ceo of pmdg says 6-12 months until NG3:
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LOL.
So some competent, high quality addon devs have taken one look at this early access pile of dreams and said âDudeâŠcome on, be serious. Make it a proper flight sim and then weâll develop some planes for you.â
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Hush! You donât wanna agitate fanbois. They get quite cranky when they are disappointed. For sake of sanity, let them think PMDG will come and magically fix everything real soon.
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I wonder if A2A has the same conclusionâŠ
I donât like how they say, âfurther cooperation and effort is definitely the rule of the day,â as if there is some problems dealing with MS/ASOBO.
Not good news, but not surprising either considering the current state of the âsimulation.â
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I just hope it wonât cost upwards of 120$, as much as I like their products, this pandemic has not been kind to my wallet.
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I donât need to be PMDG dev to know that the sim need some work. Right now even the FMC routes canât be edited.
Letâs be honest. The sim looks good, and can be flyable even on the A320 once you set up the controls and stuff. But is far from being usable as a sim, too many things missing yet. And too many things to be fixed.
And there are the GPU use issues⊠Canât imagine being in the PMDG cabin with 5 FPS.
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I never understood this.
Theyâd sell so many more units if they dropped the prices of these aircraft. Is the profit margin on that work really so thin? Itâs not like it costs anything (pennies) per copy, once the work itself is done. Thatâs the great thing about digital goods, theyâre almost free (per unit) to copy and distribute.
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The P3d market is not that big. The big developers sell no more than maybe 10 or 20 thousand copies of addons. If you have been working on something for 2 years and you have to pay for download costs, support, manuals etc. Your immediate thought wonât be to sell it for 30 bucks.
Aerosoft sell their airliners for 30 or 40 bucks but they are nowhere near as detailed as PMDG or FSLabs aircraft or as accurate.
A lot of the casual simmers will probably have left msfs by the time these aircraft arrive - further diminishing the benefits of selling it cheap.
Maybe if you quoted the whole sentence youâd see that thereâs no issue with the 2 working together, just that thereâs more work for them to do.
âWe are working very well and very closely with Asobo and further cooperation and effort is definitely the rule of the day- but a release is some ways off stillâ
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Coincidentally, ZIBO recently resumed his releases for X-plane LOL
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Asobo should outsource airplane creation to pmdg, if themselves are incompetent to even get the stats right. FS sold a ton of copies, I wish some of this pie went to pmdg. Even if the initial planes would be lighter versions, not full study level products. They would still be much more believable than GTA planes we have now.
This what I think will happen with MSFS, and trust me I want it to survive, but:
- The newness will wear off and the newbie flight simmers will leave
- There wonât be enough of the true simmers left to fund MS pockets for a project this big
- We will get a PMDG aircraft after 1-2 years finally, but it wonât function properly because asobo/ms wonât make an effort to make such study aircraft work in msfs
- Real simmers will leave and by then we will have a new XP12 (or whatever austin will call it) which will be an improvement on weather and such but not quite as visually pleasing as msfs, but cater more to the simmer.
This is all my opinion of course. At first PMDG was praising the sim but now this sounds like a âafter further researchâŠâ backpedal to me. Which isnât good. I think MS is in it for the money which is why they catered to the masses and made this look good and marketed as such. They gave just enough to draw everyone in, causal gamers and serious flight simmers. With the amount of issues as of now, they have a big hole to dig out of to appeal to the true flight simmers, a hole that I donât see them digging out of for a long time, if ever.
I hope that iâm wrong butâŠyeahâŠ
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Disclaimer: I donât hold loyalty to any payware developers
Itâs not the act of selling and distributing the software thatâs $80, itâs the non-recurring cost that amortized over however many copies they expect to sell within the time they hope to break even. Non-recurring costs can be any sunken costs during the development phase from developer salaries (yes you need to pay those, developers arenât free), office space, licenses for software, and most importantly getting data from your sources (pilots, manufacturers, maintenance facilities, etc.), and all the travel to and from.
A good satellite photo can cost a lot, for example. To hire a Boeing 747 pilot on contract as a consultant costs a lot more. To book time on a 747 in a hanger to take detailed photographs of all details costs even more.
Iâm not sure what the NRCs for developing a quality 747 is, but I wouldnât be surprised if itâs in the $100,000 - $1,000,000 range, or even more. And how many people are gonna want it? Want percent drop-off do you want to assume from piracy losses? It all adds up.
But by all means if we hear the owner of PMDG has a gold-plated toilet and snorts caviar all night, then Iâd be skeptical of the prices they ask for, sure.
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Please God No! There is no amount of gold on earth to get me to join the PMDG clan, ever again. *
On the other hand A2A could easily outdo whatever PMDG can on GA aircraft.
- But as Bond said: âNever Say Never Againâ
I understand it can be an expensive process, but they are missing out on a lot of sales by pricing themselves so high. What might be a good compromise for this is to release different versions of the aircraft with some features stripped out. Majestic did something like this, iirc. This way they can get the high prices from the dedicated nerds who want every rivet in 4kx4k texture and have stuff like functional alternate landing gear extensions, but also provide a good simulation of the core aircraft systems for people who canât afford such high prices. Thereâs something to be said for meeting people at their price point.
Although the best option would be the one mentioned up above - get Asobo to support their development costs by tying PMDG aircraft (even if it might be a slightly simplified version) into the base game. It would also serve as an advertisement for further high quality releases, and introduce more people into the âaftermarketâ of paid addons for flight simulation.
The main problem I have always had about flight sims is that the do cater very strongly towards an existing audience, and struggle to break out of that. I know that the prospects for such things is limited, but even just coming back to flight simulation after a few years (this was back in 2014 I think), I was absolutely overwhelmed and couldnât find much help. And thatâs me, as someone who was in the community not 5 years earlier.
Iâm rambling at this point. Anyway, one can dream.
Whatâs wrong with PMDG?
Not going into details, but suffice to say: Nothing with their products, except, maybe the 777âŠ
Everybody here knows how easy is for crackers to release a pirate version of one PMDG (or any other developer) aircraft. So they have to bill 2 or 3 times the possible cost since a huge amount of potential customers will pay zero bucks for their product.
In other hand there is people who want a balance between detailed systems and FPS. I donât want to fly a study level AC under 5 FPS rendering.
over priced for rebaked aircraft the fools keep buying the same aircraft for every sim lol.
PMDG never ever again, i got the 737 747 for 2004 then they wanted full price for the fsx version same dammn aircraft
so i told them to stick it, anyway the best 73xx of any kind is the IXEG 737 classic for xplane 11 so PMDG is not top of the line anyway
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