1 hour ago, virtuali said:

To think that, we had TWO airplane projects (two very popular Airbus, one still not done...), that we started, which we decided to SCRAP,

I think you made the right choice. It's similar to the choice Milviz did giving up their P3D product line to focus on MSFS. With so many items showing up on the market... the consumer would eventually flock to a product that "just works" ... think Apple vs the gazillion Linux distributions available for free or almost free. 

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

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

That's only true for some developers.

Let's not kid ourselves, LatinVFR, CaptainSim, Bredok and Taburet (among others) have flooded the market with cheap, low effort add-ons which are selling because people don't know any better or they do know, but these products are cheap.

I love the Fenix A320 and A2A Comanche aircraft and Flightbeam, Pyreegue, Jo Sund, Marcus Nyberg and FlyTampa sceneries. I am in this hobby because these add-ons exist at such a high level.

My fear is that devs can see where the greater profit margins are and feel incentivised to move from high- to mid-quality or mid- to low-quality products. That wouldn't be a surprise, though it would be very disappointing.

22 hours ago, F737MAX said:

looking at you Taburet, Illuminators and South Oak Co.)

Oh I don't know? I'm quite fond of the UK birds and cows mods. Not that they show up very often...They used to, but now maybe they've flown away and the belching cows have been slaughtered in favour of insect protein.😂

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by jarmstro

1 hour ago, F737MAX said:

people don't know any better or they do know,

Or maybe.. some people are okay with just flying around in the arcadeish sense. The community is large enough where there’s more than just the high-fidelity market to enter into.
 

The idea that devs may just opt to only to simple aircraft due to sales doesn’t really gain traction considering the 737 and A320 from respective devs have garnered a copious amount of revenue. Much like how JustFlight makes aircraft for the classic market (even though the modern market is more lucrative) and continues to do so while a lot of people don’t think they make enough sales, they clearly do cause otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it. 
 

in short, there’s money to be had from all types of simmers, I’m certainly not worried. 

On 3/17/2024 at 9:00 AM, Matt Sdeel said:

Edit: A more likely scenario, developers from all previous sims flocked to MSFS creating a seemingly bigger market for the platform

There have been just a handful that jumped from XP to MSFS. 

I haven't seen anything close to "flocking", tho 🤙

3 hours ago, F737MAX said:

My fear is that devs can see where the greater profit margins are and feel incentivised to move from high- to mid-quality or mid- to low-quality products. That wouldn't be a surprise, though it would be very disappointing

I'm not seeing this.

If anything, I believe the trend is exactly opposite, even on the mid-level add-ons coming from new(er) devs.

There always has been and always will be low-value add-ons.

There's more now, sure, but the other devs who are putting out high quality stuff seem to be steadily taking their products up-market.

E.g., Just Flight are better than ever, BlueBird is taking their 757 from casual to full fidelity, FSRs 500, black box, etc.

Same thing happening in X-Plane & DCS World. Fidelity is steadily rising across the board.

2 hours ago, Lucky38i said:

The idea that devs may just opt to only to simple aircraft due to sales doesn’t really gain traction

Not sales, profit. You can have fewer sales, but still make far more profit from reducing the quality to mid-tier because less time is spent on development.

Anyway, I'm not here to gate keep.

DC Designs' Concorde and LatinVFR’s A321neo and A330-900neo are Platinum products on Marketplace as they are accessible to people who are starting out or because learning a complex airliner is too taxing for a free-time activity.

But I fully understand why Umberto is disappointed when the Bredok 737 and F-22 Raptor are Gold products, ahead of quality Bronze selling ones such as Blackbird Simulation’s 310R, Flying Iron Simulatos Bf109G-6 and Just Flight’s PA-28.

 

Edited March 18, 20242 yr by F737MAX
Grammar

4 hours ago, F737MAX said:

My fear is that devs can see where the greater profit margins are and feel incentivised to move from high- to mid-quality or mid- to low-quality products. That wouldn't be a surprise, though it would be very disappointing.

Money isn’t always everything.  Doing what you love can also be a powerful incentive, especially when owning your own business.

8 hours ago, Matt Sdeel said:

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.

I believe that the guy that does TDS is the very same who did the Flight1 GTN (could be wrong though). RXP didn't seem to manage to make the transition. 

 

G

12 hours ago, F737MAX said:

My fear is that devs can see where the greater profit margins are and feel incentivised to move from high- to mid-quality or mid- to low-quality products. That wouldn't be a surprise, though it would be very disappointing.

I don't think you need to fear this. Randazzo is on record for saying PMDG's sales of the DC-6 for MSFS outsold all the PMDG DC-6 for FSX, P3D, and XP without hours. And when the PMDG 737-700 was released for MSFS, the demand was so high, it took down the PMDG servers. The same for A2A's Comanche last year, their servers ran into trouble too because of all the sales they got when the Comanche went on sale for MSFS. And if you were here for the Fenix release back in 2022, Avsim and pretty much all the other flight sim forums were congested with Fenix posts (leading some users of the MSFS forum at Avsim to get very irate and complain to the admins that the Fenix posts overwhelmed the MSFS forum).

Since a lot of people  buy their add-ons outside the marketplace, I think if we could capture the sales of add-ons outside the marketplace as well, I am going to guess that the PMDG 737 is probably the best selling add-on for MSFS revenue wise (not by number of sales). And Fenix is also up there for PC add-on sales for sure, although it's not available on XBox.

13 hours ago, Cognita said:

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.

I own the PMDG 737-800 for MSFS. And I have never started it up from cold, and I don't know if I will ever learn to, even though I was watching Fabio (the streamer who is also a CFI in real life) teach how to start it from cold.  For the record, I am more interested in learning how to start up a Cessna 152 or Cessna 172 up from cold, because that is probably what I will do if I ever go to flight school. I will never fly a real 737 in my lifetime, so I am not as interested to learn how to start a 737 up from cold, whereas I might fly a real Cessna 152 or 172 one day, so it's more important that I learn how to start those up from cold (I only fly the Cessna 172 on VATSIM, I have never flown the PMDG 737-800 on VATSIM before). I usually start the PMDG 737-800 with all systems and engines running when I spawn into MSFS.

Having said that, I like that I am using the same PMDG 737-800 that real life 737 pilots like Stearmandriver are using.  When I watch Stearmandriver stream the PMDG 737-800 on his livestream, I know that I can do everything that he does as well, and all that functionality is there in the PMDG 737-800 that I am using too. I paid for the PMDG 737-800 knowing that it has very realistic systems and avionics, even though I may never learn them, and that real life 737 pilots like Stearmandriver have a very high opinion of the PMDG 737. 

If A2A comes out with the Cessna 172 for MSFS, it's an automatic buy for me. I actually do want to learn the Cessna 172 more in depth, so I really hope that A2A does the Cessna 172 for their next project.

Edited March 19, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

Also related to this topic, I noticed some DCS World developers like Heatblur jumping into MSFS. And didn't WinWing mostly make hardware for military flight sims (ie. DCS World?). I just noticed that WinWing came out with their first hardware for MSFS.

2 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

I don't think you need to fear this. Randazzo is on record for saying PMDG's sales of the DC-6 for MSFS outsold all the PMDG DC-6 for FSX, P3D, and XP without hours. And when the PMDG 737-700 was released for MSFS, the demand was so high, it took down the PMDG servers.

...

Since a lot of people  buy their add-ons outside the marketplace, I think if we could capture the sales of add-ons outside the marketplace as well, I am going to guess that the PMDG 737 is probably the best selling add-on for MSFS revenue wise (not by number of sales). And Fenix is also up there for PC add-on sales for sure

Agreed that the marketplace alone does not give the complete picture of sales and uptake of add-on products. And the PMDG well maybe #1 and at the least a very close #2.

On the Navigraph 2023 survey the Fenix and PMDG were the top two MSFS add-on aircraft by far with both at ~40%. Also interesting to note in terms of the "best simulation product of 2023" question the PMDG was #1 at 11.2%, Fenix #2 at 9.7%, and A2A #3 at 8.8% .. all interestingly besting a certain sim major version release at 4.9% 🙂

https://fselite.net/content/flight-sim-community-survey-results-released-by-navigraph/

11 hours ago, F737MAX said:

Not sales, profit. You can have fewer sales, but still make far more profit from reducing the quality to mid-tier because less time is spent on development.

While I understand these are businesses, all of them have varying levels of profits that they're comfortable with to continue doing business. Going back to my example with JF, they can definetely make a lot more profit making modern aircraft, but they're currently making enough profits within their margin to continue making high-fidelity classic aircraft, two targets with margins that are smaller than you'd see compared to a CS product and especially more so with them being classics

I'm also a buyer who avoids the marketplace at all costs for scenery.