Just a thought, I’m wondering what the communities thoughts are on this. If Microsoft/Asobo were to acquire a (comparatively) small developer like PMDG or Aerosoft in it’s entirety to publish study level airliners exclusively for MSFS 2020 would that be something people would like to see?
The benefits to this in my opinion would be:
Economies of Scale - MS could easily add people to these teams, they would improve the SDK more quickly and have better access to resources and technology allowing for more higher quality aircraft, quicker, reducing the price of say a PMDG level aircraft from $120 to $60 each while bringing these products to market faster for the consumer. (2 or 3 $60 aircraft per year opposed to 1 $120 aircraft every 2-3 years, with little to no sacrifice to the quality)
Better Aircraft Overall - These larger teams could help improve default aircraft in the sim as well with their expertise. making the base sim more attractive to casual simmers.
Competitive Advantage - Obviously snagging PMDG, FSlabs, even Quality Wings, Majestic, Aerosoft etc. to exclusively develop content for your sim while giving them the resources to up their offerings at better pricing would be a huge leg up over the competition.
What do you guys think? How would this be received by the community?
What your asking would incur more costs, so then surely the price would rise not drop. Adding more staff may speed things up but not make it cheaper. I would assume there would be cost of acquiring such companies and those companies would also have to be willing to let it happen.
I personally think it’s better as is as those companies have more reason to keep up the quality of products as is. Don’t want a situation like with EA buying up developers and ruining games.
I feel like an Obi Wan quote may be applicable here, as other flight sim communities cry out.
I’m not sure how that would help things. Perhaps financially in the short term. But it’s probably better for everyone that they manage their own workload, and not be directed by others who may not be suited to the task.
Not necessarily, with the increased access to Microsoft resources and computing power development should speed up substantially.
When you increase the quantity of products and up the sales you can justify increased staffing and lower costs. I mean ya you are right there’s a million things to look at when acquiring a business in terms of profitability, market reach, potential for the future etc. etc. so it would have to make sense financially and obviously you wouldn’t want them ruining things like EA.
I just feel the development cycles take a really long time on a lot of these things because PMDG and FSlabs etc. are so small they can’t afford to speed up production which ultimately hurts them get new people into the hobby especially when so many people want new new new all the time.
Maybe with a much larger user base once they get one quality product out and they start seeing larger profits those developers can then afford to expand their number of staff.
I think MSFS will really boost the devs sales and profits with the larger user base.
Perhaps, and ya obviously it would be a big kick in the nuts to the Xplane and P3D guys… but I feel the talent at these small devs can go a lot further with more resources.
There’s no reason it should take years for one aircraft unless of course you only have a couple people working on it. I don’t think it’s beneficial if you are seriously looking to grow the flight sim community.
And personally I don’t mind waiting, more thinking about the future of the community, obviously the more active engaged people spending money on flight sim the more quality content/hardware, etc. all of us can expect.
Ya that’s true, and I hope it’s the case. I mean even if you start seeing these high quality aircraft in the in sim store that alone will expose their products to many people that have never heard of them.
I mean how cool would if be though to have multiple PMDG aircraft in the sim store by 2022… The 737 NG3, 777 and maybe a MSFS exclusive like a new PMDG 757 or something…
it’ll just never happen because they are soooo slow at putting out airplanes…
We’ll be lucky to have the NG3 by Christmas I feel.
Those developers have been producing addons for many years. Their client base don’t use exclusively MSFS. Why would they abandon those? For money? It is a hypothetical discussion anyway…
That would really have to be the main driver I assume, also I would think it would be exciting for a small developer to have access to the vast resources at Microsoft and they could potentially do a lot more given that access.
Think maybe, more aircraft with more features, they could dive into the immersion a little more with weather effects on the aircraft, cabin crews, airport ground features. all the typical addon stuff you would need to buy extra… I mean who really likes buying addons for your addons?
That’s not a good way to conduct business. It’s like thinking that quality will improve if a consultant on a building project temporarily acquired the contractor that supplies the material, and the contractor that builds the foundation. Quality tends to go down because there’s no more competition, and now you’ve introduced a conflict of interest.
I think it’s for the better that they’re all independent organizations. Besides, each organization has its strengths and weaknesses, and they’re all complemented by the organization structure which is optimized for each team. Forcing everyone to play by one set of rules will introduce overhead burden on everyone.
makes sense, but I feel status quo isn’t the best course of action to facilitate community growth as a whole.
They would not be acquiring all studios, just one or two and competition would still exist, maybe forcing some of the other guys to “up their game” merge, put out more content etc.
But hey I agree it could also all go horribly wrong haha, personally, while I don’t really mind waiting, I think the community would benefit from seeing more higher quality airliners faster.
True… but even if the SDK was perfect, it still took PMDG/FSlabs/Aerosoft, etc. YEARS to release their airplanes on those other sim platforms as well right?
The SDK is coming along it appears and there seems to be a lot of positivity coming from he 3rd party devs about Asobo’s ability to work with them.
Jorg Neumann, the head of MS/ASOBO, actually states exactly the opposite in a recent interview.
I you haven’t read it, it is a very informative article.
The airplane devs are having major problems with the codes. The scenery devs are doing well with this Scenery Simulator. I wonder why? Planes are continuing to be pushed back for release inorder to get study level working.
Yes and? Did you ear in the latest Q&A Sebastian is working on PMDG code? Did you read the Aerosoft forums (they’ve removed their post since then) both Asobo and Aerosoft developers work together even late on Saturdays?
I won’t intervene more in this discussion, and I guess I understand the point you’d like to make, but if there is one aircraft which is getting full priority and resources is the CRJ and I can’t wait it is released, not only because it is an aircraft I’d personally like to fly in FS2020, but also because once done, this will give Asobo more time to document all the SDK features they are using for the CRJ but still undocumented for others, and they’ll probably have more time to take care of other 3rd party vendors as much as they’re doing to help releasing this product.
I don’t like doing this, but I didn’t read the comments before this (because I’m at work and shouldn’t be in the forums ). So I apologize if this was covered.
I don’t think Microsoft wants to be in the business of study-level aircraft. Jörg has said that they have taken a deliberate decision to not do study-level aircraft specifically so they could make a market for third party makers. They have no interest in squashing competition. Rather, they want to build an ecosystem around this product.
Same, I’m very excited for the CRJ. Also like DORRAGER said, MSFS 2020 alone with an in sim store may drive the sales for these study level aircraft even higher affording more money to the developers to speed up development as well and offer better products.
Also a good outcome for all of us and the community.
From the get-go we talked to third-parties. Their career and livelihood depend on the things they do, and we wanted to be respectful of that.
We thought that if we overshoot too far, we are actually damaging those people’s businesses. We clearly don’t want that.
But:
On the Garmin, we were in a similar state of mind because there are some good add-ons, so we didn’t want to do something damaging to their business.
In retrospect, after reading a bunch, and that didn’t come through enough in the alpha and beta to make us really aware of it… now we’re like “How did we not realize this?” The base sim really needs to have great base functionality and the Garmin is that.
At least I agree with “The base sim really needs to have great base functionality and the Garmin is that.”
). So I apologize if this was covered.