Some Devs Are Just Out of Touch

[edpatino 1,964]

Let the market forces do their job!.

To be honest, the KCDK freeware version does a very good job for me.

Cheers, Ed

[PILOT'S 157]

25 minutes ago, Manny said:

I am curious, why would you pick an airport that requires expensive satellite images? MSFS provides enough geographical area that has those images. I know Aerosoft had to buy those for Lukla which was understandable for P3D since that airport is unique and highly sought after. But MSFS solved that problem for 90% of the world I thought. All you had to do, was to just focus on the airport. 

I guess the level of quality of the default satellite imagery and the level of quality a developer would like to include with their scenery ultimately determines what a particular scenery add-on will include. For the Cedar Key region the default quality is rather poor in our opinion, and if you fly over the default Seahorse Key, which is just south of Cedar Key Airport, you will find that some of the Bing tiles for that area are actually missing. The fact that the default tiles are missing there in fact causes a CTD with custom satellite imagery for Seahorse Key, which we have had to exclude until Asobo/MSFS patch this. They have been made aware of this and will hopefully fix this in the very near future. It is a misconception to think that default satellite scenery in MSFS is mostly perfectly adequate in general, there are very many areas that have very poor coverage and/or show anomalies such as clouds, there are also colorization and water masking issues. To provide a high-quality rendition of Cedar Key Airport with a large custom 64 sq km of satellite imagery coverage, we felt it was necessary to provide our own custom-crafted satellite imagery, and this never comes cheaply.

[CFIJose 5,485]

57 minutes ago, PILOT'S said:

You underestimate the cost of custom-crafted satellite imagery, not only is the acquisition of such imagery expensive, the process of custom colourization and image correction takes up a huge amount of time.

As far as I'm aware none of the recently released FSDT scenery packages for MSFS feature any such custom-crafted satellite imagery.

Stefan,

I understand and respect that you must be compensated for your work and need to cover your expenses. I know nothing about scenery development but I do know that a business needs to make a profit to remain solvent. I did not mean to be obtuse. My sincere apologies!

Jose

[marsman2020 1,310]

I think some developers still need to get used to the idea of having an addressable user base of 2 million MSFS users vs a much much smaller number of P3D users.  

[Cognita 1,078]

It will be interesting to see what people are looking for as the sim matures. I too am using pay ware and freeware scenery. I have been really happy with some of the freeware. I don't gravitate toward Google earth imports or simply rearranging freeware assets but some people have taken time to handcraft models and textures to create a pretty sound representation of an airport -- Catalina and Lethbridge come to mind as examples. I like that the sim has extended the hobby to include scenery creation to a greater degree than earlier sims. To me this can be seen as part of the hobby, of the experience.

I have also purchased a dozen or so pay ware airports, places that I fly a lot and want a better quality experience authentic to the real world. But I am also more price sensitive and thoughtful about what I purchase. In P3D I would only fly to pay ware airports because I found the default ones, and the surrounding scenery, poor and unconvincing - it felt jarring to have a high quality, good looking aircraft and to fly into such terrible scenery, and so I purchased high quality airports and especially liked when the surrounding area was included. But in MSFS this is not the case and I would not, for example, pay a premium for color corrected satellite imagery. I appreciate that for others this may still be a valuable aspect and worth paying for the additional costs to produce it, it is just not for me. I think developers will gradually figure out what people are looking for and what they are willing to pay, but this will take time. Hopefully these kinds of discussions can be helpful.

[marsman2020 1,310]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I am sure I am in a very small minority here but quite frankly I would have rather seen a strategy of not making freeaware airports possible for MSFS.  When a hobbyist can crank out competition for a professional content developer and give it out for free that does not bode well for sustaining professional developers, and quite frankly I'd rather see a very robust pro developer community continue to bloom for MSFS.  As for costs it seems like most airports in the market place are less $$ than what I paid for P3D content.

This is totally against everything this hobby has been about.  I honestly can't believe you are serious.  There are so many great freeware aircraft mods and you would rather just ban all of that to line "professional" developers pockets?  ("Professional" developers who put out total junk like the Eurofighter Typhoon)

[chapstick 2,757]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Thank you kindly for making my main point--I rest my case.

Please continue. I want to hear more about how banning freeware would be a good idea. 

[sidfadc 1,344]

23 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

This is totally against everything this hobby has been about.  I honestly can't believe you are serious.  There are so many great freeware aircraft mods and you would rather just ban all of that to line "professional" developers pockets?  ("Professional" developers who put out total junk like the Eurofighter Typhoon)

Agreed without freeware it would be totally different experience

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, PILOT'S said:

the process of custom colourization and image correction takes up a huge amount of time.

I've got a few Pilot's sceneries, so I like the products. But this about colour correcting stuff and tweaking an image is nonsense. It only takes ages if you have no idea what you're doing, and frankly, it's not up to a customer to pay over the odds for something because a manufacturer isn't professional enough to get things done in an expedient manner.

 

[aniiran 431]

I have a decent freeware Athens but the second FLYTAMPAs version hits the store I will buy it. The same with Frankfurt.  Even though I have premium delux frankfurt and its very good.  It doesn't have the level of Immersion that Mega Airport Frankfurt has.

[Christopher Low 5,353]

Colour correction is an interesting topic by itself where photoscenery is concerned. I had assumed that the new Microsoft Flight Simulator does some kind of colour correction on the fly, but I have no idea if this is the case or not. What I do know is that the colouration of Bing (and Google) images can be a very mixed bag. The more I used the Horizon VFR UK Photographic Scenery, the more I came to hate the badly coloured areas (and there were lots of them). I have seen critical comments regarding the ORBx TrueEarth images of the UK being too green (including roads etc), but I can categorically state that the colouration of their photoscenery of the UK is light years beyond anything else that was previously available. It is the consistency of colouration that makes the big difference. I certainly would not be happy any more having to fly over photoscenery that looks more like the image in a kaleidoscope than the real world.

Edited February 6, 2021 by Christopher Low

[sanh 823]

2 hours ago, Noel said:

I am sure I am in a very small minority here but quite frankly I would have rather seen a strategy of not making freeaware airports possible for MSFS.  

Thankfully a minority. I have never bought a payware airport and been simming since FS5.1. Many of us see no need to pay for an airport because we want to fly somewhere different each time and don't care about non-airside features we would hardly notice from the cockpit. Freeware is an important stop gap for areas MSFS default airports are lacking (airside). 

[kaosfere 3,115]

2 hours ago, Manny said:

IS it that much. Oh Lord! I never checked. 🙂

That's the way I feel whenever I look at one of those Steam Calculator things that tell you your collection cost asmuch as, in my case, almost $10,000.

(Even though, in reality, with sales and such I'd guess it's more like $5000.   Bear in mind though this includes no flight sim expenses.)

[Tom_L 533]

24 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

I think some developers still need to get used to the idea of having an addressable user base of 2 million MSFS users vs a much much smaller number of P3D users. 

Gary Summons of UK2000 took to Facebook just the other day and pleaded to buy from his own shop because of the cut MS ist taking in the Marketplace. So obviously having a large amount of potential customers at hand doesn't necessarily translate into a larger amount of sales - because if that would be the case, it would make up for the smaller revenue per sale. To me this shows that the market (as a whole, not only the MSFS marketplace) seems to function as it should, as UK2000's addons are on the more expensive side while the quality has to be considered mediocre (see FilbertFlies' reviews). And the sales seem to reflect that.

We had several threads here dealing with price/quality considerations or calls for a vetting process on simmarket or the MSFS marketplace. These discussions are pointless imho, because as you can clearly see in this thread (again), there's different approaches to flightsimming - from "only freeware" to "freeware should be banned" and everything in between. No one is forced to buy anything, let the market decide!

[kaosfere 3,115]

2 hours ago, Noel said:

Thank you kindly for making my main point--I rest my case.

It strikes me that the only way in which freeware developers would be a threat to payware developers is if they, on a large scale, create products so good that large percentages of sim users opt to use them rather than buying the alternative.  In this situation, where is the harm?  If a commercial product is not sufficiently better than a free alternative for people to choose to pay for it, then clearly the community does not need that product, and the only people at a disadvantage are... those who want to build and sell products that the market doesn't want?  Who else?

I'm not discrediting the value of having a strong commercial development scene -- it has been a key part of our community and I believe it will continue to be so.  But only to the extent that they provide a product sufficiently better than the free one that people are willing to pay for it.  A freeware scene that drove commercial developers out of the market would be, to me, a sign that the developers you saw being threatened simply weren't providing enough value to the community to continue to exist in their present form.

If I try, I can hypothesize a situation where a) you had a interest so esoteric that there wasn't any freeware for it; b) it were available for a sufficient amount of money from a commercial developer; c) that developer relied on sales of other products to stay in business; and d) the overall loss of sales drove that developer out of business.  In this case, perhaps the loss of that developer would cause a harm to you, because you would be unable to get that need filled.    But, in this case, the harm is to you, and you alone.   You simply have a need that is not in line with the rest of the community.

That doesn't mean you should desire everyone else to exist in a sub-optimal situation just to fill your own need.  That's selfish.

What am I missing?  Where would the harm in this nightmare situation you dread where commercial developers are driven out of business by high quality freeware be?

Edited February 6, 2021 by kaosfere