No Subscription Required

[Dominique_K 10,149]

The only issue is, for me,  the cost/advantage ratio. Lets see :

- First, my profile as a simmer : I love to fly  everywhere in the world, mostly with GA and WB but seriouly considering getting into a medium haul airliner type of flying too. 

- 4.99 USD/EUR a month is, after a year, 60 bucks, the cost of a new game

- For this annual sub price,  I can buy, these days, about three sceneries during the sales with a big caveat though. I am not sure that there is any scenery I want. Case in point : Orbx has almost ceased to make regions that I am interested in or having the 8th version of a megahub is really not in my priorities. I am an airfield guy more than a big airport guy, if you see what I mean.  So the sub gives me more choices. But, I doubt that MS will offer everything I want, these small strips in the boondocks for instance, so I may have to buy DLC/addons anyway but fewer.

Not an awfully bad deal, more choices for a reasonable price.

Now, lets imagine 9.99 a month or, horresco referens, 14.99. 120/dollars is really an upper limit as I don’t buy that much (talking about sceneries only),  the deal becomes problematic. 180 USD year after year  ? Maybe not .

As they say YMMV. What I mean, is that the sub is an economic problem not a philosophical one. 

 

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by domkle

[G-RFRY 1,712]

6 hours ago, n4gix said:

No one ever "owns" software; they simply pay for a license to use it.

That will be more relevant in the future with the sale of goods act, a product like game is like a car you buy it and you can do what you like with it, sell or give away. This is why steam are fighting a possible court case with the EU, this will force Dev`s to possibly lease access on subscription you never own the product, aka office 365.

PS small print terms my have no legal standing and my be challenged.

Edited October 14, 2019 by rjfry

[Lenny777 299]

I'm going to guess that it will be subscription based if you want to access Azure data and of course the beauty of the sim is related to that. I have no problem with that. It seems we have no problem with subscriptions related to various addons such as Navigraph but the reluctance to pay for what I expect to be a dynamic data set on Azure is not understandable. One can imagine a constant tinkering with this huge data set with respect to adding buildings in cities when they are built in real life, maybe a forest fire occuring in realtime which could be dynamically placed in Azure data etc. That takes money and time but it starts to bring our sim into the 21st century as something which isn't frozen in time but reflects real life.

[CarlosF 1,241]

On 10/10/2019 at 11:50 AM, Flamingpie said:

Because subscriptions cost more

How much more?

I pay $7.57 monthly subscription for MS Office 365 which gives me access to all the apps the I use (Home PC, Laptop and phone) and are always up to date and that includes 1TB of space with OneDrive, that is 90.84/year, its about the cost of a dinner with the wife in a nice restaurant.

I highly doubt MS will deviate far from their current subscription model which has serve them well, this model has reduce if not eliminated piracy.

Edited October 14, 2019 by CarlosF

[KillerKlient 92]

Personally, I think if this sim ends up being subscription based for the live bing data then that'll be the death of it.

If MS wants more than just a fixed price then add-ons is by far the best way for them to make a stable revenue stream whilst not putting off end users.  Many tripple A game titles have proven this model works very well, GTA 5, Rainbow Six Siege, etc.  I think Ubisoft now makes more money from add-ons than they do selling their games.

[Wobbie 938]

Sony does subscriptions, & they have not died yet.

[KillerKlient 92]

19 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Sony does subscriptions, & they have not died yet.

Yes but that is a entire platform right? Not one game?

[anden145 2,285]

14 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Sony does subscriptions, & they have not died yet.

Indeed. Well said!

A lot of companies, have gone for offering their software by utilizing some kind of SaaS model and are quite successful at it. From Office 365, Azure Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage (Google Drive, DropBox etc), Amazon Web Services, is just to name a few...

To be honest, the notion, that you should/would be able to utilize Microsoft's Azure Cloud AI with and Bing Maps streaming-service, free of charge, is just a pipe-dream, IMO. 

Why are people so 'doomsayers' when it comes to this paradigm?? What are people so afraid of? It's not exactly unheard of, within the industry...

[Wobbie 938]

Well, Microsoft could to the same.. A monthly/quarterly subscription to the Xbox store.. 

But then, we still have no idea as to how they will monetize the game as yet. 

[Deleted 250]

38 minutes ago, Flamingpie said:

Well, if I could buy MSFS for 60 and use it for 4 years, it would have cost me 60 in total while you would have paid 363,36 in total so that's 303,36 more in 4 years. I can buy a LOT of interesting add ons for 303,36. I could have bought a new copy of MSFS every year and still I would have saved 123.36 compared to you. That's a VERY nice dinner with the wife in a nice restaurant on top of MSFS. Of course I know subscription have advantages but if I can save some money to spend it on something else I'd like to save it. 😉

You will definitely be able to fly offline by paying once. But streaming will definitely require a subscription. Because servers cost money and MS will not give it to us for free

[KillerKlient 92]

8 minutes ago, Pitbull2504 said:

You will definitely be able to fly offline by paying once. But streaming will definitely require a subscription. Because servers cost money and MS will not give it to us for free

Definitely? Really, when did you decide that?

There are many ways to fund running servers, suscription isn't the only way.

[OSJJ1985 134]

I also don't get this enormous fear of a potential subscription for the online services that come along with MSFS. A model where the offline product is available at a one-time purchase (including all the critical downloadables like patches, hotfixes, ...) and the subscription service for the online/streaming services... in other words the premium version of the world. I see it as a win-win for all of us and I'd actually support this kind of model. Why?? Because I'd most probably end up investing less than what I do now

- You got your simmers that don't care much about the world and are just interested in the flying part (the equivalent of those using not more than the P3D's default world) --> Offline mode and that's it  (and btw I consider Offline MSFS to be somewhere between Orbx full fat region and TrueEarth, but obviously with the better graphical engine, etc..)

- You got those simmer that do pimp up their world and environment, but only prefer specific small regions (P3D with a single/few 3rd party region and couple of airports) --> Offline, one time subscription for pre-cache and then discontinue the online service

- And you got the hardcore simmers (like) me, which globally pimp up their sim world and already have an average monthly investment, which is higher than most subscriptions --> Full Streaming experience

 

You want First Class you have to pay First Class. None of what I has written have been confirmed. The reason why I hope it will be subscription for the online streaming services is, because I hope this thing is kept alive and breathing. I see myself saving loads of money on regional scenery, environmental and cosmetic add-ons, etc... and probably many airports, since default level will potentially be on an acceptable level and I would only upgrade airports I fly the most to premium payware standards. I just don't see how they can keep this thing alive (and keep working on it) for ten years with just one-time purchases below $100.

And btw, as someone has already mentioned you'd get far more value in return compared to other online service subscriptions like navigraph, real traffic or being able to play multiplayer on XBox Live or PSN. We all need to keep things in perspective.

Edited October 14, 2019 by OSJJ1985

[Wobbie 938]

LOL, we have not, as yet, seen the guys asking if they can get free upgrades to MSFS as yet.. That train is still coming to the station.

[goates 576]

45 minutes ago, Anders Bermann said:

Why are people so 'doomsayers' when it comes to this paradigm?? What are people so afraid of? It's not exactly unheard of, within the industry...

The issue is that more and more developers are moving software of all types to subscription models, including ones that have little or no cloud services of their own to pay for, meaning one could easily end up paying far more than before to do anything on a computer, smartphone or console. Even worse are the ones that take functionality that was available in previous versions and put it behind a subscription. I do happily pay for subscriptions to some products, especially those with cloud services to maintain, but have also dropped software because they moved to a subscription with no real benefit for the end user. It can get even worse for those of us living outside the US when exchange rates are factored in. Looking at all the software I have on my computers and how many are slowly moving to subscriptions, I could be looking at a couple hundred dollars per month. Slowly, but steadily, disappearing are the days one could buy software and use it as is until you, rather than the developer, decided it was worth it to upgrade. Not to mention the risk of something happening like what Adobe did to its users in Venezuela. Subscriptions can certainly be worth it, but to assume there aren't valid issues and concerns is just as naive as your so called doomsayers.

 

Paying for the streaming scenery in the new sim may be worth it, but the cost is going to have to be right. $5CAD/month wouldn't be bad, $10CAD/month is getting a bit steep for a single entertainment program.

[pmb 5,137]

4 minutes ago, goates said:

The issue is that more and more developers are moving software of all types to subscription models, including ones that have little or no cloud services of their own to pay for, meaning one could easily end up paying far more than before to do anything on a computer, smartphone or console. Even worse are the ones that take functionality that was available in previous versions and put it behind a subscription.

...

 Looking at all the software I have on my computers and how many are slowly moving to subscriptions, I could be looking at a couple hundred dollars per month. Slowly, but steadily, disappearing are the days one could buy software and use it as is until you, rather than the developer, decided it was worth it to upgrade. Not to mention the risk of something happening like what Adobe did to its users in Venezuela.

As I said

Kind regards, Michael