I’d even go a step further! I say people (but not me) should spend hundreds to thousands of hours developing addon planes using the skills they built over decades and give them away from FREE! Surely, that should motivate them! 
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There are hundreds or thousands of hours dedicated to develelpment/research behind complex planes, as much as for a game.
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Issue is not just price - I wish they had a trial of x-number of days / hours you can try a plane before spending $$$. Right now high cost and the unknown factor if the item is any good is the biggest deterrent IMO, so most folks stick to free planes and add-ons. There are many really good free add-ons out there that are ‘risk free’. 
Just be selective on what you want as I am.
Everything being generally USD and being located in Australia, I can add at least another 25% to the dollar as our currency against the USD and others is poor.
So choose wisely grasshopper and be selective.
There are quite a few decent freeware planes, yes… F-22, all the BushLeagueLegends stuff, the 172 Bush planes, Grumman Goose, etc… But a vast majority of freeware aircraft are pretty terrible - they ARE freeware, after all… I see a lot of freeware planes with cockpits from other aircraft… or non-functional switches/gauges. It’s definitely a market that one also needs to sort through to get to the good stuff.
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Aircraft cost what they cost because they’re made by companies that need to turn a profit from all the man-hours put into research, modeling, texturing, programming and such.
Prices of products usually aren’t arbitrary. Developers project expected sales against the costs they incurred.
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OTOH, many many games have a market that is just as small and are comparatively cheaper.
I think this doesn’t say the whole story. From what I see in this forum, until now this niche market has a sizable portion of real life pilots. And we all know that piloting is a REALLY REALLY expensive hobby. I mean, we are talking a $150/hour hobby. And thus I suspect the sim market adapts their price to this niche public.
But now that this market is expanding with MSFS and especially the Xbox, the prices have to go down, because no casual gamer will buy $200 planes.
This is a similar situation with games on phones compared to games on PC. Noone is going to pay $50, let alone $70 on a game for iPhone.
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Why not make your own if it’s so easy peasy.
Then you don’t have to pay anybody. In fact, make your own sim too.
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The Top Rudder 103 is cheap and worth every penny, I just wish I had VR.
It’s in the Bundles section.
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Yes correct but there is nobody who decides the prices should go down but the seller of the product. If the seller thinks he can make more money by making the product cheaper he will.
And yes the market is bigger now so that would be a possible direction the market is going (probably very gradually). But requesting “Planes that don’t cost 20-40 bucks” is not how the economy works. 
And with this new sim i can imagine a lot of people would rather have the quality of the products go up first. Some products are still at the Xplane/P3D level visually and are asking the same price. I rather have some high quality addons for 40 bucks than a lot of low quality ones for 5 bucks a piece. Development costs money, everyone has to pay the bills.
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But almost none of those mobile games come anywhere near the deprh and complexity of a AAA game which easily costs 70+ USD either!
And those that are are often riddled with „freemium content“ - I personally know players that spent 500+ (yes! Five hundred!) and more on a single mobile game (total, over several months of course).
(A development that has become a trend on console games, and more and more on PC games, too)
So we are often comparing different business models here.
It’s not about quality, it’s not about how much people will spend, it’s about the right that every man has to make a living. If an addon dev has quit his day job and spent 4000 hours building a great addon, he’s got every right to charge whatever he likes for it. The trouble is, once one dev did a great job and charged accordingly for a quality product, every dev suddenly thought he can charge the earth for the half ■■■■■ junk he’s putting out. I cite DC designs as a prime example of this mindset.
Would he get more sales selling at a lower price? Well, historically, in the flight sim world…no. There are simmers who buy quality addons and appreciate the craftsmanship and there are players who refuse to pay for anything that, in other games, would be free (eg, almost every addon for Arma3 ever made). And the flight sim world has always been a very niche market, the best addons in the history of flight sims haven’t sold 7 figures, the market is limited…or was…until MSFS that is.
What are the latest figures, something like 2 million users worldwide? And that’s before the Xbox release.
So if the potential market has increased so much…and dev costs haven’t gone up, there’s been no worldwide labour shortage of coders, the cost of corrective lenses and eye tests hasn’t skyrocketed…so why haven’t prices dropped?
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They have. PMDG’s DC-6 is cheaper at $55 than anything they have done before. But the question you have to ask yourself is “out of 2 million users, how many are viable addon buyers”?
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I get this post, heck its all over the place. I have some planes that are free and they are great too. I’m all for some planes offer less features and realism and just are fun and can add to the game. The only plane I’ve actually purchased from the store so far is the Spitfire. Going between xbox and pc too so would appreciate some that work with both that can be paid for once.
Already did if you read my post again. The ratio of simmers who will buy addons v simmers who don’t will not have changed, just the base number of overall players. The potential market has increased by a huge amount with the advent of MSFS however you look at it.
Once the Xbox version launches and we’ve got all these new Xboxers who haven’t been brainwashed into thinking it’s fine to charge the price of RDR2 for an addon, that ratio may change.
If you are referencing the MSFS 2020 T45C then I would disagree. It’s flight model is terribly flawed, but I would be quick to emphasize that it is the MSFS engine that is the issue there.
I am surprised that given the missing fidelity that any third party is currently bothering to develop for MSFS. It’s just bad, we’re hanging around because it’s pretty, and we hope that the handling gets better in due course.
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Yeah well that’s highly unlikely and if it is less than 20 bucks it is likely to be no better than freeware.
In the heady days of the optimistic speculators we were told there was no need for scenery add-ons or planes … 
“we are all hanging around because it’s pretty”
Man you just nailed it in less than 10 words ! 
Just because something costs a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s any good. India Foxtrot Echo’s (?) stuff is really good and is reasonably priced. On the other side of this type of thinking you could say that a lot of gamers are being duped into paying high prices for things because they think it’s better when, in reality, it’s just some coding on a few extra gauges and a bit of fancy marketing hype from a company run by a former pilot who always wears his pilot hat in photos. You could say that, and you may be right or you may be wrong.
Yes, and those developers love you for that type of thinking.
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