General? The normal rules of selling software

[GordonM 2]

Hi guys.

I have become increasingly concerned about the tendency of companies selling software in the simming world, to release sub-standard products.

In any other area of life this would be completely unacceptable, and the companies concerned would cease to exist in short order.

Expecting people to actually pay good money for bad products doesn't seem like a sustainable business plan. Or is it the case that the vast majority of the simming market are gullible, and see no problem whatsoever?

I welcome comments.

[nealmac 260]

It all depends on people's perceptions. Unfortunately, many people buy good products only to load them up on bad systems and then they throw their toys out of the pram when they don't work as expected.

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

Welcome to Avsim, Gordon!  

I cannot really see this as a trend, I think we all have had our very own expections when it comes to software features:

Some buy the visuals of a plane more than they buy the systems. So some developers may "get away" with light systems and even recurring bugs.

Others buy systems more than textures and models. That's why some devs provide less variants, but more system depth.

The question is: Does the advertising/the product description correspond to what the product actually has to offer? And has the software been debugged to the extent that it's largely usable on a PC that meets the system requirements?

So, if someone promises you a CRJ 900 and it's not part of the package you bought from him, you have been screwed.

But if they never promised you a weather radar, and the wx radar is there, but it just needs some tweaking ... that should be acceptable, IMO. Unless, of course, it's part of a bazillion of bugs that affect the release.

 

And your two recent posts in the Aerosoft forum have just been deleted ...

 

[Captain Kevin 586]

I think part of that perception really comes down to people either not reading reviews and/or being so desperate to get a particular plane that they aren't paying any attention to anything else. Take the Abacus 787, for instance. Some people bought it because they were so desperate for a 787, yet just looking at the box that it came in, it was pretty clear, to me, anyway, that it looked nothing like a 787. The other thing is what have people come to expect versus what the developer actually said. One thing to be clear, though. Every software is going to have bugs. It's just impossible to release something completely bug-free. That said, there appear to be some issues that appear only on some peoples' systems and not others, which makes it even more difficult to track. In fact, as strange as it sounds, there have been instances where bugs that appeared in software was appearing when using software from a DIFFERENT developer. Those become even more difficult to trace as you then have to find common ground somehow. I remember seeing on the PMDG forums an issue that appeared with the Boeing 747-400 only happened when a scenery by a different developer was being used. Fortunately, that developer was willing to work with them to come to a solution to said issue, but stuff like that can be difficult to resolve when you have developers getting defensive and not willing to do anything to solve an issue that they believe wasn't caused by them.

[Poppet 703]

1 hour ago, GordonM said:

In any other area of life this would be completely unacceptable, and the companies concerned would cease to exist in short order

Hello Gordon, Welcome to Avsim 

Ah not really,  A couple of years back I ordered and paid for an Americano Coffee from a Coffee shop on the west of Ireland,  What i received was a filtered coffee as apposed to the Americano I ordered,  I brought the Coffee back and complained that it was not what I ordered and the nice man shrugged his shoulders and said "coffee is coffee"

I stuck my head over the shop counter and realized he did not have an Americano machine for making these types of Coffees.  

At the start of the summer I was back in the same area,  I walked passed the same shop and he is still open for business and looks pretty busy.

I hate getting bad Coffee,  I now always check before I order an Americano coffee 

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