, which is very different. When a platform is no more updated by the developer since years, it is virtually dead. I can use Commodore 64 today, this does not mean the platform is alive. I can use a 1955 Ford today, this does not mean she's still in production and I can buy replacement parts at the manufacturer's site.

Again, Microsoft was "open to developers" because that was the business model they had chosen back then, but at some point it was discontinued exactly because it was not profitable anymore. This is the one and only reason why we had an "open structure" for many years. Of course, we can use FSX for more 10 or 20 years, as long as developers will keep on investing on it and releasing addons for us users.  This will hardly change the fact, however, that no new developer entering this market today will use that business model. And yes, Microsoft would do the same today it they still were in this market. It is not speculation, it was confirmed by Gibbage here above, who worked for ACES. While I don't know exactly which business model they would use, it is safe to say they would either use the DLC concept (which they actually did with Flight, but ultimately failed) or put the burden on the users entirely, as LM does with P3D, or a mix of both. Definitely they would not keep on investing and providing support for FSX for years without a profit.

As I said above, someone has to pay for this business. I find very naive when people call the Steam concept "greedy" or "money grabbing", as I often read in other threads. These people appear to forget that they pay $200 for each new P3D version for a reason.

4 hours ago, jcomm said:

Kevin,

to start, - Thank You ! - for sharing with us your knowledgeable insight into DTG's FSW. I remember well your contributions to MS FLIGHT at the MS FLIGHT forums here at AVSIM, as much as I remember using MS FLIGHT which was actually the sim which brought me back, for the good and for the bad, into flight simulation after I had left around 2007.

Well, 10 yrs after returning, and after what was probably my biggest disappointment - MS's decision to close MS FLIGHT development and support - I see in DTG's FSW a new light at the end of the tunnel, in all of the aspects you mention.

While I was initially concerned with the statements by some well established developer, my position has shifted and while I understand that developers who are going to embrace this project have to move cautiously, I also want to believe that their efforts will, sooner more than latter, be returned.

"TheFlightSimGuy" has put better than I could even imagine to write what I think about this project in the very first place: 

Then, everytime I look at the footage / screenshots already available all I see is a very nice looking flight simulator, with 7 nice default aircraft I actually ( apart from the Cub ) never owned for FSX / P3D, so, they're all a win for me. 

The fact that DTG shares, for a start, FSX's flight dynamics core might be the only "negative" aspect for me, but truth is, the sim I still log more time in when I have it installed is FSX, and success with this platform could pay for a good team of flight dynamics experts to try to add the necessary hooks for rotary wing and other types of aircraft - only time will tell...

OTOH, I am a supporter of the closed circuit model. I would rather prefer to buy my add-ons from a restricted distribution point than have to pay and have accounts at multiple stores. I also never appreciated having to pay twice for add-ons in order to be able to run them in FSX and P3D, and paying $190 for P3D is out of question for me, specially now when I can have pretty much the same for around €30 !

I strongly hope DTG's FSW can finally bring me back to civil flight simulation, and away from DCS or IL2 where I honestly never feel confortable playing war games just to be able to taste nice flight dynamics :-)

Ah! And for those who might forget that - at least DTG's FSW brings for free an updated airfield World database, where, in Flight School, even my small LPMN was already portrayed !

I  full agree with you, reinforcing the free update database of airports, I hope DTG does, or opportunities for community to do.
LR has a good way with WED, maybe DTG does something similar.
We also have freeware airport editors, ADE, that we can perfect, or create a nonexistent airport.

 

João Alfredo

 

 

12 hours ago, Gibbage said:

 So no "competition" and a monopoly.  To some, that may be a good thing, but competition is the core to a free economy.

 

Gibbage;

some like monopoly some other dont.

personally i will not support Dtg into their monopolistic ideas.

13 hours ago, Gibbage said:

Dovetail has stated on this forum that there will be no external 3rd party stores.  

This is not the case, as we repeatedly have stated 

Our baseline is that you can sell on your own store, which means all the simmers who have been buying from you the past ten years can continue to do so. We ask that you also make your add-ons available on our channels, but we are not limiting the places you can sell. If you have any questions or wish to discuss things further, please contact our Third Party team. 

Thanks,

Aimee