Just now, LHookins said:

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.

Not quite that senior yet - I started writing code in 1982, but the professional part took a while before it became a constant in 93.

From my point of view the whole flightsim market is askew. I am not sure that the usual rules of marketing and calculation even apply. How do you compete against people whose life doesn't depend on their sales or who even give product away for free? I think that for a large part, prices are artificial, and success is derived from your companies' reputation in the community. And I am also convinced that the market has been shrinking, hence the increase in prices in the last 4 years and on the other hand the constant "50% sales" shouting at us.

There is a difference if PMDG or FSLabs make a new product - they can calculate a break even point. But if you enter the market as a new player, all bets are off - you only have the crystal ball - and in many cases over-enthusiastic expectations.

And then there are those addons, where you are asked to pay a price for a tool that only changes a couple of lines in a .cfg. Judging the actual value of a product is tricky, but the simmer community is very proficient in finding out what a product actually does, so we usually are protected from that kind of thing.

Best regards

Another factor in determining how much to charge is to look at similar planes made by other developers.  You don't want to charge much more because people won't buy your plane, and if you charge much less you won't be making as much money as you could.

Money you make on one product helps pay for making the next one.  If everyone charged less, and were still able to make money, there would be less money for new development and we'd have fewer planes.  If they can't charge enough to make back their development costs in some reasonable amount of time, they simply won't make the plane.

From what I've seen, the aircraft we have available are priced properly according to the amount of work that went into them.  I haven't seen any I thought were overpriced, but I've seen a few that I thought might be a bit under.

Note:  I'm really only interested in planes and I don't know how the rest of the industry works.

Hook

I wrote a long post that got lost when my router decided to reset itself, so you owe my router a drink. 

The bit I remember is that I think the flight sim add on buying market us very important in this too. It’s full of middle aged/ retired men with relatively large amounts of disposable cash and time, who don’t have much exposure at all to what value looks like in the rest of the gaming ‘eco system’. Generalising for sure, but it’s a bit of a dream demographic for people who want to charge a lot for things. 

In iracing I can buy about 5 ‘study’ level racing cars and 8 laser scanned racing tracks for the same price as a pmdg 777. Or I could buy project cars 2 and all of its dlc, twice. It’s really difficult for me to work out whether it’s good value or not. 

Funnily enough though, of all the buckets of flight-sim add-ons, planes are the ones I least have a problem with. 

32 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Note:  I'm really only interested in planes and I don't know how the rest of the industry works.

Hook

The rest are pretty much the same, most add-on's sell only 1,000 to 2,000 copies in their lifetime. There are the odd exceptions of course which sell much more, these are the so called "Must have Add-on's", IE: GSX, Hi-Fi, FSUIPC, etc.

For this reason the majority of 3rd party content developers work as part time with another Job that actually pay the bills and feed your family, we all start on this part time out of passion for this hobby because we want to see something working in the simulator the way we dream about it, if you are "lucky" enough to release an add-on that becomes a "must have" then the income might start to out wage your full time job and under such circumstances you could decide to switch to full time.

People would be surprised to hear how many well known developers really do for a living, some of them work at CERN, others in aerospace centres, oil platforms, etc. and some of these provide one of the best payware airplanes or freewares add-on's available today. This means they work endless nights to be able to develop DLC content as they are working all day long doing something complete different.

So it is really heart breaking to read some comments on these forums IE: 3rd party devs are milking us, they should disappear, I hope MS control all they do, etc. I haven't seem such hatred comments for a very long time in the community and I really cannot understand why it is all coming out this way just because a new wonderful Simulator is on the way to be released.

If this is really the sentiment from the flying sim community, then I am afraid we are looking at apocalyptic times, where the best 3rd party developers will just decide to stay away from all these and the flight sim community will continue to shrink, generating a down spiral cycle were our simulators will stop being pushed to their limits and eventually things will not improve anymore. Many will disagree with my last paragraph and many will agree with it, to those that disagree, most changes made to the internal engine core of P3D, AF2 and XP come from request from 3rd party developers (freeware and payware) who listen to what users would like to have and request to the Simulator engineers to expand it further in order to develop more stuff for it. It is easier to the game developers to do it this way instead of dedicating their time (which can take years) to create the content themselves IE: an airbus A380, 200 repaints of AI traffic, over 150 new detailed airports, an add-on' to connect to Vatsim, an add-on to update the navigation charts and database for other airplanes, etc. and the list goes on.

I really hope the majority of flight simmers really appreciate the dynamics of how flying simulation has reached the levels we have today in comparison with 20 years ago, many 3rd party content providers (freeware or payware, who listen to many users from many forums and social sites) are in direct contact with the Simulator developers and engineers, and I can assure you their input have played an impressive role in many top core sim updates that you have seen today.

All the best,
Simbol

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by simbol

16 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

In iracing I can buy about 5 ‘study’ level racing cars and 8 laser scanned racing tracks for the same price as a pmdg 777. Or I could buy project cars 2 and all of its dlc, twice. It’s really difficult for me to work out whether it’s good value or not. 

The question is, how many users the racing market has? and how many copies any DLC content provider can make in such market?

The flying sim community is NOT big, for P3D we are talking about 130,000 - 150,000 users maximum so if you do an add-on for it, and not all of them are actively buying add-on's, you can't expect to sell 300,000 copies and therefore be able to put a price tag of 5,99 USD.

S.

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by simbol

1 hour ago, Superdelphinus said:

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 think we'll probably have to agree to disagree here; as I say, if you look at the real costs of development vs the retail prices and the amount of time that many people spend using these products I think generally it's incredible that the likes of PMDG are able to survive charging only £130 or thereabouts for product with development lives of 5+ years and which many will get literally thousands of hours of enjoyment out of.

As I say, if you only buy the very best of everything, the premium products, then any endeavour you choose to get involved in will be expensive. If you only buy 50-day aged fillet steak and vintage wine, your shopping bill will be high. If you're in to golf and you only want to buy the most expensive golf clubs, then you will find golf extremely expensive. If when you want to buy a new car you only consider Ferraris then you will probably find that the market is prohibitively expensive.

There are a very small number (countable on the fingers of one hand) of top-end developers who are producing premium products at relatively high prices. Using them as a barometer is like using McLaren or Bugatti as a barometer for the price of cars -- it makes little sense.

Why do people spend the money on the higher-priced products when there are cheaper alternatives available? Ironically, because I think on the whole the perception is that they actually represent better value for money than the cheaper, but lesser-featured/lesser-detailed products. Obviously that is a generalisation, but I regularly come across people who, having bought the cheaper product, end up buying the premium version because when push came to shove they ended up disappointed in the functionality or features. Which, thus, represents better value?

As Oliver says, if you have a piece of software which makes some small config file changes which significantly improve your sim's performance and your experience -- what is that the value of that? If you know what you are doing and can work out which changes to make and where to make them yourself, such a piece of software would be pretty much worthless. But if you don't have the ability, knowledge and/or confidence to make those changes yourself, that software could be very valuable to you indeed.

3 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

In iracing I can buy about 5 ‘study’ level racing cars and 8 laser scanned racing tracks for the same price as a pmdg 777. Or I could buy project cars 2 and all of its dlc, twice. It’s really difficult for me to work out whether it’s good value or not. 

I have to confess that I am not at all familiar with iRacing or the addon market in racing sims, but as a general principle I would think that the number of parts and systems on even a sophisticated high-performance car most likely pale in comparison to a modern airliner which has literally millions of components and operates in three dimensions (and most high-end developers are simulating the actual physics outside of the sim and just injecting values directly rather than relying on the sim's internal physics engine so that adds a further dimension).

However, if a developer in iRacing can develop a vehicle, sell it for £10 and make a profit then good luck to them! I can only imagine that the development times must be very short and/or the market quite large.

 

11 minutes ago, simbol said:

 

So it is really heart breaking to read some comments on these forums IE: 3rd party devs are milking us, they should disappear, I hope MS control all they do, etc. I haven't seem such hatred comments for a very long time in the community and I really cannot understand why it is all coming out this way just because a new wonderful Simulator is on the way to be released.

As a long time simmer who has seen this hobby become what it is over almots 40 years, I was horrified by these comments which cumulate ignorance and hatred (both go along quite well as a rule). Thats why I put a developer recognition thread on the Hangar forum.

 

 

Some people love to criticise PMDG/FSLabs etc. for the relatively high cost of their products, but it takes a long time for one of these high fidelity simulated planes to be built. If I remember correctly, the FSLabs Airbus A320 was in development for at least six years! Surely the developers need to be rewarded for what is widely regarded as the most complex piece of simulated aviation technology ever released for the PC?

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by Christopher Low

- it would be awesome if we can start in the terminal at the gate (with the right destination name on TV) and walk to the plane via the animateur bridge

1 hour ago, domkle said:

 

As a long time simmer who has seen this hobby become what it is over almots 40 years, I was horrified by these comments which cumulate ignorance and hatred (both go along quite well as a rule). Thats why I put a developer recognition thread on the Hangar forum.

 

 

I don't agree that developers have been milking us and most of the money that I have spent over the years has been well-spent.  They are there to make money and there is nothing wrong with that.  None of us have to buy anything from them.  It's a completely voluntary act on our part.

Nevertheless, as a consumer, I would like the base sim to contain most of what I need to fly out of the box (scenery, planning, mapping, weather and ATC) without the need for add ons except perhaps for aircraft and am willing to pay for that.  There is nothing else that I have on my PC that needs so much "extra" stuff to make it look good and provide a proper level of functionality.

The city lights illuminating the low clouds will be a nice and realistic addition!

11 minutes ago, Flamingpie said:

I am very grateful for everything 3rd party developers have done for the hobby: without them I wouldn't be flying anymore today, but well, let's be honest, in the end everyone would LOVE to see as much features as possible 'out of the box'. Saves money, makes (re)installing a LOT easier, not to mention updating... So again, thank you all, developers, but if possible I'd prefer to not deal with you anymore in the future. 😜 Sounds rude and harsh, I know, but I am certain everyone will agree with this. It's a shame we NEED add ons! But well, obviously... MFS will NOT include everything we want out of the box so just to be on the safe side I'd like to say: I love you all, 3rd party developers! 😎

Apart from all that: if I think an add on is too expensive I simply won't buy it. I don't really see what's the problem here. I'd love the have a Porsche but I can't afford it so I drive around in a cheap Asian brand. Big deal. First world problems.

It's not rude or harsh - it's reality.  None of us have a responsibility to make sure that 3rd party developers stay in business although I do not wish them ill.   But, like you, I'd rather deal minimally with them less for the money side of things and more for the simplicity aspect.

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by ricka47

32 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

If I remember correctly, the FSLabs Airbus A320 was in development for at least six years

Let's say, that on average 7 people were on this project more or less full time - sometimes more, sometimes less. That amounts to 70.000 work hours (seventy thousand) by rule of thumb. Whichever way you place the hourly rate, that is a lot of money if you have to pay for it. I often read the argument that developers should "just" hire a professional programmer, designer, whatever, to make it happen quicker. They sure could. But an experienced programmer will cost you $100 per hour. Do the math.

And then there is that story about this engineer, who was working for a company making newspaper printing machines (those cost several million apiece). One day they decide that his job is obsolete, and they let him go. A while later, one of those printing machines develops a defect and the whole newspaper comes to a standstill. They try everything, but can't fix it. So they remember the engineer and call him in. He spends two hours walking around the machine, then he makes a cross on one part and says: "replace this and it will work again". They do, and it does. Everyone is happy. Then he sends in his invoice - $50.000 - and the company promptly accuses him of price gouging, and tells him to detail that invoice. So he sends in the details: "One piece of chalk: $1. Knowing where to make the cross: $49.999". They paid without any further comment. 
Point of this story is - in many circumstances you pay an engineer or a developer for what he can do - not for how long it takes him to do it.

Best regards

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

15 minutes ago, ricka47 said:

Nevertheless, as a consumer, I would like the base sim to contain most of what I need to fly out of the box (scenery, planning, mapping, weather and ATC) without the need for add ons

I totally agree and understand this concept, however we fly simmers always want more.. and unfortunately not always the base sim will provide what we dream to have.

I remember dreaming since FS98 to see passengers and pilots boarding the airplane, and having the catering services coming to serve my aircraft.. each new release of MS simulator was welcomed but there was always this missing, then one day a 3rd party developer create AES and I was all over the moon even when we could not see passengers at least I was able to receive ground services, then P3D came along and again this dream was broken as AES was not compatible with P3D and once again a 3rd party developer was able to make my dreams come true (Umberto) via GSX!.

Recently GSX2 finally put those beautiful passengers into play! and my dream came true. 

It wasn't done by Microsoft, Lockheed Martin or Laminar Research.. it was done by FSDream Studio in their constant efforts of pushing the base simulator beyond it limits.. this is just an example of why having an open platform is so important.. otherwise the base sim will become boring and fixed with the defaults delivered by the base sim developer.

S.

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by simbol