Strong sales of CRJ may lead holdout devs to prioritize MSFS

[Concodroid 84]

17 minutes ago, eslader said:

There's room for both. By your logic, Bentley should not exist. Very few people are going to buy a Bentley, but enough do that Bentley makes a lot of money at it. If Bentley started turning out Daewoos, yeah, more people would buy them, but there's a problem. Daewoo employees are paid less than Bentley employees. Bentley employees are better at their jobs than Daewoo employees. You'd be dedicating premium quality, and priced, labor at building cheap cars. Daewoo would make more profit selling Daewoo level cars than Bentley would because of that.

Oh I forgot to mention I was talking about releasing a "lite" addon. But digital products and real-world... things? jobs? aren't the same. You want every Bentley to be high quality, so each one has to be built very well. On the other hand, PMDG makes a single product, and it's exactly the same quality for everyone.

 

However, I agree, I think I made the point before - if PMDG were to attempt this, it's a fine line to walk, because of their reputation. Creating a lite aircraft, in my opinion, would solve many issues with addons today - you'd get a very solid base aircraft, if that's all you want, and you'll get a very high quality addon later, if that's what you want.

Honestly, I believe the best course of action is this - PMDG starts releasing their aircraft in two or three tiers. Their employees are kept to the same high standard, as essentially they're building a 130 dollar addon, but they then release it in different tiers. That way, PMDG Tier 3 addons are just as high quality, tier 2 is midrange, and tier 1 is more budget-friendly. It's like car tuning - a tuner offering different stages of tuning isn't going to have their reputation tarnished because they release a stage one tuning package.

Now I'm probably the last person to ask about what to include in different stages of a flight simulator addon, so I won't try and come up with something good for each price point.

There's one issue - if PMDG is a luxury brand. See, brands like Apple work because there's a sense of luxury. They aren't luxury, they're still definitely consumer electronics, but they seem to be.

I don't get that with PMDG, I don't think of PMDG as luxury at all. I think of them more like... the Honeycomb Alpha. It's not a luxury product, but it's still expensive and most importantly high quality.

tl;dr - I don't think PMDG releasing stages of addons is a bad idea, as long as they keep the same standard up.

P.S. Pmdg releasing high-quality addons for a lower price, with limited features, will force other addons to either lower the price, or increase the quality. Competition is always good for the consumer, I believe

Edited March 24, 2021 by Concodroid

[eslader 1,784]

I would imagine that a lot of the coding work that goes into tier 3 would also have to go into tier 1. No one's going to buy tier 1 if the flight dynamics are worse than the other tiers, for instance. So whoever works on the flight dynamics coding is getting paid the same amount, but his efforts are resulting in varying levels of income which means his value to the company fluctuates depending on what tier a customer buys. That doesn't seem a good idea to me.  It's back to the pay-the-lawyer-to-scrub-toilets problem.

 

19 minutes ago, Concodroid said:

a tuner offering different stages of tuning isn't going to have their reputation tarnished because they release a stage one tuning package.

 

Well that depends. If Ruf releases a stage 1 tuning package that most people buy, and the tuning package consists of a giant exhaust tip, some stickers, and a neutral-downforce wing, its reputation absolutely will plummet, and the Porsche crowd interested in spending real money for real gains will go elsewhere. 😉

Or if Ruf releases a stage 1 tuning package that's $10,000 while stage 2 is $30,000 but stage 1 requires 90% of the effort to install on the car, then they'll realize much lower profits on stage 1 sales than stage 2, and they'll probably determine that isn't worth their time, because there are plenty of people willing to spend money on stage 2. 

It's not quite the same in software because as was already said, once you develop the addon you can copy it infinitely with no extra effort. However, if you're paying a coder $X/hour to code a flight model which is the same across all three tiers, and 90% of people buy tier 1 because they can (whereas half of those 90% would have bought the expensive addon if it were the only one available) then you will see less income and therefore get less value out of your coder.

 

[Concodroid 84]

3 minutes ago, eslader said:

It's not quite the same in software because as was already said, once you develop the addon you can copy it infinitely with no extra effort. However, if you're paying a coder $X/hour to code a flight model which is the same across all three tiers, and 90% of people buy tier 1 because they can (whereas half of those 90% would have bought the expensive addon if it were the only one available) then you will see less income and therefore get less value out of your coder.

That's essentially the only place we disagree at this point - will they make the same amount of money, or more, or less?

Because obviously, despite saying

29 minutes ago, Concodroid said:

Now I'm probably the last person to ask about what to include in different stages of a flight simulator addon, so I won't try and come up with something good for each price point.

, I would expect that a tier one mod just be the a 130 dollar flight model, 130 dollar... model, 130 dollar texturing, and basic systems, for around 40 bucks (It's still PMDG). Will that yield more profit, or less?

Thankfully, we don't need to know.

[MarkW 1,493]

2 hours ago, Concodroid said:

I'm not entirely sure what the player numbers of MSFS are - they're high, for sure - and based on pure guesswork, I'd say it's more profitable for a company to release a very good addon for 40 dollars, and have it sell like crazy, than to release a perfect addon for 140

This is true for sure but creates another problem. PMDG is not setup to support 100 times the current user base. They may want to keep it smaller with a higher price so they can still support their customers. 

[eslader 1,784]

13 hours ago, Concodroid said:

I would expect that a tier one mod just be the a 130 dollar flight model, 130 dollar... model, 130 dollar texturing, and basic systems, for around 40 bucks (It's still PMDG). Will that yield more profit, or less?

I was actually thinking about this last night some more. It strikes me that PMDG is already doing the tiered approach. You can pay $140 for the 747 base package, which is just another way of saying tier 1. Then if you want the 747-8 -- tier 2 -- you pay $70 more. And PMDG found a way to add value to that. While a lesser company would simply change the visual model to stretch the hump and fuse and maybe, if they were thinking about it, remove the winglets and add the rakes, PMDG, on the other hand, changed pretty much everything that changed on the real -8. That's a proper tier-2 option for the 747 package, and it works because in order to produce it they actually had to do extra work, thus justifying charging extra for it while not charging *less* for the -400-only tier 1 setup.

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by eslader

[threexgreen 3,139]

I believe the most obvious tier model when it comes to aircraft is how Majestic are doing it with their Q400. They offer the pilot version for the lowest price point, then go higher with the pro edition and finish with the training edition. The extra value (and extra development work) that comes in per tier is the systems depths and the number of features simulated.

This is pure speculation, but I would assume it works for them. An important difference however is that it's one aircraft which is offered in three different tiers, while PMDG may need (?) to do this for several different aircraft, which would be more work if one assumed the basic version would be what they currently offer with their aircraft. If they were to strip the aircraft off some systems depth and features simulated for the basic version, it would probably mean less work this version but I think that's where the argument of reputation comes in. Profit isn't the only thing that makes a company successful and profitable, other aspects like reputation do as well. I have no clue if this would 'damage' their reputation in any way, actually I wouldn't think so since what they're known for would still be offered, but I'm only thinking about this as a layman from an outside perspective.

Edited March 25, 2021 by threegreen
Corrected edition titles.

[WestAir 2,522]

A lot of people are saying FBW and WT have said the SDK is perfectly suited for study level sims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SDK doesn't even allow you to implement a working weather radar, as one single example in a sea of other examples. Obviously MSFS is powerful and has advantages over its competitors - but someone will correct me here if I say you cannot make an study level aircraft, that has 1:1 functionality with a P3D V5 FSLabs or PMDG bird, in this very moment of March 25th, 2021.

[Krakin 5,773]

7 minutes ago, WestAir said:

A lot of people are saying FBW and WT have said the SDK is perfectly suited for study level sims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SDK doesn't even allow you to implement a working weather radar, as one single example in a sea of other examples. Obviously MSFS is powerful and has advantages over its competitors - but someone will correct me here if I say you cannot make an study level aircraft, that has 1:1 functionality with a P3D V5 FSLabs or PMDG bird, in this very moment of March 25th, 2021.

PMDG said the SDK in it's current state is not hindering from releasing complex aircraft so they are now bringing pretty much all of their modules over.

"I have been mostly-mis-quoted ten thousand times this week as having said something along the lines of "the MSFS SDK isn't capable of supporting what we do" or "MSFS isn't capable of supporting what we do." I want to be very clear in stating that this new sim is highly dynamic and changing continually. What may have been true in June of 2020 is not necessarily true any longer. From the standpoint of development, we are not currently seeing any major limitations to prevent us from bringing our product catalog into MSFS."

[WestAir 2,522]

11 minutes ago, Krakin said:

PMDG said the SDK in it's current state is not hindering from releasing complex aircraft so they are now bringing pretty much all of their modules over.

"I have been mostly-mis-quoted ten thousand times this week as having said something along the lines of "the MSFS SDK isn't capable of supporting what we do" or "MSFS isn't capable of supporting what we do." I want to be very clear in stating that this new sim is highly dynamic and changing continually. What may have been true in June of 2020 is not necessarily true any longer. From the standpoint of development, we are not currently seeing any major limitations to prevent us from bringing our product catalog into MSFS."

The amazing crew at FBW said they were in talks with Asobo over getting the SDK to allow them to implement a working weather radar with tilt etc, as they can't do it themselves. I guess this quote from Captain Randazzo means PMDG have a work around that the FBW team haven't figured out, or something. I dunno, I'm just trying to put the pieces together as best I can.
 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by WestAir

[SAS443 1,723]

19 minutes ago, WestAir said:

A lot of people are saying FBW and WT have said the SDK is perfectly suited for study level sims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SDK doesn't even allow you to implement a working weather radar, as one single example in a sea of other examples. Obviously MSFS is powerful and has advantages over its competitors - but someone will correct me here if I say you cannot make an study level aircraft, that has 1:1 functionality with a P3D V5 FSLabs or PMDG bird, in this very moment of March 25th, 2021.

Don't fly FSLA320 then in P3D v5.1 with enhanced atmospherics ON. The radar is not working as intended at all. This charade has been going on since last may. Haven't you noticed this??

https://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?/topic/28572-p5-truesky-and-wx-radar/

[WestAir 2,522]

9 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

Don't fly FSLA320 then in P3D v5.1 with enhanced atmospherics ON. The radar is not working as intended at all. This charade has been going on since last may. Haven't you noticed this??

https://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?/topic/28572-p5-truesky-and-wx-radar/

That's crazy! No I had no idea, I haven't played P3D since MSFS was announced. The link says "EA" is causing the issue for the FSLabs bus. What is EA?

[FlyingInACessna 656]

On 3/21/2021 at 8:35 AM, leprechaunlive said:

Yea aparently the SDK has magically improved overnight 😄

I don’t know if you’ve been following, but nearly every weekly blog update has contained several SDK updates listed, and Asobo has been in direct contact with these 3PDs giving them whatever they need as quickly as possible. The comment about the SDK not being ready was made back around when the sim was released. We’re several months past that now.

[leprechaunlive 1,852]

5 minutes ago, FlyingInACessna said:

I don’t know if you’ve been following, but nearly every weekly blog update has contained several SDK updates listed, and Asobo has been in direct contact with these 3PDs giving them whatever they need as quickly as possible. The comment about the SDK not being ready was made back around when the sim was released. We’re several months past that now.

yea, i dont know if you've been following sarcasm, its been pretty popular for about 3 thousand years 😄 it was a joke, reacting to how suddenly pmdg wakes up when it sees another develloper hitting the jackpot while they are still waiting for "sdk improvements".

i talk to asobo daily, they go to amazing lenght to help us, i dont know if its part of their plan or if the guys we hang out with are doing it in their spare time (kinda looks like this but i dont want to ask them lol) but regardless, they are helping in many ways.

[Oldschool61 38]

On 3/21/2021 at 11:31 AM, blueshark747 said:

Do you foresee hardware devs ever making XBOX compatible yokes/sticks/rudders/throttle quadrants?

What do XBOX console users have so far?

A gamepad and keyboard?

There is already a HOTAS for PC/XBOX and PS4,  I know I use it.  Thrustmaster.

[FlyingInACessna 656]

4 hours ago, leprechaunlive said:

yea, i dont know if you've been following sarcasm, its been pretty popular for about 3 thousand years 😄 it was a joke, reacting to how suddenly pmdg wakes up when it sees another develloper hitting the jackpot while they are still waiting for "sdk improvements".

i talk to asobo daily, they go to amazing lenght to help us, i dont know if its part of their plan or if the guys we hang out with are doing it in their spare time (kinda looks like this but i dont want to ask them lol) but regardless, they are helping in many ways.

I got that it was sarcasm, but the sarcasm I detected was that you were joking about there even being any improvements to the SDK. There have been, and they've been steadily coming each week.

 

Glad we're at least on the same page lol

Edited March 25, 2021 by FlyingInACessna