Grand Canyon... Oh Dear

[Wobbie 938]

But you got exactly what was written on the tin, a 64bit game, new generation, early access /beta, and a call to the community to help them. 

No more and no less. Their marketing business plan is theirs alone, so, you have choices.. Get in at the beginning and support DTG, or not! 

 

[Chock 17,769]

I think one has to be aware that what Steam and or DTG take in a percentage of sales from a third party developer's product is something which cuts both ways. All three parties are businesses and they all want to make money, so in the first instance they would start talking to one another, and thrashng out a deal on who takes what, and it's up to them to work something out, after all, if the vendors want to take so much that third parties just end up saying 'go f*** yourselves', then how does that help the vendors? Well, it doesn't, so all parties need to be happy and that is where negotiation kicks in.

One also has to be aware that it is not simply a case of either Steam or DTG sitting on their arses and taking a cut for having done bugger all. DTG have provided a new sales outlet for developers and Steam have provided a potential 125 million customers who are registered with the outlet (average amount of that number online at any one time, approximately 12 million users worldwide). Steam regularly advertise such things with pop up adverts and such, and provide an easy way for users to find additional DLC content for a particular game. This is all part of the cost of their cut and is advertising and promotion, all of which occurs without any effort on the part of the third party content producer.

Now just think about that for a second: Let's say you made a map utility for FSX and sold it through your own website for 10 quid, and as a developer, you did your developing part time as an additional hobby because you enjoy doing that kind of thing, but with the additional bonus that it provides a small supplement your regular job income as a pleasing bonus. We all know there are very many developers who do this kind of thing. Two problems will be; first, you are unlikely to be able to afford vast amounts of money to spend on advertising your product, so you would rely on reviews and announcements on flight sim forums to make your product known, and second, at some point all the people who learn of your product through that method who either express an interest in it, or even buy it, will eventually have bought it, and so there is no new customer base and you might then find that you will pick up the occasional sale once in a while, but not much more. In that situation, sure, you will get all of that occasional sale's ten quid (minus any tax dues and the cost of running your website and download server for the product). Alternatively, you could strike a deal and have your product exposed to 125 million potential new customers and pick up a lot of new sales, at a lower cut. Yes it's a lower cut of the sale price, but these are sales you would not otherwise have had, and in addition to these sales, 125 million people have now heard of you and your product. Clearly there are plenty of developers to whom this situation made sense as evidenced by the irrefutible fact that they are, right now, selling stuff on Steam, through DTG, for FSX-SE, so they clearly were able to come to some kind of arrangement which they saw as beneficial, since nobody is preventing them from selling their stuff for FSX-SE on their own. Nor would that be the case with FSW, as DTG have repeatedly stated. so why, if that is the case, does anyone imagine they woud think differently for FSW sales via that platform? Yup, that's right, they wouldn't, and here is why...

I don't care how big any developer is in the flight sim world, there is no way on this earth any of them have had a 125 million user throughput to their own website. Not a chance. These are not world famous brands with a massive advertising budget, such as Nike or Ford. Really, go out in the street or the pub and ask someone if they've ever heard of PMDG or Milviz or Flight Sim Labs.

So if developers want a piece of that Steam action which can give them a massively more well known presence, they absolutely can have it, just not for free, and that is what they are paying for when DTG and Steam take a cut. And why shouldn't they take a cut for having facilitated such a situation? So to suggest that they have done 'nothing' in terms of creating the product might be true, but to ignore the fact that they have done everything to ensure that the creator of it can profit from having created it is to not credit them with something for which they do indeed deserve payment.

To address another point brought up on this thread: Saying that FSUIPC won't be in FSW may be true, but there is no law or technical bar to prevent DTG or another TPD from developing something similar to it. I'm not wishing to diminish FSUIPC's usefulness, but it is after all, only a bit of programming and there is a similar plug in for XPlane (XPUIPC) which quite ably proves this point, so there is nothing stopping there from being a FSWUIPC, and should that need arise, I'm sure it will be one that is addressed by someone who wants to make money from having done so, and good luck to them too.

[Elvensmith 165]

My experience of being part of commercial groups making train sim add-ons (admittedly a few years ago) is that by the time the publisher and other interested parties got their cut, the pot left to share among the creators was severely diminished. Add to that the requirement to pay income tax on whatever the royalties were and you were left with what amounted to beer money for many hours worth of work. Now the scale might be slightly different on the flight sim side, but you need to guarantee some fairly hefty sales to make it worth the effort. (Which is why I now confine my route building efforts to freeware project).

Not sure how a discussion of the GC scenery in FSW digressed into the commercial realities of producing add-on content, but thought I would share my experience.

[Wobbie 938]

Back to topic?

[Chock 17,769]

14 hours ago, Elvensmith said:

Not sure how a discussion of the GC scenery in FSW digressed into the commercial realities of producing add-on content, but thought I would share my experience.

Well, it becomes part of the wider implications of the sim's viability as a saleable product to discuss the default sim's scenery. To me it is obvious that what DTG are after providing, is a fairly pretty blank canvas which can be further enhanced with DLC, as evidenced by the relative simplicity of the included default aircraft too.

Plenty people seem to be under the impression that DTG are some kind of evil empire out to screw developers, and presumably that would include developers of any Grand Canyon scenery add on too lol, but there is undeniably (or will be), money to be made from add-ons for FSW because of the large customer base they are going for. As noted by me on another thread which got into this, DTG's 2015 version of Train Sim has sold just shy of a million copies on Steam, now it is true that the cut from brokers and vendors and such will diminish how much the creator of add on software gets from a sale, but even if one gets a mere 10 percent of the RRP of a product selling for 10 quid, if you can sell that to nearly a million people, that's quite a few quid, and quite an incentive to get creating. Hell, I might even get back into it myself lol; granted it's years since I made any freeware for the Avsim library, but for that kind of money I might be tempted to dust off my skills.

[DreadMetis 5]

About the opening post :
1st add FreemeshX or any mesh in FSW, you'll get a better "default" scenery
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/780659091823095969/78F8679AF6684758D6F71C28638AE6A1F4A3C52B/

Then you can find some photoreal textures, even old ones like I used
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/780659091823477518/150591F5C9B25447F0241BD236FACB451F65FCE5/

[Elvensmith 165]

I was wondering whether my old FS Global would work on this.