4 minutes ago, Nocturnal said:

How is ifly the best example when 99% of the sim community owns the ngxu in p3d and zibo (which is a freeware) in xplane ???? Also from where are you getting those figures from? LOL People don't buy and post it on forums/internet "I bought this today", so there is no way to find out about the sales figures unless you are working for them. It's funny how everyone who is asking others to "move on from p3d" are marketing and sales gurus where they can "guess" the sales numbers and hence declaring "p3d is old".

No one is asking others to move on from P3D and the numbers were examples based on personal assumptions to demonstrate the financial viability of an add-on in numbers opposed to emotions. 

It's funny how someone can read something and interpret it so differently from how it was written and subsequently put words in someone's mouth... 

The iFly is the only exclusive add-on released for 5.3 since the 5.3 release hence the best indicator of 5.3 sales.  It is designed with all the latest 5.3 functionality from LM in mind.  Seems to me it should be a valid indicator if there is still a viable market.   

But if you are saying no one will buy something that already exists then why would any dev remain in the P3D market?   It's saturated.  Outside of a couple of add-ons it has everything most people need just re-iterating there is a very limited additional revenue stream in P3D.  All the more reason "as a business" to move to MSFS.  

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by psolk

Sales of iFly's 737 also suffer from the fact that they come after (long after) the launch of the NGXu.

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by Juliet Alpha

If they make the max I will buy it. 

13 minutes ago, Juliet Alpha said:

Sales of iFly's 737 also suffer from the fact that they come after (long after) the launch of the NGXu.

Yes, but one was developed for "legacy" Pre 5.3 P3D, one is brand new for all of the functionality within 5.3 including atmospheric and lighting.  If no one is buying something brand new for 5.3 because they "already have it from years ago" what is the motivation for a developer? 

So basically even developing something exclusively for 5.3 functionality isn't enough to drive sales if it already exists.  So how big is the P3D market really?  It's a niche market within a niche market as I've expressed.  Either you can find the couple of things left undone and hope for revenue streams there or there are no revenue streams in P3D period.   It is just confirming that P3D sales are dead outside niche niche offerings and the writing was on the wall whether people chose to read it or not...  THAT is very different however than the sim itself being dead.  If as you just said, you have what you need then as I did with FS9 and continue to do with P3D you can HAPPILY use what you've got because it's already pretty awesome 🙂 

Which is basically what multiple Dev's have said and why they have moved on.  No emotion just business viability.

Edit:  I'd also think with the animosity expressed here there should be a large number who wouldn't buy from PMDG anyway and would be flocking to iFly.  I actually LOVED their stuff in FS9, it was my go to for years especially with HW support.  

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by psolk

1 hour ago, simbol said:

11 pages on this subject.. but PMDG still working full time on MSFS.. just saying..

 

I don’t understand the point of what you’re trying to say?

I don’t think anyone here is blaming PMDG for working on MSFS products. I mean, just considering the fact that three of the most common and popular Boeing aircraft already have products released in P3D, it makes perfect sense for MSFS to run and get those same products released for MSFS. 

I think what’s being discussed is the potential abandoning of the P3D platform by PMDG. That’s a huge problem. You would have the best aircraft in the world (tied with FSLabs) only being released for a platform whose developers don’t even understand why a historical weather function might be important and catering their product advancements to the same people who are spending daddy’s paycheck on Fortnite skins.

”heyyyy MSFS developers can we have a feature to have the plane fly itself and have an interior cabin so the flight attendant can serve champagne that would be soooo cool”

This isn’t FS9 vs FSX. The latter was the natural evolution of the platform with every core competency built in. Everyone knew they would upgrade eventually when their computer power allowed them to. Everyone here can run MSFS, but chooses not to (yet at least) because we want to fly a simulator, not a game. And if PMDG only wants to support the game, then that’s a huge blow to our hobby. 
 

 

1 minute ago, micstatic said:

If they make the max I will buy it. 

I'd be the same. PMDG in my mind are digging themselves further under ground by putting out such statements and also completely abandoning their products. Now, I don't want to be a fire starter here with this. Just my opinion. I am sure there is a business side of this that all makes sense but as their customer for probably as long as since FS2004 days I feel very much left behind... and also after purchasing their 200ER which I absolutely didn't mind paying for I expected a bit more than just hey we are now 100 per cent focusing on something else and you guys are nothing for us anymore. If one pays for something you also have an expectation that they at least continue to put out updates for it. And again I would not mind paying for it, since they would be working on it then. But this is ridiculous from them.

29 minutes ago, psolk said:

No one is asking others to move on from P3D and the numbers were examples based on personal assumptions to demonstrate the financial viability of an add-on in numbers opposed to emotions. 

It's funny how someone can read something and interpret it so differently from how it was written and subsequently put words in someone's mouth... 

The iFly is the only exclusive add-on released for 5.3 since the 5.3 release hence the best indicator of 5.3 sales.  It is designed with all the latest 5.3 functionality from LM in mind.  Seems to me it should be a valid indicator if there is still a viable market.   

But if you are saying no one will buy something that already exists then why would any dev remain in the P3D market?   It's saturated.  Outside of a couple of add-ons it has everything most people need just re-iterating there is a very limited additional revenue stream in P3D.  All the more reason "as a business" to move to MSFS.  

We all here know that MSFS is the new fish in the market and of course most devs will try to get their current products in MSFS as soon as they can. For scenery developers this would not be much of a hassle, but for high fidelity airliners, is that really the right platform for them? Don't get me wrong, I love MSFS and I use if often for casual GA flying. But its still far from being a "sim" in many aspects. Half the time their weather is broken, if the sim window is not the main window the controller stops working, and the most annoying of them all, the issue where the mouse pointer mysteriously disappears and to bring it back you have to keep hitting "ESC". These are just a few of the "UI" issues with the sim. Is it a wise decision to completely ignore your old customers and move on to a broken platform?

Let's not forget the big FLOP that the PMDG DC-6 was for XBOX where they had spent countless hours on it. That means they spent tons from their own pocket and getting $0 in return. Very wise business decision that was.

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by Nocturnal

3 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

So you missed the Black Friday sale 21% off .

Evidently I did

20 minutes ago, DChockey08 said:

I don’t understand the point of what you’re trying to say?

People keep going on and on.. but they will not be able to change any decision or PMDG road map.. at least we have been told where things are heading.. time to accept it and move on..

S.

22 minutes ago, Nocturnal said:

We all here know that MSFS is the new fish in the market and of course most devs will try to get their current products in MSFS as soon as they can. For scenery developers this would not be much of a hassle, but for high fidelity airliners, is that really the right platform for them? Don't get me wrong, I love MSFS and I use if often for casual GA flying. But its still far from being a "sim" in many aspects. Half the time their weather is broken, if the sim window is not the main window the controller stops working, and the most annoying of them all, the issue where the mouse pointer mysteriously disappears and to bring it back you have to keep hitting "ESC". These are just a few of the "UI" issues with the sim. Is it a wise decision to completely ignore your old customers and move on to a broken platform?

Let's not forget the big FLOP that the PMDG DC-6 was for XBOX where they had spent countless hours on it. That means they spent tons from their own pocket and getting $0 in return. Very wise business decision that was.

1.  PMDG stated themselves they were surprised by the DC6 sales and that within it's first hour it sold more than all other copies in every sim platform combined.  It was a wise business decision to move to MSFS within an hour of their first release.  

As for PMDG getting $0 in return it was actually MS that took it on the chin.  PMDG did not lose their revenue and the apparent issues have since been addressed via the work on the 737 so again, yes a wise decision to move while the platform is maturing to influence direction as they apparently already have with the 3rd party AC API passing WXR information now.  If they waited for all the stability issues with P3D as a platform to go away they would have had to wait years for a 64 bit architecture yet they continued to develop for a broken 32 bit Sim that couldn't even handle the VAS limits of it's own add-ons...  

I'm not getting into the sim vs game debate.

 

Quote

 

To make amends, Microsoft has announced they would like to offer refunds to those who purchased the PMDG DC-6 for Xbox. The only way to request a refund is through the Zendesk ticket portal offered by Microsoft. You will be unable to contact PMDG via their support channels to get a refund as it is beyond their control.

Whilst this is hugely disappointing news for many, Robert did say that once the fix has been issued, the introductory pricing will be reactivated in the spirit of fairness for those who may have missed out. There’s no timeline promised so far for when the fix will be released and the DC-6 will be back on sale through the in-sim Marketplace for Xbox, other than it may take a few months.

Despite this setback, Robert added that “I am not at all concerned that DC-6 is being removed from Xbox beyond just a short period until the fix reaches distribution.“ He continued, “I am likewise not at all concerned that we won’t have the 737, 777 and 747 product lines on Xbox in concert with their Marketplaces releases.“

It’s important to note that this bug is not present with the PC version if you purchased either from the in-sim Marketplace or directly through PMDG’s website. This issue and the refunds are only for those who purchased the DC-6 for Xbox."

 

 

2 hours ago, Benbo said:

So many PMDG lap dogs over on their forum more interested in jumping on peoples backs for not adding a signature to their posts,whats all the about.

I reckon there are one or two people who scour all new posts on there, desperate to find one with no signature.

1 hour ago, psolk said:

1.  PMDG stated themselves they were surprised by the DC6 sales and that  

 

 

The so-called flop of the DC-6 in MSFS is one of the urban legends that the uninformed (I am polite here) love to spread. Like MSFS being non IFR, like the lack of SDK preventing high level aircraft and so and so forth. I fully understand that you could prefer P3D over MSFS (Greg and some others made a good case for it in another thread) but at least it should be for the good reasons.

In Other Areas of PMDG:
In other areas of PMDG, here are a few things that are actively afoot:

We are preparing to beta test a pretty significant update to the 747 product line for P3D users. Quite a bit of initial testing has already been accomplished, but another round is needed in order to vet changes to LNAV and the flight director control laws that have been implemented. We are hoping to get positive feedback from our testers and then the update will roll out to users via the Operations Center. I will obviously let you know it is available with an announcement.

Speaking of the Operations Center: One of the things that caught us on the back foot was just how complex it would be to get livery handling for MSFS implemented. There was really not much information available for us to pre-work the solution, so we had to wait for the PMDG DC-6 to publish in marketplace in order to get live test cases against which we could build. We made the cardinal mistake of thinking, "how hard can it be?" After all, we have done this for a decade across multiple platforms, and Asobo has clearly invested time and energy into unifying MSFS in order to ensure that a single process works for all cases and across all platforms. Except for liveries. Yeah. Except for that.

I'll spare you the long and languid details, but we are currently doing internal testing on a version that we are happy with. We are also tweaking and tuning the livery import/export process a bit to make it more useful to PMDG customers by ensuring the functionality in MSFS and P3D is as tightly knit as possible so that you don't have to learn new techniques as you move back and forth between the two platforms.

Note: Just because someone will misunderstand what I just said- I am talking about user interface issues here, not the liveries themselves. P3D liveries and MSFS liveries are totally different and unrelated to one another. You cannot use an MSFS livery in P3D, nor the other way around... Just to be clear!

This is from the January update for 2022, that`s  not giving up on P3D from my reading.

PS it will be interesting to see what affect DX12 will have on MSFS as it`s not fully implemented in the sim yet and the updates are already having effect on addons and causing a problem.

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by G-RFRY

58 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

The so-called flop of the DC-6 in MSFS is one of the urban legends that the uninformed (I am polite here) love to spread. Like MSFS being non IFR, like the lack of SDK preventing high level aircraft and so and so forth. I fully understand that you could prefer P3D over MSFS (Greg and some others made a good case for it in another thread) but at least it should be for the good reasons.

Hi Dominique,

I would not go as far as saying the current MSFS SDK is preventing high level aircraft (there are already plenty of very good products available), but it does have some limitations that would prevent certain features already available to customers in XP11 and P3D to be implemented currently for MSFS. We keep asking Microsoft to provide these, many requests are in review, others approved and scheduled as per road maps and others are set as not planned or not possible at this time (aka ask later maybe in 2023 / 2024). You can see the MSFS SDK Q&A released yesterday to get an insight of some of these things.

Personally I am looking forward for the upcoming Weather API (Read only at this time) + Terrain API, which would allow very nice weather radar instruments among many other things to be developed. So things are improving for sure, but not as fast as we (developers) would like / need.. but it is what it is right? what can you do.

For the rest of the guys, the reality is, each platform offers something different, and each platform provides advantages and disadvantages.. it is pointless to compare them. The results you will get with each, will always be be "different" vs the other, these differences are not worse or better, they are just different.. what is really bad for your personal needs, might not be bad for another person needs, and what it is a "must" for you, it is not for another person.

I have seen group of friends getting into such debates of one platform vs another, each side trying to convince the other what is best, etc. the amount of energy on these discussions is tremendous and it never reaches any positive conclusion, in fact most of the time people even stops talking to each other because they can't agree on terms.

My advise to everyone, just respect what the other person think, if they like P3D fine.. let then enjoy.. if they like XP11 perfect let them enjoy it.. if they like MSFS, fine let them be happy with it, what matters is to stick to what you like, life is too short..

All the best,

S.

 

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by simbol

15 hours ago, psolk said:

And to others, no, FSX could not do everything FS9 did day 1 nor could P3D even do everything FS9 could do day 1 because the premise of staying with FS9 was specific add-ons not being available in FSX or P3D, sunk investment and performance of said add-ons with full AI and details turned up.  In some cases in took years for the same FS9 add-on to be available in FSX or P3D, even longer for performance with said add-ons to be on par and heck it's only 5.3 that people are talking about exceptional performance in P3D and being able to really max out the settings. 

Since I guess that's responding to my point, I'll clarify that I was talking about the capabilities of the base sim, not add-ons or performance. For example, if you had a setup based on popped-out gauges on separate displays and with multiple views across multiple monitors in FS9, you could still have that in FSX - it had feature parity. MSFS removed that capability entirely, which means people who relied on it either can't migrate or have to accept losing that functionality. I am critical of MS and Asobo for not making complete feature parity with FSX at least a goal for the project from Day 1. I remember well the FSX (and P3D) performance issues and I remember FS9 fondly for its stellar performance on the hardware of the day when FSX came out (though, IIRC, wasn't it also criticised when it first came out for poor performance on the systems of *that* day? After all, CPU speed was pretty much still doubling every 18 months back then).