1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

Wouldn't that require Laminar to make an X-Plane Xbox compatible?

Don't think so

but xbox's are now just windows machines with secured storage, so probably not the largest of burdens they have on their list.

PS5/PSVR2 would be my preferred, that's BSD/Vulkan based, so probably a better target.

Couldn't be worse than Concord. Both need Laminar more than Laminar needs them.

Edited September 19, 2025Sep 19 by mSparks

5 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

Got my PPL in 1978 in South Florida. Wet brand new C 152, $19 and hour, instructor $9 and hour. Rented a C 172 on lease back owned by a Dentist, with about 1,000 hours on the hobbs, for $36 an hour wet..   Those were the days. 😉

well in those times is probably what the price is now 🙂

Edited September 20, 2025Sep 20 by pete_auau

8 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Welcome to Germany, where the PPL(A) is around 15,000€.

Sounds about right. Here the average PPL(A) is around 14,000 EUR (including theory course and Pexo-exams). 

But Franz's hourly rates are almost double to what any ATO/DTO offers here. It certainly stood out.

8 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

I can really only speak for myself, but I run both sims (and others) based on what they’re individually really good at. 

there are tradeoffs to all of them…

and at $70ish each, it really doesn’t matter. 

I guess, for e.g., I wasn’t willing to purchase Prepar3D Professional at $250 because it didn’t offer me anything more than the Academic license  did.

i don’t think I’d be willing to pay a lot more for x-plane for the same reasons. Like…what extra could they offer a consumer beyond a few bundled Hi Fi addons or something that isn’t already in the game…?

despite the fact that many of us spend a LOT more on hardware than simulators (or perhaps because of it), many are price sensitive when it comes to sim & addon prices. 

I mean, I’m open to ideas, but I just can’t agree with the “let’s price it higher so people perceive it as a premium product”, mainly because the cat is out of the bag on that one.

Fair enough. I see the spendings in flight simulation as a whole. I have a good PC only for that, then yokes, pedals, many addons etc. And when I’m passionate about something I don’t count. The part of the base-sim compared to those total spendings is also ridiculously low in my opinion. But you could be right of course that a big part of users would not buy it at a much higher price. I am just not entirely convinced yet that there would be that many at the end. What is almost sure however is that there would be a huge s.h.i.t-storm 😃

1 hour ago, SAS443 said:

Sounds about right. Here the average PPL(A) is around 14,000 EUR (including theory course and Pexo-exams). 

But Franz's hourly rates are almost double to what any ATO/DTO offers here. It certainly stood out.

Welcome in Switzerland and when your flight-school is based at a big international airport (LSZH) 😄

20 hours ago, Bjoern said:

You're focusing too much on a specific stratum of the user base that may be represented strongly in the communities, but is very likely not particularly large in the overall audience. 100,000 people paying $250 isn't even remotely compensating for 500,000 people paying $80.

Even I would abandon ship at $250, unless it's absolutely worth it. And to be worth it, Laminar would have to polish XP to perfection (i.e. my personal interpretation of perfection and mine only and within three update cycles, one month apart at the slowest).

The question is would it be 100'000 or 300'000 staying. You are just throwing a random number in the air. I really wonder how it would be. Without a strong competitor like MSFS I wouldn't worry at all, that at least 80% would still purchase it for 250 bucks. So yes no ones really knows.

20 hours ago, Franz007 said:

The question is would it be 100'000 or 300'000 staying. You are just throwing a random number in the air.

So do you.

The model adopted by ED / DCS appears to work.

You can use a few scenery áreas and aircraft for free without restriction, and then start buying modules, and they're still alive...

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

So do you.

No I simply questionned how much it would be but don‘t have any idea how much at the end.

Went to Internet Wayback machine, first saved page from Laminar Research is from April 13, 1997. Ordering info

"X-Plane sells direct from Laminar Research for $249+shipping, and requires a Pentium with Windows-95 or a Power-Macintosh with System 7 or later. X-Plane ships only on CD-ROM. (The scenery files alone would fill 170 floppy disks!) The CD-ROM contains both the Macintosh and Windows-95 versions of X-Plane."

So it has been 250.- $ in past.

14 hours ago, pots said:

Went to Internet Wayback machine, first saved page from Laminar Research is from April 13, 1997. Ordering info

"X-Plane sells direct from Laminar Research for $249+shipping, and requires a Pentium with Windows-95 or a Power-Macintosh with System 7 or later. X-Plane ships only on CD-ROM. (The scenery files alone would fill 170 floppy disks!) The CD-ROM contains both the Macintosh and Windows-95 versions of X-Plane."

So it has been 250.- $ in past.

Interestingly:

$250 in 1997 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $504.64 today

$80 in 2025 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $39.63 in 1997

17 minutes ago, FPVSteve said:

Interestingly:

$250 in 1997 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $504.64 today

$80 in 2025 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $39.63 in 1997

This is exactly how software should work, eventually becoming gpl free as in beer.

Sick! That means Laminar has way less margins per sold copy today than 28 years ago. But they must sold way more copies I guess.

It’s called market forces, and it applies to everything apart from niche operators such as Bentley or Ferrari. For the rest, to capture and hopefully retain a market share, you pile it high and sell it cheap, as one of the originators of supermarkets said.

IRL, consider a small light GA aircraft like a Cirrus, add a microlight to the mix, and compare them to your motor car. The Cirrus costs a fortune because of all the ticket-clipping that goes with regulatory burdens on things like, for example, certified spares. The market is smaller, because a PPL costs far more than a microlight pilot's licence. The microlight is much less restricted, but because the user base is still relatively small, the purchase price is still high. Compare your real-life Tecnam microlight’s actual build content to that of even a modest, mass-produced vehicle (where a licence to drive costs next to nothing in comparison to aviation) and you see the rule of Economy of Scale in action.

Most of us spend way more on hardware – joysticks, throttles, rudder pedals and so on – than we do on a simulator program. The producers of these add-ons know that the market for them is far smaller than that of the sim programs. As the quality of an add-on increases, the market for it shrinks and the price-point rises.

Over on the other side, MSFS has this pretty much sorted, with its users locked into an ‘optional extras’ system that improves its bottom line. LR is late to the party on this, and while I appreciate their expressed good intentions on planning to open an XP store, I can’t help feeling that there’s an income stream in mind as well. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Edited September 23, 2025Sep 23 by Brian Mackie

On 9/19/2025 at 7:00 PM, mSparks said:

but xbox's are now just windows machines with secured storage, so probably not the largest of burdens they have on their list.

PS5/PSVR2 would be my preferred, that's BSD/Vulkan based, so probably a better target.

Couldn't be worse than Concord. Both need Laminar more than Laminar needs them.

Looks like you can finally play Microsoft flight simulator on your PS5 on December 8th. Hehehehe