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abrams_tank

Randazzo from PMDG on demand for P3D products

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We beating this horse again?.. sales drop because simply put no enough new people are joining the P3D market.. and this market shrinks further and further every year.. this is confirmed by NaviGraph pool results.

It is very difficult right now to assess if a new product will sell great for P3D.. I have released new products for P3D during 2021 and the numbers were really low.. if the trend continues, 2023 would be more than half of 2022, making it very risky to invest 12 months of development for something new.. in business you measure risk vs revenue.. folks, it is what its.. developers are following the decisions from your own wallets.. there is no evil here, bad intentions or anything like that.. 

Don't forget we developers suffer the same faith as many of you, our cost of living increases, we are affected by inflation, we are affected by energy and petrol cost increases, food, etc. I live here in the UK, we are facing 50% increase in energy (Electricity + Gas) + a tax increase for public health services, the cost of living has sky rocketed and also the cost of petrol for our cars, the cost of public transports, everything!. Anyone living in the UK understand what I am talking about.. and with all the pressure on my back, sales for P3D are just going down and down everyday.. if it wasn't because I have a full time job, I would have been force to shutdown the flight sim company and do something else.. now big developing firms such as PMDG has employees, which also suffer from daily cost of living increasing.. and PMDG needs to retain those workers, there are highly skilled, it is not easy to find people that know how to develop for flight simulators, so they need to increase their salaries and working conditions, otherwise they would go just somewhere else.. it is life, would you not quit your Job if your company don't increase your salaries for 3 to 4 years? think about it. so why do you think it would be different for PMDG employees, Aerosoft employees, Carenado Employees, etc.? how you guys really think they would be able to keep doing this if they focus on a shrinking market? now if the market was not shrinking things would be different of course.

Having said that, personally I keep monitoring the situation while also moving forward, SU8, SU9 and SU10 -SU12 will be key to see where things are moving in combination to what LM plans to do for V6.. but for now, with the current stats, doing something new for P3D makes no sense at all, having said that, there is not reason to drop any support for products under P3D, the P3D market might be slow and shrinking at the moment, but it is very much still alive with an proximate 30% to 35% of the original P3D flight sim market.. so as a developer, exiting the platform entirely at this point in time is a very bad business decision in my view, you have to be prepared for a possible "rebound", V6 will be the right time to take a decision based on people reactions to it.

And remember, flight sim has been always a niche market.. numbers of users are not as big as you guy think.. this is for all platforms, P3D XP or MSFS.. 

S.

 

 

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Thanks Simbol.  That was a very informative post you made there.  I wonder what you think of the numbers PMDG is experiencing.  This is Randazzo's quote:

Quote

Paul- The hard reality is that demand for P3D products has evaporated. We saw a 30% decline in month-over-month revenue that started a week after MSFS was announced. Sales for P3D products have departed downward steadily since then and now muster about 25% of what they did even a year ago

So PMDG was already seeing 30% month over month decline in revenue in the fall to winter of 2020 for their P3D products.  So by January of 2021, the revenue from P3D products had already undergone several months of declining revenue.  Then Randazzo further says that the revenue from P3D in January/February of 2022 is 25% of what it was in January/February of 2021.  This could potentially put the sales of PMDG's P3D products today as low as say, 10% of what they were before MSFS was released.  

Do you have any other insights into these numbers from PMDG?  It's always great to hear from a 3rd party developer since you are offering inside information, while the rest of us are guessing from the outside.

Edited by Ray Proudfoot
Long quoted post removed

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43 minutes ago, simbol said:

And remember, flight sim has been always a niche market.. numbers of users are not as big as you guy think.. this is for all platforms, P3D XP or MSFS.. 

S.

ive been saying that for over 10 years on here.  they wont listen simbol.  they wont accept it.

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44 minutes ago, simbol said:

Don't forget we developers suffer the same faith as many of you, our cost of living increases, we are affected by inflation, we are affected by energy and petrol cost increases, food, etc. I live here in the UK, we are facing 50% increase in energy (Electricity + Gas) + a tax increase for public health services, the cost of living has sky rocketed and also the cost of petrol for our cars, the cost of public transports, everything!. Anyone living in the UK understand what I am talking about..

this is just the icing on the cake of what to expect in the next 20 years.  you better hope you dont get sick

anyways back to topic.

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6 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

That was a very informative post you made there.  I wonder what you think of the numbers PMDG is experiencing.

I am not in any position or means to be able confirm or speak on behalf of other developers sales numbers, I can only speak for my own.. and they are dreadful.. the majority of my sales comes via many other 3rd party developers (I work with many and I have many partnerships where I participate in projects and I get royalties from their sales) and due to NDA's I can't reveal anything as you must understand.

But for example AI Lights Reborn Pro, has sold only 2 copies this month..back in 2020 I would have already sold already by the 7th of the month about 30 copies (15 times more in 1 week).. each year the numbers just shrink further. 

There is also a snow ball effect, every time a developer announces is leaving P3D (Milviz, Aeroplane Heaven, etc.) my overall sales get another hit, is like when these news comes in, people expend less in the platform, juts like they are losing faith in P3D and therefore they are investing less..

The market is "as sleep", I did a promotional free copies of AI Lights Reborn Pro during Christmas, there were about 400 people that joined the raffle, however they would not buy it.. this confirms in my views what's happening, most people are sitting back and waiting.. they are waiting what will MSFS do.. what LM will do.. lots of uncertain in the market is making people think very carefully what they do with their money.. 

S.

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all the above & more…

as a relatively new flight simmer - this is a PMDG titled thread - I was burnt by PMDG when my purchased PMDG 737 (all variants) was not made compatible with P3Dv5…

it was a 2 year old purchase for me (bought from Aerosoft shop) - & then rendered useless,

I regard it as a waste of about USD$200 of PMDG purchased product…

how much effort would Randazzo et al need to make to make my PMDG NGX P3Dv5 compatible?

not much effort actually- I would have thought…

 

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2 hours ago, simbol said:

And remember, flight sim has been always a niche market.. numbers of users are not as big as you guy think.. this is for all platforms, P3D XP or MSFS.. 

Spot on MS are not interested in numbers as Phil spencer said he`s most interested in XBOX and PC game pass subscription service with a wide verity of games in the catalogue to suit anyone.

  Microtransactions and DLCs Generated 61% of Activision Blizzard revenue for 2021 (guru3d.com)

This is why he purchased Activision makes more money than all the flight sims together. And if MS do another flight sim some time in the future don`t be surprised if it`s a game pass exclusive title.  


 

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It is also worth noting that some of us are quite happy with what we already have. I saw no reason at all to purchase the NGXu when the existing NGX is still a superb product that I thoroughly enjoy flying. Since I was not hooked by the marketing exploits of Microsoft, that $100 rebate for the NG3 was essentially meaningless to me. Of course, I am also still using P3Dv4, which means that I was not convinced that upgrading to v5 was worth it either. Yes, both of these products may be more advanced (in different ways) than P3Dv4, but the fact remains that I have worked long and hard to build "Flight Unlimited Great Britain", and I have no intention of throwing all of that away until I feel the need to do so.

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Christopher Low

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54 minutes ago, craigeaglefire said:

all the above & more…

as a relatively new flight simmer - this is a PMDG titled thread - I was burnt by PMDG when my purchased PMDG 737 (all variants) was not made compatible with P3Dv5…

it was a 2 year old purchase for me (bought from Aerosoft shop) - & then rendered useless,

I regard it as a waste of about USD$200 of PMDG purchased product…

how much effort would Randazzo et al need to make to make my PMDG NGX P3Dv5 compatible?

not much effort actually- I would have thought…

 

Any effort that does not return revenue is wasted man hours, operating expenses and a net loss for them even if it makes the limited P3D user base feel better. 

I'd love to know how the iFly did for V5 exclusively.  My "guesstimate" is between 100-250 copies sold total if they were lucky...   I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually less than 100 copies sold.  That's not a business anymore it's charity work for the quote/unquote hardcore simmers 😉  

My guess is the ratio of P3D users to MSFS is ~1:1000   For every 1 person still using/making purchases for P3D you have 1000 in MSFS.   Just a guesstimate but I wouldn't be surprised if that was THAT large of a disparity.   Like I will sell more copies in MSFS in a day than P3D in a year...

I'm fairly certain their decisions are made on numbers and facts, not emotions.  

My goodness some of the P3D users sound so much like myself 10 years ago clutching on to my FS9 and it's add-ons until they were pulled from my dead PC's HDD.   I mean it is like watching history repeat itself 🙂 

 

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I mean, let's not be surprised about this, but this was going to happen based on their communication with the community over the last 1 year or so. It's funny when developers or companies start crying (no offense) over "sales figures" when they choose to completely ignore their own actions.

I had posted a thread back in May 2021 and it's almost 9 months since then and none of their Boeings are still out for MSFS. All they did for one year was keep going back and forth over the progress of NG3. Let's go back to May 2021 and dig a bit of what was said by their chief. They were fully confident of releasing NG3 in a couple of months, followed by 747 and 777 by early 2022. These were the exact words and oh well we are well into 2022 and there's nothing except the same dramatic announcements of 1000 words minimum followed by laughs, giggles and some pat on the back. In fact, now they also don't know when they will release it LOL.

Now during all these times, there was literally no update about the pending issues with the P3D issues. The LNAV was supposed to come out in Summer 2021 as mentioned in one of their newspaper announcement but I knew it that they will never fix that. So basically this means that they are going to completely ignore P3D and sit back and relax till MSFS is set for their planes no matter how long will that take.

After all this, are they really surprised about the sales going down? LOL.

Link to the thread mentioned above. https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/600841-is-pmdg-indirectly-snubbing-p3d/

.

Edited by Nocturnal
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I said it once I'll say it again, RSR posts are just false promises posts, and have been since I became their customer 10 or 15 years ago. That's why I won't spend another cent on his software, in MSFS or any other platform. Like someone said earlier, replace RSR name with MK and you will not see a difference. 

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2 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

It's always great to hear from a 3rd party developer since you are offering inside information, while the rest of us are guessing from the outside.

Sales for P3D product are declining for everybody but, I must say I'm quite shocked to hear ( first from Milwiz and then now from PMDG ) by HOW MUCH.

I mean, if we went down to 2-3 sales per week ( like Milwiz said ), or to 25% of what they were only a year before ( like PMDG said ), not only we would have announced abandoning P3D WAY EARLIER, but we would have gone already bankrupt in the meantime!

So yes, we saw declining sales for P3D, but nowhere near as dramatic as that, and they are still somewhat significant, today. We still sell *some* stuff for FS9! In fact, I can safely say we surely sell more FS9 stuff than what Milwiz said they are selling for P3D right now. 

In our case, it's more about the future: what if they would continue to slow down ? How they'll look like in 2 years time ? Because THAT'S what makes all the difference when deciding to start a new project from scratch, you can't use the current sales, but anticipate how many users will be left when your the product you are starting now will be out, perhaps 18-24 months later.

I suspect in case of PMDG, price is a big factor. I had to buy the 777 for P3D ( even if I already bought it for FSX, but zero upgrade price ), and I used it for exactly 20 minutes, which is the time I need to create a GSX profile for it, so I had to remember how expensive it is, for a product that has been released years ago.

If you want to see some sales from FSX/P3D products, you must do something with pricing. As an example, when GSX came out in 2012, in addition of being vastly less capable than it is now, it used to cost 39$, while today it's 24$ and you can get it bundled with the Level 2 Expansion for 34$. KLAX ( our current best selling scenery ) came out for 39$, today it's 18$ and everything made before 2010, it's now 9.99$, this before any periodic sale so, on average, we basically halved prices for products that has been out for years.

Price is important. I do recall when in 2008, when it was clear that Blu-ray was "winning" the format war against HD-DVD, I still bought lots of movies in HD-DVD, because I always liked the format, and stock was discounted so heavily, that I could get 4-5 movies in HD-DVD for the price of a single one on Blu-ray, with no visible benefit for BD ( this was before Blu-ray was extended to 50GB and many years before it supported 4K ) . Of course, both formats eventually lost to streaming, so even my movie collection in Blu-ray is now as obsolete as my HD-DVD movie collection, but at least I paid way less for that!

Edited by virtuali
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9 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Because THAT'S what makes all the difference when deciding to start a new project from scratch, you can't use the current sales, but anticipate how many users will be left when your the product you are starting now will be out, perhaps 18-24 months later.

This..that's the key thing..people need to understand a project needs time to be developed and released.. so with current numbers in decline.. makes more sense develop for a platform were numbers are increasing rather for a platform were sales are dropping.

Listen to Umberto... there is a reason why I still support P3D 100%.. and will continue to do, so I am not dropping the platform, but at the same time, I am on the fence regarding a new entire project for P3D at this point in time, specially after the results of "new releases during 2021", so sales predictions down the road for 2023 / 2024, are not good enough vs the effort vs investing the same time to develop something for another platform instead.

S.

 

 

Edited by simbol
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22 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Sales for P3D product are declining for everybody but, I must say I'm quite shocked to hear ( first from Milwiz and then now from PMDG ) by HOW MUCH.

I mean, if we went down to 2-3 sales per week ( like Milwiz said ), or to 25% of what they were only a year before ( like PMDG said ), not only we would have announced abandoning P3D WAY EARLIER, but we would have gone already bankrupt in the meantime!

So yes, we saw declining sales for P3D, but nowhere near as dramatic as that, and they are still somewhat significant, today. We still sell *some* stuff for FS9! In fact, I can safely say we surely sell more FS9 stuff than what Milwiz said they are selling for P3D right now. 

Yes, the decline in sales for Milviz and PMDG for P3D is quite shocking.  

Anyways, a really nice thanks to @virtuali and @simbol for giving us some firsthand information from a 3rd party dev on this topic! I find your comments on this subject to be very informative and the best source of information in this thread 👍

 

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