I know and understand the general purpose of not taking prepayments. But my suggestion is that you take prepayments a few days before release, maybe up to one week before. By doing so, less people will have problems during the release day, and would save you the effort of a lot of checking for errors.

Example: You will release a product on a thursday. Announce the release and start take prepayments on monday that week. By doing so, you will save a lot of frustration from eager customers during release day, and save hours on support also. Just a suggestion.

11 minutes ago, hasse29 said:

I know and understand the general purpose of not taking prepayments. But my suggestion is that you take prepayments a few days before release, maybe up to one week before. By doing so, less people will have problems during the release day, and would save you the effort of a lot of checking for errors.

Example: You will release a product on a thursday. Announce the release and start take prepayments on monday that week. By doing so, you will save a lot of frustration from eager customers during release day, and save hours on support also. Just a suggestion.

Mikael,

 

As Robert had said in the past this is not going to happen and do not see any reason for this to change. We will accept a payment only when the product  is fully ready not before.

 

 

On 7/29/2018 at 1:35 PM, hasse29 said:

I know and understand the general purpose of not taking prepayments. But my suggestion is that you take prepayments a few days before release, maybe up to one week before. By doing so, less people will have problems during the release day, and would save you the effort of a lot of checking for errors.

Example: You will release a product on a thursday. Announce the release and start take prepayments on monday that week. By doing so, you will save a lot of frustration from eager customers during release day, and save hours on support also. Just a suggestion.

Honestly I have most of the time purchased the aircrafts on the release date and never faced any issue. 

But let's say they would do this (which they wont), if people behave the sameway on the day of the prepayment, then the same issue and frustration will be there and the same number of support requests. The difference is that they would have to spend the same time answering the requests, while finsihing the product for it to be released on time, which might be worse.

So in the end it would really not change things in my opinion 😉

To be honest, most of the oddities we see are on the other end, payment-wise. What we run into mainly is just compacted demand of everyone downloading (which really only affects download speeds), which would be an issue with prepayment or the current system. The former, however, is fraught with all kinds of odd issues. It has also turned into a (negative) hot topic in the gaming industry because of some of the larger devs abusing the concept (No Man's Sky, anyone? ...though in their defense, the latest updates have made it a lot more 'worth' that purchase). That's not to mention that, as soon as you start taking payments without delivering something, you get into a weird grey area of having to walk the line of meeting customer expectations of when you should release, and we have had a very long standing policy of releasing things when they are ready, and not simply to meet some random deadline - our own, or otherwise.

Don't see the need/benefit, honestly.

Edited July 30, 20187 yr by scandinavian13

Haha, every dev cycle has it share of ‘suggestions’ and schemes from users trying to get their hands on the product sooner. Just wait guys, it’s not gonna kill ya. We’re in mid summer, why you all here? Go outside lol

4 minutes ago, captainsazzman said:

Haha, every dev cycle has it share of ‘suggestions’ and schemes from users trying to get their hands on the product sooner. Just wait guys, it’s not gonna kill ya. We’re in mid summer, why you all here? Go outside lol

Even if you don't go outside (which I enjoy, though not as much in peak summer in DC), fire up DCS and blow stuff up or something 😂

(That's usually what I do. It's not even fair. Load up an 18 with a bunch of 7Ms and 9s, set up a bunch of bombers with no escort, and just fly up and pick them off...)

1 hour ago, scandinavian13 said:

fire up DCS and blow stuff up or something 😂

 

Dude 😂

10 hours ago, captainsazzman said:

We’re in mid summer, why you all here? Go outside lol

Bit too cold and wet here in Aus, it's mid Winter !! 🌧️🌩️

I always wait to purchase because of this issue. The reason for suggestion is that the product is finished that time. Then you start prepayment. Servers will have a lot easier to manage x thousands of people doing a payment at the ame time, than it will having x thousands of customers doing payments and downloading at the same time.  Everyone knows by now that you can get some strange messages during payment if servers timeout, people do not know if payment was successful or not. I think by doing this procedure they would eliminate a lot of issues. But, as the title says, it was just a suggestion.

Mikael,

During the NGX release, our servers were subject to a Denial of Service attack that originated predominantly in China and Romania.  That isn't something that is going to be affected or changed by accepting prepayments.

During the 777 release, our servers were subject to exceptionally high demand during the first few hours of release, and this caused some headaches.  As a result, we took that utilization data and invested heavily in systems to bolster our delivery capability while under loads of that level.

We had no such issues with the 744 release- even though demand was about 25% higher during the 744 release than it was during the 777 release.

So- thank you for the suggestion- but we run an old-fashioned business model at PMDG.  We will take your money when we have something to hand to you in return.  We think that provides the best overall value equation- and we will do our best to ensure a trouble free rollout because that, too, is our job. 

 

Someone’s just angling for a release date 😉

Michael Chandler 

2 hours ago, JA806A said:

Someone’s just angling for a release date 😉

Michael Chandler 

I smelled this as well

fly safe

2 hours ago, JA806A said:

Someone’s just angling for a release date 😉

Michael Chandler 

 

17 minutes ago, mokeiko said:

I smelled this as well

fly safe

Well, in Scandinavian manner I will introduce a new subject to you, called logic. As Mr Randazzo mentioned in his post there has been problems before, and since I am an old customer, I have had experience with those problems. So my suggestions had a historical background. There was a logical reason for my suggestion. Furthermore, nowhere in my post did I even hint about asking for a release date. I know PMDG manner in that question since I have been a customer here since old 747 was released. In other words, there was no logical reason for your statements. Think about that.

35 minutes ago, hasse29 said:

 

Well, in Scandinavian manner I will introduce a new subject to you, called logic. As Mr Randazzo mentioned in his post there has been problems before, and since I am an old customer, I have had experience with those problems. So my suggestions had a historical background. There was a logical reason for my suggestion. Furthermore, nowhere in my post did I even hint about asking for a release date. I know PMDG manner in that question since I have been a customer here since old 747 was released. In other words, there was no logical reason for your statements. Think about that.

 

👏

 

Michael Chandler

34 minutes ago, hasse29 said:

 

Well, in Scandinavian manner I will introduce a new subject to you, called logic. As Mr Randazzo mentioned in his post there has been problems before, and since I am an old customer, I have had experience with those problems. So my suggestions had a historical background. There was a logical reason for my suggestion. Furthermore, nowhere in my post did I even hint about asking for a release date. I know PMDG manner in that question since I have been a customer here since old 747 was released. In other words, there was no logical reason for your statements. Think about that.

It's just forum oneupmanship, best to ignore it.

Prepayments might sound like a good idea, but ask a certain other developer if it was such a great idea to take prepayments for their King Air product... 😊