as a scenery developer and as a simulation enthusiast for about 20 years, I must say that this seems to me an insult to the community and I would in no way support this.
MSFS has brought in a lot of new simmers who don’t know anything about this world and I have no doubt that they are going to make a lot of money with this.
During different times of the year the stores usually offer promotions and discounts that make it easier for those who do not have great economic resources to access certain products, we have black fridays, etc etc etc.
Is this really happening?
If you want to have “access” to the devs and each company has its form of contact, if you want to learn how to make scenarios and we have the Sanctuary par excellence that is FSDeveloper, Avsim and more places.
We have youtube, where thousands of experts on various topics offer their knowledge for free to the nas novice or interested in learning something specific.
In short, I am very annoyed with this.
We have thousands of tutorials on youtube of all levels to learn that, and if you want to have a discount on a specific complement you wait for the dozens of offers and discounts that are published throughout the year in many stores.
But with the thousands of new simmers that we have now thanks to MSFS I have no doubt that they are going to get rich in a short time thanks to thousands of uneducated inexperienced in this area.
Well there’s surely a market for this concept.
But most of the discounts expire soon and it’s up to them to decide which discounts are provided in the future.
Also things like this for JustFlight:
This discount code provides FSA members with a 10% discount on almost any Just Flight product! Act fast: the discount expires at the end of the month.
** Please note that the discount excludes the PA28 Arrow and Turbo Arrow, along with third-party content available through the Just Flight store.*
So they’re excluding selected products where they know there’s some people interested in. sigh
This is the impression I have: You know those magazines you see on the shelf in the store, and you say… “Hmmm… cool… that’s a magazine about the thing I’m interested in!!”. And you buy it. And you get it home, flick through it, a bunch of random cards come tumbling out… you realise there’s not as much interesting stuff in it as you thought there was (you know… the same old stuff reworded again) and put it on a shelf in case it might be useful in the future… It remains there for about a year until it gets recycled? Yeah… an online version of that.
You can check it out for a month which is quite a good idea. Like being able to flick through said magazine in the store without the owner hassling you to buy it, or not coming sealed in plastic.
And you realize that most of the contents are plain or hidden advertising.
If I see that the “webinars” are done by the studios that provide addons, rest assured they are sponsored contents.
Nobody knows if that really is the “big” thing they talked about, given the fact that the discounts don’t seem to apply on the MSFS Marketplace and Asobo/MS are not in the list of sponsors…
Looks like something third party to me, with no affiliation to Asobo/MS at all.
What does FBW have to do with FSA? They are not mentioned in the front page?
“FSA is provided by the organizers of FlightSimExpo, North America’s largest enthusiast flight simulation conference.”
Edit: sorry if im confusing this with something else. I just saw a thread from the FBW guys over at avsim letting us know to expect “something big”. I just associated this topic with that thread.
This would be very unlikely to happen. Both LM and LR are busy developing their own products and simply abandoning this development to develop a new sim would be basically a waste of money and effort. Especially for LR who is working on X-Plane 12.
FSA is making money from discounts that are usually free, profitting from something that VA’s/communities have worked hard to offer for free over the years. From what I see from discussions this morning, the community is not impressed and even more disappointed with the developers involved. The learning guides are a great idea, charging for discounts not so much.
