2 minutes ago, ricka47 said:

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.

I share your point but not entirely. It depends how much work MS is ready to do to upgrade the sim over the years.  Look at the weather. Third party developers rather fierce competition has been good for us, as they went much beyond the simple METAR integration of FS9 and FSX.

 

2 minutes ago, Flamingpie said:

Let me quote myself for once: one thing I'm hoping to get with MFS is a Steam-like installation process. 

This is exactly what the OrbX installer does 😃 ! You buy, download and fly. 

 

 

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by domkle

Quote

This is exactly what the OrbX installer does 😃 ! You buy, download and fly....

...or in the case of ORBx TrueEarth GB South for P3D.....you buy, download, disable all of the 3DM files, and fly

9 minutes ago, domkle said:

I share your point but not entirely. It depends how much work MS is ready to do to upgrade the sim over the years.  Look at the weather. Third party developers rather fierce competition has been good for us, as they went much beyond the simple METAR integration of FS9 and FSX.

 

That is a good point to be sure. My main sim is now XP11 which is much less usable out of the box than perhaps P3D.  The ATC, the planner, and the clouds are all awful.  LR has not seen a need to improve on these as there are external options. 

So, the issue of competition is a good one.  MSFS may include decent ATC or weather but 3rd party developers may compete with each other to produce better ones.  Microsoft would not have the incentive to do that since they already have sold the base product.

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by ricka47
Grammar.

9 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

...or in the case of ORBx TrueEarth GB South for P3D.....you buy, download, disable all of the 3DM files, and fly

 I don't have this problem. 200 Gb sceneries would take 4 days and nights to download at my end 😈. No way !

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by domkle

The simple fact is that with millions of new gamers coming to FS2020, developers ought to reduce their prices, even the ones relying on x sales per year to stay in business.

Why? Because the sheer volume of potential sales that won't happen if they continue to charge current prices. No-one outside of current simmers will know, nor will understand, why PMDG, FSL, Majestic or top-end scenery devs charge elevated prices compared to the season passes and DLC add-ons for mainstream games.

Simple economics states that if they don't, devs will miss out on huge levels of profit. Additionally, a new host of gamers won't become converts and we're left with just a few hundred thousand (and decreasing) simmers continuing to support an increasingly expensive cottage industry.

Away from pricing strategies, as mentioned earlier, I want to see a one-click install solution similar to Steam. The whole process is cumbersome, exacerbated by config issues between (non-) compatible products that require manual amending/editing. So many hours spent on making it all work.

(And not forgetting all the spectacular eye-candy, please.)

6 hours 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.

The baseline for the cost of any software is the base cost of all custom software.

Forget the fact that the end product is used in a game. That is irrelevant. It costs exactly the same to produce a an aircraft of any quality as it does to write an operating system, a new database, or a new word processor. The only difference is the number of man hours it takes to create them. The labor and infrastructure requirements are exactly the same (not talking about the folks developing from home, I'm talking about the ones with an actual buisness "footprint").

Writing quality software involves spending boatloads of money and time before you make the first nickle. It is a tremendous risk, and has huge potential downsides. There's a price to that as well.

1 minute ago, F737NG said:

The simple fact is that with millions of new gamers coming to FS2020, developers ought to reduce their prices, even the ones relying on x sales per year to stay in business.

Why? Because the sheer volume of potential sales that won't happen if they continue to charge current prices. No-one outside of current simmers will know, nor will understand, why PMDG, FSL, Majestic or top-end scenery devs charge elevated prices compared to the season passes and DLC add-ons for mainstream games.

Simple economics states that if they don't, devs will miss out on huge levels of profit. Additionally, a new host of gamers won't become converts and we're left with just a few hundred thousand (and decreasing) simmers continuing to support an increasingly expensive cottage industry.

Away from pricing strategies, as mentioned earlier, I want to see a one-click install solution similar to Steam. The whole process is cumbersome, exacerbated by config issues between (non-) compatible products that require manual amending/editing. So many hours spent on making it all work.

(And not forgetting all the spectacular eye-candy, please.)

My guess is that new generation of flight simmers (assuming that they are out there) won't be tweakers like we are.  I can't see Millennials and those who follow them spending more time installing, updating, adjusting sliders playing with .ini and .cfg files and doing so much manual tweaking and jury-rigging than flying. 

They would want and expect it to be a more plug and play solution and I would agree with that  - I want that as well!

 

34 minutes ago, ricka47 said:

My guess is that new generation of flight simmers (assuming that they are out there) won't be tweakers like we are.  I can't see Millennials and those who follow them spending more time installing, updating, adjusting sliders playing with .ini and .cfg files and doing so much manual tweaking and jury-rigging than flying. 

They would want and expect it to be a more plug and play solution and I would agree with that  - I want that as well!

 

I don’t believe in the millions of fs2020  simmers. There will be millions of purchases, quite a difference.

About the tweaking. There are very large communities of modders around games like Skyrim or Fallout. I dont know how old they are but tweaking, modding is not only to be found in the flight simulator world.

I hope to see some of what we had before but was dropped in P3D, namely jets from Boeing and little guys like the Cessnas.  It would be great (if unexpected) if MS were to provide a ton of aircraft as default models.

4 hours ago, Superdelphinus said:

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. 

It's not unique though, plenty of hobbies work that way. Someone up-thread mentioned a music hobby and the cost of DAW plugins. That's my other hobby too. The demographics are more evenly distributed, with many young people involved (wannabe musicians with bedroom studios). The youngsters may not have much money compared to the old retirees, but they don't have the expenses retirees have later in life either, and can live a pared-down lifestyle while pursuing a music hobby or career. 

In that hobby, I've spent $300 for a reverb plugin I thought was marginally better than a $50 reverb plugin. I'm sure it didn't represent more time in development, just a better concept, or better source data to work with. It's another dream area for developers because "quality" in audio is so hard to pin down objectively. At least with flight sims, the features and performance of an aircraft model can be objectively compared to another model. So we should count ourselves lucky in that respect. 

Microsoft, please kill off that tedious monstrosity known as the DLL.xml system.

 

Dynamic weather- Snow- This is how it can be done without using shaders and such to simulate the effect.

A game I play- 'The Hunter- Call of the Wild' will be releasing a new map tomorrow with an upgraded dynamic weather system.

The Yukon Valley map uses a new method for snow where it gradually accumulates on the ground.

For those not familiar with the game, the graphics and immersion are state of the art and about as realistic as you can get.

See at about the 5:45 mark of the video.

The trailer for the new map showing the varied environments and atmospherics.

 

2 hours ago, F737NG said:

The simple fact is that with millions of new gamers coming to FS2020, developers ought to reduce their prices, even the ones relying on x sales per year to stay in business.

Why? Because the sheer volume of potential sales that won't happen if they continue to charge current prices. No-one outside of current simmers will know, nor will understand, why PMDG, FSL, Majestic or top-end scenery devs charge elevated prices compared to the season passes and DLC add-ons for mainstream games.

Simple economics states that if they don't, devs will miss out on huge levels of profit. Additionally, a new host of gamers won't become converts and we're left with just a few hundred thousand (and decreasing) simmers continuing to support an increasingly expensive cottage industry.

You're assuming that there is a large untapped market of people who would be interested in the complexity of a study-level PMDG style aircraft, and they just don't know that this kind of thing exists because they're busy playing games. 

An alternative view would be that anyone interested in that kind of thing is already flying those aircraft in the current sim platforms, and there actually *is* no untapped market for aircraft models at that level of realism and complexity.

That's basically my personal view -- that flight sims are in a steady-state period of neutral growth. We lose some at the back end as we age out of the hobby and die off, and we get a small but steady flow of young people entering the hobby at the front end. There isn't actually much potential for growth at the level of a PMDG product, because it's a very niche area of interest. It always has been. And that's okay, as long as the hobby doesn't die completely.

In short, I think it may be wishful thinking to believe there are thousands more people out there who would gladly jump into a PMDG level aircraft and have fun with it, and they just don't know that such a thing exists. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

Already covered so deleted! I accidentally missed out a page.

Edited June 24, 20196 yr by vortex681