No, and I don't think you have understood my post at all. Justflight wanted to distribute the update for free, so you would suspect the charge is being put upon JustFlight by Milviz, as cash is flowing back to them. If the cash was only going to JustFlight, why would they be writing an email about wanting to make it free like they do their own products? You suspect they want to charge MilViz for issuing an update, but not the customer? I doubt it.

The heart of this topic is exactly what level of ongoing service and support do we buy into when we purchase an add-on. Clearly that's a movable feast, if you look at the vastly differing stances on converting software to P3DV4.

To the developers who've passed on the conversion at no extra cost, I say well done, you've created superb customer goodwill and can look forward to even greater loyalty going forward.

While I can understand that some smaller developers may find it difficult to provide these conversions for free, isn't it also true that, to survive as businesses, they simply have to make their products 64-bit compatible?

It's clear that FSX is now more or less history and most of us will be ditching P3DV3 as soon as the NGX and Orbx airport sceneries make their cost free jump to the new de facto platform, which I imagine will be any day now (although Orbx's current silence on timescale is a bit disconcerting).

Therefore might it be fair to suggest that developers who charge for this are directly passing on the cost of staying in business to their customers? That's certainly something they are entitled to do, but I really do wonder if some companies are treating this as an opportunity to generate a bit of profit out of the process? Again perfectly acceptable in a free market, just as it's perfectly acceptable if customers choose to boycott those companies in future.

And another thought. Surely the move to 64-bit and consequent end to OOM-related problems actually creates a lighter, less expensive, support workload for developers to deal with?

 

 

56 minutes ago, vgbaron said:

So I take it you think the resellers should work for free? In many businesses who sell both direct and through resellers this is always an issue. The developer has a choice, sell it through a reseller and take less profit due to reseller charges, increase the cost to cover the reseller charges and/or sell direct and not have any reseller charges.

What is happening here is in no way UNFAIR - it's pure business. Milviz needs to make $xx.xx/sale and if there are additional charges added by the reseller - they pass them on.

Vic

Didn't we *just* have this same discussion about Simmarket and Justsim..?

 

43 minutes ago, Martyn Pearson said:

No, and I don't think you have understood my post at all. Justflight wanted to distribute the update for free, so you would suspect the charge is being put upon JustFlight by Milviz, as cash is flowing back to them. If the cash was only going to JustFlight, why would they be writing an email about wanting to make it free like they do their own products? You suspect they want to charge MilViz for issuing an update, but not the customer? I doubt it.

Not really sure what the point of the post is then...

This policy applies to *all* resellers, not just JustFlight...

They stated customers who purchased through a reseller have the upgrade fee. 

Nobody said JustFlight is charging for themselves, the point of the email is very simple: they don't want to be pointed out as the bad guy, and are highlighting that it is Milviz the one that is charging the fee. 

I received hostile support from Milviz after purchasing the B55 a long time ago, they had no interest in bug fixing the airplane or getting the Reality-XP integration advertised to work right. They refused a refund and even refused a free upgrade to the Flight1 gps integration since realityxp had bugs they did not care about. And now they want to charge for a small amount of work updating the gauges to p3dv4. A2A, JustFlight, and other devs do a much better job and I'll support them instead.

Since this is just turning into the same old gripe session - let's move on to something new.

Vic