Hey there! First post to this forum I believe. This is a question/grievance
My question is simple: Am I to believe the price for a “premium deluxe” upgrade is $84.99 USD from the base game| The “premium” upgrade is $99.99(despite having less content)| And the “deluxe” upgrade is an additional 79.99?
If so…WHY?! The best version is only $120.00 on steam? Shouldn’t the best upgrade going from base game to best be only an additional $60.00? Don’t get me wrong, I believe this company should make it’s money, and I’d happily support them in that endeavor provided there was consistency and it made sense. From what I can see, to “upgrade”(Literally just unlocking a paywall) you have to pay an additional $85.00 on top of what you already paid. God forbid you’re as confused as I am, but go through with the purchase and pay for “premium” only to find out the better version is going to run you an additional $85.00 on top of the $60 you paid for the game, plus the $100 you shelled out to get the premium upgrade.
All in all, hypothetically, someone could spend 100’s just upgrading the game. Again, I understand the need to make money, and heck I’d gladly pay even $20.00 or so just for the 787(provided it’s working correctly) But to charge the amounts I perceive them to be charging is just flat out greed. Especially given the game is nearing it’s one year mark of release and still has issues and game breaking bugs.
Whoever’s in charge, please restructure this. Not angry, just seemingly disappointed. If I’m wrong someone please correct me, and point me in the right direction. However, I can’t justify this pricing.
It’s not really worth upgrading I have the premium deluxe and while I do fly the 787 and the other planes, I really wouldn;t miss them if I had the standard edition.
The base game has everything you need, if you want to spend some money on upgrades, buy the CRJ and a few extra airports from the Marketplace.
I know this is your first post so you are probably not aware that this topic has been beaten (as the proverbial horse) to death. Microsoft has no shame in charging higher than normal rates for the upgrade. Basically you get penalized for not buying the “premium” or “deluxe” version out of the gate. It’s one of the lesser problems though, as far as the big picture is concerned.
I bought the premium deluxe version right away and quite like the Pipistrel Virus and the Shock Ultra. The extra airports are a welcome addition as well. I have to admit though that the premium (and especially deluxe) airplanes received little love. They have plenty of bugs, from wrong ATC callsigns to broken buttons in the cockpit, the Shock “sinks” into the ground when you use drone cam immediately after loading, etc. You probably read about all the DA40 issues in the forum (fuel transfer). Overall, I filed around two dozen bugs with the planes in the last two months. Not much has been fixed yet so I mostly stick to the standard edition GA planes for now.
I thought several times if I should buy the premium Deluxe (I play via Gamepass) but to me the content in it is simply not worth it compared to the base version. It would cost me 94,99 EUR with the gamepass 10% reduction.
Only two of the extra planes interest me slightly, that’s it. The other planes and the airports I don’t care about.
The pricing is really weird.
Normally with other games I can upgrade the rest of the game with a fair priced DLC if I play the basic version via gamepass or just own the basic version. Also with other Microsoft games.
But hey if they don’t want my money, all right by me.
That’s why you buy the whole Premium Deluxe bundle outright from the start. Microsoft has announced this pricing scheme ahead of release and they’ve been pretty transparent with it. That buying the whole bundle would be cheaper in total than buying the standard edition then upgrading it later on.
That’s just how business works in most retail industry, Have you ever got that offer where you can buy a TV with Soundbar Combo where the soundbar would cost only 50% of their retail price when bought as a bundle rather than buying the soundbar on its own? Same thing applies here.
For anyone who is using the XBox Pass and upgrades to Premium, bear in mind if you ever stop the subscription you then have to purchase the base pack just to use the upgrade. As soon as you give up the XBox Pass you no longer have the base pack necessary to use the Premium Upgrade you purchased.
I checked it out with the XBOX Gamepass first for £1 as an offer at the time. I then purchased the full Premium game from the Store and not via the Gamepass as there were too many caveats involved. I still do not regret my chosen path, but you need to choose your own that suits you and your finances best. I have low income so I really had to put a lot of thought into the processs first and think about my needs.
On the other hand you get a nice discount. I used the Xbox Game Pass for 1$ and bought the Premium Deluxe Edition for 90-somthing $ (not the upgrade), then cancelled Game Pass. I would have preferred buying on Steam but it’s hard to estimate if it will ever get discounted there.
I paid for the premium deluxe version last August but on downloading, I got only the deluxe version. Eight months later, MS is still not answering e mails nor have they downloaded my extra planes/airports into content manager. Interesting they can download all of this wonderful eye candy but can’t seem to honor a “mistake” as regards a pre-order of the sim. If you do order, I hope you have better luck than me.
The best version is actually $59.99. The best version all of the aircraft can be modded by the community. The best version is a smaller download. The best version has the most working, near-complete aircraft.
In all seriousness, the prices appear to be structured to maximize sales, by leading the customer to believe Premium Deluxe is the best deal.
I once went to a Server 2008/Hyper-V workshop hosted by Microsoft. The rep ended every sentence with, “…so you may as well go with Server 2008 Datacenter since it is obviously the best deal.” even though the initial purchase costed substantially more than the Standard version, especially for a small business, and had features a lot of small businesses would never need.
So from my experience, this kind of price structure is par for course. My advice? If you have Standard already, save your money for some premium payware aircraft and/or scenery.
I don’t disagree with most of your post, but even the Premium Deluxe can be modded - in the sense that all mods that work for the Standard Edition will also work on the Premium Deluxe version.
It is also possible to mod the premium planes to some extent (check out the 787 mod on Flightsim.to), but yes, they don’t get nearly as much love as the standard planes because lots of their files are DRM protected and some stuff is impossible to mod.
Pointing this out so that people don’t think that Premium Deluxe = No mods possible.
Still doesn’t make Premium Deluxe worth the money. If $60 and $120 are more or less the same for you, sure, go for it. But if you’re looking for value for money, buy the Standard edition and a couple of Marketplace items that really appeal to you - or just save the extra $60.
Basically they offer a discount to people who buy upfront.
It is sort of like how a MacDonalds burger combo gives you a burger fries and a drink for less than if you just bought the burger and then added fries and a drink later.
A separate matter is whether the Premium or Deluxe packs are actually worth it, compared to paying between $20 and $50 for one addon plane or airport.
The answer to that depends on the individual. If you just want a batch of extra planes to jump into randomly and a few more handcrafted airports the price per plane/airport is a bargain. On the other hand if you are unlikely to fly more than one aircraft and will never land at the bonus airports the packs are way expensive.
For example if you are only going to fly the Steam gauge C172 you might be better getting the Piaggio Steam gauge P149, Carenado Mooney or the Just Flight Arrow instead. On the other hand if you are likely to jump around between various aircraft willy nilly or just like the idea of a big hanger with lots of choices the deluxe and premium packs may be worth it. It really depends on the user case as to whether they are worth it.
Premium deluxe content can be modded. But because they encrypt the original file. It’s difficult to grab what their file structure and the actual content is. There’s a lot of guesswork involved. And when it matches correctly, the the mod will work.
I bought the whole msfs2020 from the Microsoft store and paid $129.50 for all three. It actually took about 3 1/2 hours to download. My internet provider is Spectrum and I’ve got the highest downloads and uploads they offer. I also have not had a CTD that others have. I’ve got all the world updates and absolutely love flying. The only problem I have had is, the hours I accrued almost 300 hours vanished one day. Along with my logbook.
On paper, the Premium in principle looks like a good deal with 10 extra aircraft and 10 extra airports, with the aircraft being of a similar standard to the default ones in terms of functionality and the airports sitting between default and payware quality.
Well that’s how I view it anyway. The problem as I see it is that the aircraft need improvements but as already mentioned are DRM protected so it’s Asobo who need to do it themselves as community fixes can only do so much.
My hunch is that they are so preoccupied with all the existing bug fixes and improvements etc across the board that giving individual addons a good work over is far down the to do list, or at least that’s how it appears 8 months down the line.
Airports don’t seem to be well optimised; I removed LAX the other day back to default during testing and like for like gained 9-10 fps. Going to do the same with Heathrow today.
Is it worth paying the extra $60 now? Personally I’d say no, as there is no indication that I’ve seen that they intend to make needed improvements to a lot of the content you pay for, even if it’s a work in progress and will take some time. I just take solace in the fact that I’ve got so many hours out of this sim already the $120 outlay has paid for itself.
As others have said, you may find better or similar value in just going for the Standard version and just buying some payware that you really want instead.
I’ve also choosen the ‘expensive’ way, but since I almost exclusively fly the TBM, Longitude and 787, it was the right decision.
Considering that a flight simulator generally remains interesting for many month or even years, the additional costs are in the long run negligible IMO.
Flight sims are a relatively cheap hobby compared to say owning a motorcycle, or restoring vintage cars or even model trains which can cost $10,000 just for one locomotive in live steam. let us not even mention real world flying.
In my case I fly my payware aircraft collection (Iris Jabiru, Piaggio P149, Fiat g91, Aerolite 103, Bleriot XI, Carenado YMF-5 and Carenado Mooney) far more than I fly the occasional premium/deluxe aircraft, however those 7 payware planes cost in total far far more more than the combined standard and premium deluxe packs themselves so you would hope i fly them more.