woofalong

Just done it Kyle. Thanks Chris Medley

How Embarrassing. *goes and hides in the corner* Thanks Adam!

Hey folks, En route at the moment on Vatsim and no matter how I change the radio coms, the Sqawkbox radio frequency does not change. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Signed Chris Medley

The Big Surprise... The massive alarm that goes off if you don't touch the aircraft for a while. Scared the bejezus out of me!! Signed Chris Medley

Hey Ryan. I completely understand your lack of time to help with individual requests. Perhaps instead you could give some guidance and post it as a sticky on the forum? For those wanting to tweak their computer to optimize PMDG products it would be great! Chris Medley

You say the 'majority' of people but Ryan has already said that his day is filled with people asking for download links. This is a common issue, regardless of your own personal views about it. Additionally, the vast majority of the other developer companies for flight sim follow this model and I'm sure you don't complain or feel cheated when you buy something from aerosoft, UK2000 (add name here) etc etc. Additionally, if this was something PMDG were concerned about they could make it optional. What ever the case, the main points I made was that the service is vastly over priced, outdated, and should be based on a 'number of downloads' rather than timeframe.

Wrong - Many providers allow flexible plans for fluctuating traffic levels. Wotan, I work within the industry and I've already told you the figures. Actually what me and several others have suggested is that a surcharge of $1-2 dollars could be added to a product, which would allow the user 100 downloads or so of the product.

I think you may be looking at things from the wrong direction. If an organisation is large enough that it has set up its own hardware systems to run it all, of course its going to be expensive. This is why companies such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google ... & countless others are providing substantially cheaper solutions by offering space by mb for smaller companies, such opportunities that companies like PMDG can take advantage of. There have now been countless posts that dispel the claims that its too expensive.

Because when businesses listen to customers, things change. Case and Point is EA who have just gone back on their Online Pass idea (which bought them in extra money), because their customers didn't like it and they could do it another way. I have no doubt that when PMDG put in this service it was due to the fact that it bandwidth cost a lot. However, years down the line I can imagine Ryan may be sitting there thinking that there may be a few cheaper alternatives they might be able to investigate in the future. I've already stated that you could download the ngx about 100 times for less than $5 of bandwidth nowadays. Similarly, others have posted cheaper alternatives. Already demonstrated that this is not the case. If it is really costing this much, they are doing it wrong. They have not said this at any point Do you think people were going to stop buying EA products because of the online pass? No. They did it because they have a customer following and want to maintain a good relationship with them, this leads to long term sales benefits. Is anyone not going to buy PMDG software because of it? No. Of course not. I'll be first in line to buy the 777 when it comes out. But that doesn't mean we can't petition for an arguably oudated process to be changed.

WotanUK I'm not entirely sure why you think the thread would be locked. Several interesting opinions have been put out, and if you ever run a business you will come to know that sometimes the customers can suggest something that may well improve the processes. Its very easy to get behind the times. Quite possibly, the last time PMDG looked at this, the cloud services were indeed very expensive, and as HansRoman said, in 2003 the situation was very, very different. Subsequently, (and if Ryan is correct in that this is a cost-retrieval method) PMDG may well be interested in looking in alternatives or reviewing their decision as the industry moves on. Any business that refuses to move with the times and adjust their policy (when suitable) won't do very well in the future, and any good business leader knows this I'm sure those who make the business decisions here do not see this as an attack, and hopefully they may well have a chance to look into an alternative method in the future

I can tell you that I work in sales/consultancy within a company that offers cloud storage solutions for businesses. From this I know that $5 for a year service is vastly overpriced. A rough calculation based on the size of the PMDG 737ngx would equate to between 80-120 downloads of this to equal $5 of bandwidth (of course we are talking economies of scale rather than what you might pay as a consumer). Subsequently, I unfortunately see this as a money making activity rather than 'cost covering'. Additionally, with an automated system similar to those offered by similar companies, PMDG would save on admin costs as it is currently all done manually (I think Ryan does this?) Saying cloud storage is expensive is like saying a piece of string is long. It has to be put in context. I don't think many people would mind paying an extra $2-3 on top of the purchase price for an extended download service if it was permanent... but for a year. It is quite evidently a practice to achieve extra revenue. I said its the industry norm. This is why people expect it. Myself, along with many other people have better things to do than backup everything, every day. This is because we know that the vast majority of software is readily available to re-download free over the internet should anything happen. It's where the technology industry is moving to. Again, this is why it is not completely unreasonable for this topic to be bought up. Exactly. There is an element of trust in all purchases. I don't buy anything of value from a company I don't trust, subsequently I don't read the legal writings everywhere. These are aimed at protecting the company in lawsuits more than informing the customer. I think the OP raised a valid point. For as long as I remember PMDG have been operating this Extended Service product. Now the market has moved on (at last 4 years I think) it is more than reasonable to ask if PMDG can reassess their position on this. If they decide it still costs too much, fair enough. But as I've already said $5 for a year is vastly overpriced if its maintained as 'cost recovery' I should say here, that I think PMDG are a wonderful company with passion that isn't really matched by anyone else. This topic is my only gripe.

Hey Chris, Because in this day and age, people tend to go by the norm of the industry. In this case, the norm is to be able to retrieve old downloads if you need to reinstall. In the gaming/simulation industry in particular, it is commonplace for all developers to allow bandwidth for repeat downloads.

Flyerboy, while what some of you say is very valid, it is not just the big companies that do this. A case example is UK2000, operated by Gary Summons. He (for the most part) works on his own and has created a website which allows people who have already bought a product to redownload without any admin activity or extra charge, with a license for 20-30 downloads (can't quite remember) . Whilst you may argue that the downloads are a lot smaller (often 100-200 mb), there are many, many more of them. This sort of blows the argument of small companies not having the means to do it, out of the water. However, like you said - there are means for people to keep it safe. Yet in this day and age, with such a saturated Cloud Storage market (leading to lower prices), I think its pretty reasonable for people to ask PMDG to reevaluate its options. Companies change policies all the time, just look at EA in the last few days moving back away from the 'online pass' for gaming due to its unpopularity. Its not an unreasonable argument.

One thing (that I hope I won't get flamed for it here) I might suggest is that if the software security is as good as it can be, why not allow users to upload to a torrent site such as TPB (which can be used for good!) allowing everyone to download the base package and then use their license to activate it? Better yet, if someone from PMDG actually uploaded it to that site, it would be a safe torrent to download! This would avoid bandwidth spaces, make downloads probably faster and save PMDG time for people requesting new links (just direct them to the file on the torrent server) I would like to state here that ALL my PMDG products were bought legally :-)

Pilot Error ;-) Chris