Is Prepar3D an end of life sim?

[Daube]

3 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

If the sim you’re currently flying gives you what you want why the need for change? Will a newer sim improve your landings? Unlikely. It just makes the view look prettier. But those who have remained with P3D don’t consider the view the most important feature. Providing it reaches a certain level of reality that’s enough.

Sounds a lot like an FS9'er back in the FSX days, don't you think? 🙂

3 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Do those of you who are married consider a change of wife because the new younger versions are more attractive? I guess you don’t because there’s a lot more to a spouse than looks. 😉

I don't know your wife but mine is certainly not comparable to an outdated piece of software.

New sims are new sims. If you're happy with the old one, fine for you. If you want to try the new ones and discover new aspects of the sim that you couldn't experience with the previous one, then go for it. There's no comparison to a wife here. Sorry but that was not a really smart comparison...

[G-RFRY]

LM will release another version of P3D for their own use it`s up to you if buy it. Just as MS is likely to release 2028 but to keep the cash rolling in that`s what keeps it going. 

[IanHarrison]

The learning curve was what decided it for me when it was time to leave FSX and its OoMs. I looked at X-Plane and it was so strange, whereas P3D was like an old friend.

(Not quite sure that I could equate it to a change in marital status, though).

[shermank]

4 hours ago, Reader said:

That one was answered here:

I remember a couple years ago, MilViz said they were down to low single digit unit sales PER WEEK for P3D. That's when they decided to pull the plug on new sales as the cost of maintaining the infrastructure and providing tech support significantly outweighed their revenue.

If the cost is greater than the income, as a business decision it's not sustainable.

IMO, one company that I know of, Airplane Heaven did the right thing. They allowed all of their P3D planes to be ported from ORBX free of charge. The company said they could no longer provide technical support. But, instead of just junking their entire inventory, they did make it available. I have two of them and they work fine.

Sherm

[Ray Proudfoot]

42 minutes ago, Daube said:

Sounds a lot like an FS9'er back in the FSX days, don't you think? 🙂

No because they’re 32-bit with all the limitations that comes with a meagre 3.8Gb of VAS. P3Dv5 with an addon aircraft and third party scenery can consume 16Gb with all the advantages that brings.

42 minutes ago, Daube said:

I don't know your wife but mine is certainly not comparable to an outdated piece of software.

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. 😁

[Daube]

12 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

No because they’re 32-bit with all the limitations that comes with a meagre 3.8Gb of VAS. P3Dv5 with an addon aircraft and third party scenery can consume 16Gb with all the advantages that brings.

But, but... isn't that the same as a new spouse with bigger breasts and additional cooking abilities ? 😄

12 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. 😁

I know, I know 😉

 

[Patco Lch]

2 hours ago, Daube said:

But, but... isn't that the same as a new spouse with bigger breasts and additional cooking abilities ? 😄

With the temperament of an alligator 😁

[sdirand]

I don't think the survey is innacurate. Don't lie to ourselves on that point. Yes, there are some P3D users that forgot to answer the survey, just like there are some XP or msfs who did the same. And there are probably way more msfs users that forgot to complete the survey compared to P3D users who forgot about it.

No one can deny that P3D number are decreasing but the remaining users are hardcore users, who are loyal to a simulator that fill their need. So if they haven't siwtched to xp or msfs/msfs24 till now, they have no reasons to do it in the future. So P3D numbers won't decrease much more.

With so few users remaining, we all know that the market is dry, especially because P3D users, with so few new releases, maybe don't spend that much (said byMathijs from PMDG). The trend will probably don't change, most devs if not already done, will probably leave the P3D market.

Now, the question is to know if P3D could come back to it's glory day with a new version? It's clear that LM couldn't care less about the leasure market. They cannot promote it and probably wouldn't want to promote it anyway. I think P3D academic for them was more a beta test than anything else. Will they want to do it again and deal with the support? I'm not really sure. It's not a decision driven by money, because for sure LM don't need the money of the academic version. Future will tell.

[UrgentSiesta]

14 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

One thing that I do not understand. If you sell software and you stop selling it because there is "no demand", isn't that software still operational? It is not dead and buried.

Why can it still not be sold with no support? After all, it is only a package of code that will continue to work for years.

There are still costs to hosting files and streaming them to anyone on demand.

In the case of the software itself, if it's no longer being developed, it will eventually stop working with whatever other software upon which it's dependent. In this case, the primary dependency is the specific version of. P3D itself. Even MilViz 's own add-ons aren't uniformly compatible with a single version of P3D. A few work with 5.x, others with 4.x, and so on all the way back.

So as soon as you take money for something, you have an obligation to ensure it's fit for sale. And there are a LOT of consumers out there who buy the wrong stuff or make the wrong assumptions because they cant understand caveat emptor.

Then they complain to your employees, bad mouth you in social media, open charge backs on your credit card merchant account, etc etc etc

No good deed goes unpunished, and literally not worth the trouble.

Edited April 22 by UrgentSiesta
correcting autocorrect

[dave2013]

38 minutes ago, sdirand said:

It's clear that LM couldn't care less about the leasure market.

I don't think this is clear, actually.  LM would never have bothered offering P3D to the civilian market if they didn't care at all.

I don't expect v7 to be a revolutionary sim, but I hope it is.  IMO, using satellite scenery with imagery-based buildings and vegetation, like MSFS, makes a lot if sense if one wants to have a truly accurate flight simulation platform to use for real world training and mission simulation.  So perhaps LM will go this route in future versions.

Dave

[G-RFRY]

MS could not care less about FS until XBOX and Game Pass was the plan going forward. It`s not even its main title in the Game Pass studio the triple A games are the biggest draw.

[sdirand]

 

14 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Why can it still not be sold with no support? After all, it is only a package of code that will continue to work for years.

Maybe also because even if this is clearly written that you offer no support, some people won't read it and request support anyway if needed. They will also request new features, bug corrections even if this was clear that it won't happend. As they won't have this support, they will bring you bad publicity on the social medias. So, for only a few sales anyway, why do you want devs to take those risks & bad publicity. Not worth it.

PS: sorry quoted the wrong guy.

 

3 hours ago, dave2013 said:

I don't expect v7 to be a revolutionary sim, but I hope it is.  IMO, using satellite scenery with imagery-based buildings and vegetation, like MSFS, makes a lot if sense if one wants to have a truly accurate flight simulation platform to use for real world training and mission simulation.  So perhaps LM will go this route in future versions.

This require a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth. You also have to deal with a provider (Google?) which is not free. They might do it for their professional customers because the number is not that high and those kind of customers surely pay a lot of $$$ to use the professional version. Not sure, they would do it for the leisure market, which represent a lot more users. Microsoft / Asobo do it but they already use the in-house provider (bing) which lower the costs. To conquer the market back, LM would have to bring something exceptional on the table, something that instantly make msfs something from the past. This require a lot of development, a lot of resources and a lot of money and this is clearly not something driving the professional market. So why bother do it just for the leisure market?

Edited April 22 by sdirand

[Luke]

1 hour ago, sdirand said:

This require a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth.

I'm not sure you appreciate just how inexpensive it is to download stuff. It is literally pennies per gigabyte and you don't need "a lot of servers" to do any of it.

Really, once you've built the infrastructure to purchase and download a product for any simulator, additional ones have almost zero marginal cost. It's not like you're building completely parallel infrastructures for different sims. You're not.

Cheers

[spilok]

I fly P3d every day and am still amazed

[Rogen]

P3D is still my go to sim.

P3D negates the need for an expensive high data and high bandwidth internet connection and I've more high quality planes than I ever dreamed I would have.

Plus it meets my tinkering desires where I can write and modify practically anything I want.

The above said I'm always open to something new provided it meets my checklist of requirements.

Cheers