John Dewar

I think everyone is being too negative about this. If the team at Microsoft has any sense, they'll figure out how to include 3rd parties in their content store (by reducing the percentage they take on more expensive add-ons, perhaps). It makes perfect sense to offer the product for free and make areas available as add-ons. The days of buying software at Best Buy are pretty much over. Who knows how much longer Best Buy will even survive? There aren't any more physical software stores left. For example, Apple has removed the software from the shelves of their retail stores. The PC market is all about downloads going forward. Given that fact, few would be willing to download the scenery for the entire earth, which would be tens of gigabytes at least. And people don't necessarily want to fly all over the earth anyway. Maybe if you're into heavy metal you would, but if you're doing VFR you might like to just fly in interesting scenic areas, and content packs make sense. You just saved $50 on the purchase price of the sim, so you might as well spend some of that getting interesting places to fly.Think about FSX from a business perspective. Microsoft invested a lot of money developing the software, which sold well at first (at full price) then gradually tailed off until they were no longer making any revenue from it. Meanwhile they have a large user base of devoted fans who want that software to be supported. But they can't justify spending money to support the software. A lot of hobbyists are still flying v9! It's one Windows update away from ceasing to function. On top of that, there's a thriving community devoted to selling add ons at prices well in excess of the game itself. If Microsoft could siphon some revenue out of that market, then Flight could be maintained indefinitely.This could be a really good thing. It's much less disruptive if Microsoft upgrades Flight incrementally. It will always work on the latest hardware and operating system, and developers will have an easier time updating their content than they would if years pass and we get an incremented version with tons of changes.And it's more accessible. It increases the size of the add-ons market, because it's currently pretty complicated. A lot of the user base probably wasn't aware that they could add content, and that high quality payware was available. There isn't just one market for it. There isn't really a mechanism for demoing some of these add-ons, so there's now way to tell if your computer can handle them. The add ons are extremely easy to pirate, and there is no standard DRM for developers to use. There are many different methods of installing the content. Uninstalling the content can be a pain. Add ons run over each other occasionally. Microsoft standardizing and supporting all of this is a good thing for end-users, and it's probably a good thing for developers, even if they have to give up a percentage of their revenue.In the short term X-Plane will benefit from the dissatisfaction with Flight, but in the long term Austin and his team need to be thinking along these same lines, especially as DVD distribution probably won't be an option for X-Plane 11 (since a lot of computers won't have DVD drives by then). They're riding high on their success with iOS right now, but that's an app store model. Capturing some revenue from the add-ons market would help keep the developers fed and housed. All of these flight sim products are extremely complex and expensive to develop, and if we want the hobby to continue we have to recognize the fact that the money has to come from somewhere to support these platforms.