I don't clearly understand the question here. most from FSX  or P3D have transferred to MSFS. ORBX, Flightbeam, FlyTampa FS Dreamteam //42 (except Chaseplane) etc. only other developer moved from X-Plane was Inibuilds sponsored by MS.

Only other major players that are missing the boat are FS Labs and  Majestic (Q400).

 

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by JBDB-MD80

4 hours ago, JBDB-MD80 said:

I don't clearly understand the question here. most from FSX  or P3D have transferred to MSFS. ORBX, Flightbeam, FlyTampa FS Dreamteam //42 (except Chaseplane) etc. only other developer moved from X-Plane was Inibuilds sponsored by MS.

Only other major players that are missing the boat are FS Labs and  Majestic (Q400).

It's not just the former companies that switched over to MSFS. You have PMDG and iniBuilds implying that they have hired more people and are a much larger company right now during the MSFS era, than before the MSFS era. So even for the former companies, they have expanded, which means the market in MSFS is much bigger.  But the bigger market in MSFS may lead to new 3rd party developers, both freeware and payware.  Two good examples of new 3rd party developers are Fenix and FBW.

Also, I may have missed FSLTL? Are they a new 3rd party developer too? Anyways, I want to get a sense of how much larger the 3rd party development scene is for MSFS, than before MSFS. And of course, this includes the new 3rd party developers, not just the former ones.

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

I did some searching and I can't find any history of FSLTL for P3D.  Can someone from P3D confirm if FSLTL is a new 3rd party developer?

50 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

did some searching and I can't find any history of FSLTL for P3D.  Can someone from P3D confirm if FSLTL is a new 3rd party developer?

They never existed in P3D, they are the "new breed" of developers (same like FBW and WT) 

Something I noticed, Navigraph since MSFS release, they are rapidly growing and their offerings are expanding rapidly. I don't recall that was the case during P3D and XP days. Nice times 

An interesting question and from the scenery perspective the influx of many new names was from what I believe the ease of getting your scenery into the sim, both from a creative process as well commercially via the resellers.

With the release of MSFS we were presented with a very user friendly SDK (relatively speaking compared to others) that allowed easy object placement, creation of taxiway/aprons etc. It was all the familiar ESP tools like Instant Scenery/ADE/SBX all rolled into one. 

What I found from my experience is that these lesser known airport scenery developer names came with an interest in flightsim having dabbled around with development and some from working mainly in XPlane. So now presented with a platform with fairly low barriers to entry and a massive uptake in users (and revenue) no wonder we saw a big influx of new scenery devs.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in some dubious practices by some that have exploited the situation. And some have withered away realising that the effort was not really worth the reward. 

1 hour ago, omarsmak30 said:

Something I noticed, Navigraph since MSFS release, they are rapidly growing and their offerings are expanding rapidly. I don't recall that was the case during P3D and XP days. Nice times 

That's interesting. I wonder if Navigraph also hired some more employees. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Logically, if MSFS expanded the flight simulation market, and PMDG and iniBuilds have hired a lot more employees from their increased revenue and profit, I can see that Navigraph sales have also gone up and they may have hired more employees as well.

22 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

How does the 3rd party dev scene for MSFS now, compare to the last 10 years before MSFS came out (ie. from 2010 to 2020)? Were there as many add-on developers as there are now, even if they were making add-ons for FSX/P3D/XP in the 10 years before MSFS?

The biggest difference between back then and now is that with MSFS 2020 you don't actually need to buy any addons. 

Starting withF FS9, right down to P3D - upon installation you immediately needed to spend $500, just to get the sim from terrible to mediocre looking. 

To be honest, with the release of MSFS I have spent a tiny fraction of what I shelled out previously. 

I can see this reflected in my Simmarket account - up to the release of MSFS, I have about 17 pages of addons - after MSFS came out, I bought maybe 3 or 4 addons. 

Same with Orbx.

Remember, you used to have to pay for raindrops!

I still consider payware airports to be a pre-requisite.  The default airports have improved vastly, but there is still a large gap between the more premium addon airports.  One thing I still miss from p3d is the way things like the airport pavement looked.  MSFS is superior in most ways, but their use of projected mesh has made most airports look strange in certain ways compared to versions of the same airport in p3d by the same dev.  Also the way LOD's are handled in the airport environment creates annoying things like very late loading PAPI's etc.  But to the point of the OP.  It can be argued we are in fact simming in the golden era.  Especially this year when so many wished for aircraft are released.  

42 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

you used to have to pay for raindrops!

Just required a change to one of P3D's settings files to make rain appear much more realistically.

Otherwise, yes. Gone are the days of spending $500 off the bat to make the sim look and fly acceptably, thankfully.

50 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

To be honest, with the release of MSFS I have spent a tiny fraction of what I shelled out previously. 

I can see this reflected in my Simmarket account - up to the release of MSFS, I have about 17 pages of addons - after MSFS came out, I bought maybe 3 or 4 addons. 

Same with Orbx.

Remember, you used to have to pay for raindrops!

When I was searching about FSLTL's history, I came upon some information that a comparable add-on for a "sim that must not be named," cost something like over $30 USD for that add-on.  And then I started to read some comments abut that $30 USD add-on, and a commenter that owned that $30 add-on said FSLTL was better anyways.

This is truly added value, IMO.  People that aren't using FSLTL are getting a product that is worth $30 USD or more, and they are getting it for free. And if you don't like FSLTL, you can always use AIG, which is also free! This is one of the benefits of having a huge 3rd party development scene, especially a 3rd party development scene that includes a lot of freeware developers.

I'm not going to complain about free, since I think a lot of developers should be compensated for their work. But it's still nice to have some developers like FSLTL, AIG, FBW, etc, that are giving away top tier free add-ons that you would normally pay money for.

Another side benefit is because of the increased competition and bigger market for MSFS, add-ons are also much cheaper. Can't complain about cheaper either 🤣.

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

People were happily using AIG for free in p3d too.

On 3/17/2024 at 5:32 PM, Fiorentoni said:

Aamir from Fenix once showed off his calculations that CaptainSim's Frankenstein aircraft likely have a 2000% (!) higher net profit than the Fenix

That's likely.

When Microsoft released the bestselling addons of the Marketplace (I wish they released it before???), apart for the sad consideration as a scenery developer as well that very few airports made it to the top 100, the things that most shocked us was the "Platinum/Gold" tiers, which so much stuff that, when it came out, was immediately labeled as borderline scam, no names, you all know who they are. 

The other thing that puzzled me, a lot, is how much more popular the military airplanes are compared to the "mainstream" idea that tubeliners are the only ones that matters, which is even more strange, considering military planes sold on the Marketplace must comply with the limitation of not showing (let alone have it working) any weapons.

To think that, we had TWO airplane projects (two very popular Airbus, one still not done...), that we started, which we decided to SCRAP, after reading all the negative comments saying lightweight products more catered to the Xbox users shouldn't exists and would ruin the developer reputation in the long run, so we decided to focus on GSX, which took away all our available time (and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future), because we were lead to believe that, either something is "study-level" or it shouldn't even exists.

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by virtuali

11 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Also, I may have missed FSLTL? Are they a new 3rd party developer too?

How about PMS50 and TDS? Are they new 3rd party developers too?  Flight1 and Reality-XP were popular in the P3D space. Now they're AWOL. I wonder what happened to them. One would thing they would have had the experience developing avionics and could quickly develop for MSFS.

24 minutes ago, virtuali said:

because we were lead to believe that, either something is "study-level" or it shouldn't even exists.

Yea, this is bit of a strange mentality that seems dominant here on AVSIM. It is not the reality and I suspect there is a healthy profit to be made in providing more entry-level aircraft. In my case, back in the FSX days, I distinctly remember deciding not to purchase PMDG because the reviews talked about the many steps needed to get the aircraft started, etc., and I wanted to learn other things and not be burdened by having to go through checklists and learn how do do everything properly. I was learning more basic things about aircraft, flying and aviation and was not at all interested in that kind of complexity. But little by little as I learned I came to appreciate the fidelity and the striving for realism, but it took time and I am glad there were less complex aircraft that I could gradually learn and step up from. Today, in the GA world, where I do most of my flying these days, I will not even purchase an aircraft that does not have modelled systems and a wear-and-tear failure system -- the 414 and HJet, for example, sit idle in my hanger because they don't grab my attention any longer, my time is in the Comanche, DA42, M500 and TBM850 now. 

All this to say I completely appreciate the market for low to medium fidelity aircraft.