So after having 200 dollars of DLC in my cart from the OrbX sale I decided to go and look at an airport in the sim or check it’s area first. To my surprise the first airport I checked had a damaged mesh around it and what a shame it was beautiful Bella Coola. So with diminishing returns even on payware I started to wonder why would anyone buy this stuff if the Asobo mesh was damaged or every update breaks everything.
Then I thought to myself why doesn’t OrbX offer a subscription model for all their DLC? It took me a few years to survey the landscape but I have a good idea of who the best of the best is when it comes to scenery and airports and for the most part OrbX gets my approval. Sure some Aerosoft Airports are nice and FSDreamTeam has some great performance so yeah there are a few big names not on that list. However there is still enough DLC over there to start a subscription model. With all the diminished returns on payware these days it seems like a good alternative so people can at least sample the content first.
I am very reluctant to purchase airports in this sim. Airplanes have all had diminishing returns too but I have avoided scenery until now. With so many damaged areas of the sim looking worse and worse with every update I am leaning towards modding the mesh files with OrbX now. All that cost’s huge amounts of money though. Why is there no subscription model for this stuff?
Is it too hard to broker a deal with authors of the content? I mean you guys have panels all the time and try to identify marketplace trends and value. I think this could potentially work. It could also be used to drive sales as people will get used to stuff they like and add it to their wishlist and move on. OrbX seems uniquely poised here as they have a good selection of in house design and partners who could sign on with this.
Perhaps you could have one sub for scenery and another for planes or a sub model with 2 tiers one for scenery and one for both or vice versa. I mean I am just throwing the idea out there because as a consumer with money to support these developers I have zero faith in this platform stability. I waited years for a good sale on this stuff and now I can’t pull the trigger because every update is breaking everything.
Personally I detest subscription models. They can often cost a lot more than just buying a title outright. You get free updates anyway if they get broken by sim updates.
That is not necessarily true. If you subscribe to a thing for say 12 months and it costs you $100 and you use $500 worth of addons then, as happens, you lose interest in the game and move on, you no longer subscribe and you have saved a considerable amount of money. It also incentivizes the people who make these things (many of whom consider customer service to be some sort of major inconvenience and that includes Orbx) to keep their products up to date and bug free. Subs may not suit everybody but they can be of huge benefit to many more. Also, also, many addons for this game are comically over-priced for what you actually get in return.
They certainly benefit consumers too, at least in some cases.
I’ve saved a fair bit of money by using Game Pass, for example. With all the offers and sales I paid about $70 for a full year, and during that year I played games that would’ve cost over $300 to play on Steam.
It’s also a great way to discover new things, as there’s no worries about buying something and then going through the hassle of getting a refund. (Might be near-hassle-free in some cases, but certainly for every service there is.)
I’m not against it. I think it could be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your view. If you get a year’s subscription for say, $70 and download $300 worth of software, good for you. If the company went a few months without offering new content, you could cancel your subscription and come out way ahead.
However, the opposite applies too. If the company promises a lot of future content and over the next year you end up downloading about $50 worth - and find that some of that is low quality - then you’ll feel you were taken and will spread the word. Also, if I fly exclusively in the USA and their new content is on another continent, then I won’t be a happy customer.
It’s also possible that a subscription model might force companies to put out more content to please their subscribers, and we all know what happens when a company hurries a product to market.
It’s more difficult in practice than it is in theory, mainly due to the community folder structure for 3rd party addons from outside the marketplace.
What’s to stop someone from subscribing for one month for $10 for example. Download $1000 worth of addons, copy the addons out of the community folder into another drive. Then the person can just unsubscribe and still have a copy of a $1000 worth of addons.
The only way I can think of that this could work is encrypted addons, and that can only be done through the MSFS marketplace. You subscribe to the addons extra. You can install any addons without limits. But as soon as you unsubscribe, the encryption keys needed to unlock those addons becomes invalid so you can’t access them anymore.
But the downside of encrypted addons is that they take ages to update. Even if the developer already has the updated version ready to deploy, they might be forced to wait for 15 weeks or more before the updates are published in the marketplace. By that time, another update might have gone through already which might break that updated version of the addon anyway.
I certainly take a deep breath and think twice about buying any content for the sim these days, with aircraft but definitely scenery. I’ve got gigabytes of scenery add ons that I spent quite a lot of money on only to hardly ever use or see. I’m sure thats the same for a lot of people.
A subscription model Isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, its quite common in the games and software industry these days after all. And a lot of consumers do prefer it. It could work for a big company like Orbx for all their in house content anyway.
Subscriptions models can definitely benefit the consumer as well as vendor, but in this case there would need to be ownership even after the subscription has ended in order to make it worth my while.