3 minutes ago, HighTowers said:

Actually with all the demands in this thread, suddenly the base sim will now cost $1262

Don't worry they will either ignore us, or it will be included in the Xbox Game Pass, ouch! This will get a response 🙂 I haven't seen people this excited and or angry, since McDonald's announced the McRib was coming back 🙂 For a limited time, no doubt. Did time just slow down for everyone. Seems like this was announced like a year ago. We are chomping at the bit for a NEW sim 🙂 Well a lot of us are.

BTW, can we get a DEMO of Microsoft Flight Simulator XX,  ( I like the XX, forgot who posted it, me like it a lot. Just don't ever release one in 2030, you know what I mean, 🙂 Not good! ) so we can see if it run's on our systems like FSX, and X-Plane, and DCS World, just to name a few?

31 minutes ago, HighTowers said:

Actually with all the demands in this thread, suddenly the base sim will now cost $1262

Still well south of what some have spent over time to get FSX, P3D or XP up to snuff

lol

I would pay 1200€ if everything is included. 

I paid already 5k for Star Citizen so thats peanuts 😄

Edited June 23, 20196 yr by DaWu

Some randoms situations could be fine also. Emergency landings, closed runways, meteors, UFO'S 👽 (Who can forget those FSX missions near groom lake)...

Also some visual aspects as northern lights...

7 hours ago, HighTowers said:

Actually with all the demands in this thread, suddenly the base sim will now cost $1262

with Xbox game pass $14.99 monthly payment as a requirement, they will get much much more than that.

On 6/21/2019 at 9:49 PM, Mihai Eu said:

4. Max addon price to 30 EUR. No 100 EUR addon should be allowed. PMDG either adapt or disappears. They milked this community for far too long.

LOL are you serious?!

Again, I see this urban myth, that PMDG (and other high-fidelity addons) are 'milking' (hence, cheating/robbing) the community! Where on earth are you getting this??? You are purely generalizing your own assumptious opinion.

You obviously have absolutely NO clue of what it takes, to produce and program an airplane with the fidelity and detail-level, that PMDG (and FSLabs) are creating.

In my own opinion (<-- see what I did there?), the price-tags for the addons that PMDG and FSLabs are producing, are more than fair for the quality and detail you get. 

57 minutes ago, Anders Bermann said:

LOL are you serious?!

Again, I see this urban myth, that PMDG (and other high-fidelity addons) are 'milking' (hence, cheating/robbing) the community! Where on earth are you getting this??? You are purely generalizing your own assumptious opinion.

You obviously have absolutely NO clue of what it takes, to produce and program an airplane with the fidelity and detail-level, that PMDG (and FSLabs) are creating.

In my own opinion (<-- see what I did there?), the price-tags for the addons that PMDG and FSLabs are producing, are more than fair for the quality and detail you get. 

Yes, but what on Earth are you measuring that against?

An addon for a game that costs approx four times as much as the game did originally. Seems a little like exploitation.

1 hour ago, penta_a said:

with Xbox game pass $14.99 monthly payment as a requirement, they will get much much more than that.

$14.99 is for the ultimate one that includes the libraries for both Xbox and PC - most people here won’t need that. And there is nothing that says it’s a requirement?

33 minutes ago, ganter said:

Yes, but what on Earth are you measuring that against?

An addon for a game that costs approx four times as much as the game did originally. Seems a little like exploitation.

Yep. None of us know (I doubt) how much money it takes to make something like the pmdg 777, or how much profit they make on each one sold either. So it’s difficult to say whether it’s good value or not.

My sense though, when compared to other genres in the gaming world, is that flight sim add-ons are very expensive for what you get. In iracing, which I presume is similarly niche, the fully systems modelled mclaren mp4 (one of the most complicated machines in existence) is $11.95.

Actually with the plane section I have less of a problem because there is a fair amount of competition in that segment which should mean there is some level of market force in play. There are some areas where there are de facto monopolies though, like scenery, where you don’t have much choice other than spending around £100 just to make one country look better (in x-plane you used to do about 80% of the same job for free, maybe you still can - although i I suppose you don’t get the hand counted 2 million trees with that. Imagine counting 2 million trees with your hands). This looks like the main area that will get disrupted by msfs.

 

 

44 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

None of us know (I doubt) how much money it takes to make something like the pmdg 777, or how much profit they make on each one sold either. So it’s difficult to say whether it’s good value or not.

The value is measured against your own expectations. The value is good when it is good for you.

In end-user software the prices are not really related to the cost that was required to make the products. They are not manufactured goods, but rather similar to books and movies. The first order of business is to stay in business - and to eat. Take PMDG for example. To my best knowledge they are an outfit of about a dozen FTE plus freelancers. To maintain that organization (wages, infrastructure, legal, etc.) they need about $2 million every year - even if they don't develop anything new. The prices of their products will be calculated so that they allow them to reach at least that goal and if possible surpass it. To get to that amount with their current price structure, they would have to sell about 20.000 units every year. To be honest, looking at the flightsim market, that sounds like a lot - so my numbers are probably off and are just to be seen as a theoretical example.

The ideal software product is one where you have little effort for creating it, but since everybody wants it, it sells in thousands. Many a fortune has been made that way.

Best regards

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

Exactly what Oliver said. 'Value' is a subjective measurement and basically comes down to how much you enjoy the product and whether you think you could get equivalent enjoyment from a cheaper product.

In terms of the cost of developing an addon like the PMDG 777, for instance, as a very very rough idea:

• Take how you think a good software developer with the requisite skills would cost per year
• Multiply the result by the number of developers
• Multiply that by the number of years of development (bearing in mind that the cost doesn't stop at release, because generally people expect that having bought the product it will be supported with patches, free incremental updates, service packs etc etc seemingly indefinitely)

That will give you a very, very rough ballpark idea, not including the other general costs of doing business over that time. Expect there to be a large number of zeroes on the number you come up with!

At the end of the day, crafting high-quality products takes time; and time costs money. Obviously we'd all like to pay less or nothing for everything from FS addons to a pint of milk, but in most things in this life you get what you pay for. Personally I think the FS addon market is fairly competitive: for pretty much every top-end product produced by PMDG/FSLabs etc there are generally cheaper options out there (from the likes of Captain Sim, iFly, Just Flight, Aerosoft etc etc). The same with scenery.

As a consumer, you take your pick; but if you shop in Harrods every day then you shouldn't really be surprised that you're spending more than if you went to Lidl!

I agree that what value you derive from it is one part of it, but not all. If I get huge amounts of value out of a £100 add on, but find it out it only takes £5 to produce, my perception on whether it is good value or not is obviously going to be affected. 

My point is that I think we frequently don’t get what we pay for in the flight sim world, compared to other genres so even if I get something out of them, I still think many of them are very expensive for what they are and wouldn’t be the same price if the customer base was different. 

I'm glad someone else took a stab at explaining this.

Edit to add:  I think the right question to ask is, "How do they decide what to charge?"

Does anyone have a good idea of how long it takes to sell enough units to break even on development costs plus overhead?  I'm guessing a year or more.  However long it is, the developers are "out of pocket" for the costs and don't make a penny profit until that point is reached.

A simplified version of how to determine price is, estimate how much it will cost to develop, estimate how many units you'll sell the first year, divide development cost by unit cost.  This is a ballpark estimate of how much you have to charge, plus cost to sell the unit, just to start making money a year after release.

Concerning unit price, if you charge less you'll sell more units, and if you charge more you'll sell fewer.  If you plot your income from these it's not a straight line but a curve.  It goes up, peaks, then comes down.  Your ideal price is at the peak, and if you charge more you actually make less money.  Compare this with the number you calculated in the preceding paragraph.

Capitalism Lab is a good business simulation that will allow you experiment with these concepts, and with the Digital Age DLC you can even do it with video games.

Hook

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by LHookins

Just now, LHookins said:

Does anyone have a good idea of how long it takes to sell enough units to break even on development costs plus overhead?  I'm guessing a year or more.  However long it is, the developers are "out of pocket" for the costs and don't make a penny profit until that point is reached.

That depends on whether you have a company, where you must sell to survive, or if you do it on the side, next to a real job that is paying the bills. 

Don't assume that this is even the case. The vast majority of addon developers are in the latter situation. I can only safely tell you that for my own products, which would be the latter too. The effort to make them was more than 3000 hours over the years. If I had to pay myself my normal rate as a senior programmer, that would amount to development cost of 500.000 Euro. In the real software industry that price would even be much higher, since you have to pay for the specification and testing too. There is no universe where I as a small developer could ever break even in less than 100 years. In the current market situation, if you sell 2000 copies of anything (in total, not per year), that is already considered a success.

Best regards

Thanks, Oliver.  I don't think people are complaining about the lower priced planes, but stuff like PMDG, FSLabs, A2A, etc.  You know, the people who must sell to survive and put a lot more into their products than the garage developers do.

The freeware Manfred Jahn C-47 is phenomenal, but I watched that cockpit take years of part time work to develop.

How senior are we talking about here?  I started my professional programming career in March, 1976.  Always good to meet someone else with a few miles on them. 🙂

Hook