I’m not suggesting using my example of one plane, and my flight hours in it as a yardstick. 
It’s subjective for one thing, but to my mind, the closer you start getting towards £1 to the hour, or 130 hours in your example, the more attractive the whole thing becomes. If you wanted to use the old, and tired example of comparing a night at the movies, where a ticket might cost £8 for a two hour movie, the entertainment we get from these one off purchases we can continue to use for as long as we wish makes them very cheap in the long term.
£8 for a cinema ticket?? Sign me up!! 
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I haven’t gone in so long so had to search for that, and £7.99 was the first one I saw. 
In fact, if you then throw in drinks, and snacks over the course of that movie, that could easily buy you a plane in the store.
If we called it say £20, being stingy, the DC-6 could cost you maybe 4-5 trips to the cinema, or maybe the equivalent of ~10 hours entertainment. Use the DC-6 for at least 10 hours, and you got your moneys worth! 
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No one should harbor illusions. This plane will be expensive.
But in the history of computer games certain magic numbers have established, price levels that people accept and it is not easy to invent whole new categories for yourself.
For example a computer game with big budget costs ~70$. Microsoft has aimed exactly for that level with the base version of MSFS and people have accepted that. Had it been 150$ for 1 version this product may not have been the great success that it is.
Critically acclaimed, professional addon planes (meaning a real company makes them and not some individual) traditionally costs 49,90$. Vendors can go 1 level above if their product is exceedingly sophisticated and is aimed at professionals. They go to 79,90 or sometimes 89,90 reflecting that is no more just a consumer product but a professional simulation software that can also be bought by consumers.
However rarely do we have a situation that some vendor could almost double that and I predict most people will not follow. The majority would probably pay anything up to 100 dollars for a study level DC-6, in that case expecting an absolute premium quality product. But before they shell out those amounts of money they first have to be shown what this plane does so much better than the usual 50-70$ addon. As long as there isn’t even a door to the passenger cabin, and I have to stare at a grey wall instead I would say this is pure wishful thinking and the party involved should be careful that this doesn’t backfire.
A price of 100$ is possible but the developer would have to show what justifies this price. So far I see only a well made cockpit, and 4 engines that have been individually coded, needles for the engines showing different values etc. That is very nice however it should be standard anyway, and a missing internal cabin is a big minus in this category, not a plus.
A price over 100$ is also possible but the bar is even much higher. Certainly not a few nice gauges that show slightly more realistic values. There would have to be completely new modules and
features, and of that I see none (or maybe just the flight engineer but I have to see more).
It’s a pity that we have to have this discussion but the fact that they haven’t talked about the price usually means it is going to be shockingly high. I have seen that for example with the inibuilds A300. If the price was low, one would of course announce that right away to increase more hype. But if it were very high you would tend to create hype first by videos and such and then at the last moment strike the big blow.
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The CRJ from Aerosoft has just set the mark in my opinion, in term of quality and price.
I was not waiting for this plane at all. But I took the plunge and now this became my own standard for future choices. For 50 € I have what I consider a fun and intersting plane to fly, with nice model and sufficiently advanced system for my taste. Also smooth and easy on my rig. So it’s a winner for me.
So, I would say, 50 to 60 € is a good price for a good addon I think (most PC games are around this price)… For a very good and interesting GA plane, 30 to 40 is OK). Beyond that it’s becoming a bit much. In the past I used to put 90 € in PMDG planes for FSX. I’m not sure I will do that again. There are many more things to do in MSFS2020 than simply jump in a liner, as good as it can be, and fly for hours at 35000 feets.
In this situation, the CRJ is a very good plane for short hops from place to place. And arriving at destination, using a little GA plane to visit nice POI. But this is how I see things now with MSFS2020 and I can undersand why people are ready to spend more money in very advanced planes. Just not my thing anymore :)…
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It sure can be an expensive hobby. Then again, so is golf.>
See? This is good… What would I pay for a golf club? ANY golf club? Zero, cause I have no interest in it. Many others would hunt down a set of great clubs and pay a lot for them. It’s all about what you are looking for.
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I’m expecting them to price the add-on at $69.99 like it was for FSX, P3D and X-Plane 11. everything else would be kind of much for me to be honest.
I understand that quality add-one like the PMDG DC-6, the Aerosoft CRJ or the A2A GA lines take a lot of time to develop and a lot of man hours are put into those wonderful additions to the sim. And they’re definitely worth every penny (usually). So the 50 - 70$ range is ok for me.
I’m really looking forward to this though. Seems like a lot of fun and I love the handling of those big radials. Also loved the A2A Constellation in FSX. I still hope this will be brought to MSFS2020 in the future.
Super excited for PMDG coming to MSFS2020. Having those high fidelity addons really is a game changer for me in the sim.
Happy flying everyone
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I found a curious paradox here.
The people that will probably want to spend 70 to 120 dollars are the ones that care less about the “flight engineer” feature. They are probably hard-core simmers, also known as “button pushers” and will like to spend a lot of time reading the manuals and flying the aircraft “by the book”. They will not like that whatever the price is they are also paying for that feature that they won’t use.
I think PMDG already knows this so with the creation of the FE they are “dumbing it down” to make the plane easier to flight for those that are not hard simmers or don’t want to push buttons for hours. But those guys are not going to spend more than $50 in an Aircraft.
So my guess is that they are likely to price the DC6 at about $50 to $60 to make it appealing for both sides. It wouldn’t make sense to price it higher once they have spent the time creating features for casual simmers.
At that price all the hard-core simmers will get it and they won’t be upset about paying for the FE features as the plane is “cheap” to their standards, at the same time a lot of casual simmers will also get it as it is a high quality plane that they can fly without much hassle. If the CS 777 is worth $30 then this one is certainly ok at $50 to $60.
If they increase the pricing they will lose the casual simmers and there are a lot of those for MSFS.
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I have said it before and I will say it again… Once PMDG comes to MSFS, I am uninstalling P3D. The thing that helps make this decision easier is that they fixed the weather radar in the latest update where it shows precipitation instead of clouds. That’s a game-changer. PMDG IS a catalyst I have always said JUST MAY kill off P3D - perhaps not in LM’s continued development for it, but certainly in whether or not people sink more money into add-ons for it. Up until now I have been perfectly fine spending more money on P3D, but that’s not gonna happen anymore. As a matter of fact, I have already deleted all non-study level aircraft from P3D and just left all PMDG, FSLabs, QualityWings, Majestic, Milviz, and Aerosoft products there (so… about 20 Carenado and JustFlight aircraft got removed along with Aerosoft’s CRJ for redundancy)…
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Now we just need A2A to push out their first GA for the sim and it’ll be golden as far as I’m concerned
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Yup. Forgot them too. All my A2A stuff is alive and well in P3D. But they aren’t even enough to keep P3D for me. JF’s Arrow does the job just fine, but the sooner A2A moves to MSFS, the less reason to keep P3D around.
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I agree. And also their warbirds. There just nothing like firing up a Rolls-Royce Merlin or a Pratt & Withney that has been modeled by A2A in a sim. Gives me goosebumps everytime
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you went a little far there mentioning the word worth in the same sentence as CS. It may be good looking, but not worth $30.
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Totally agree, I should have worded my sentence in a better way such as “if there are people out there that think the CS777 is worth $30 then…”
If you ask me. I would’t get it if they pay me.
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that is how I explain the concept of negative numbers XD
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And, scientific notation!
Some insight.
First, I am a Beta team member.
Second, Rob always plays development and projects close to the vest. It’s always been say something when there is something to say.
The first notice of the DC-6 caught a lot of us on the Beta team by surprise, we were expecting the NG3 to be the first to drop. That said the DC-6 testing has been a crazy process. As with all PMDG projects the main focus is getting it correct. Right now that process is often upended when the sim itself updates. The last update is a case in point, it blew the autopilot system out of the water.
One of the biggest items for those of us that are used to study level sims coming to MSFS was the lack of implementation of systems in the default aircraft. It effectively made the A320, 787 and 747-8 unflyable. Imagine buying a car and finding out that most of the controls in your car are inoperative. To almost all of us this is ok. To new simmers there was no expectation for these systems to work, for experienced simmers it’s a default so we didn’t expect it to work. For PMDG and I’m sure for FSLabs and Majestic this is not acceptable. The aircraft and its systems and subsystems MUST work as they do in real life. You should be able to do an accurate flight from load up to shutdown. Flight models must be correct. Weight and balance must affect flight accurately. Fuel burn must be correct. The AFE in the DC-6 was built because the workload synchronization of that work load called for a third party in the cockpit. Not to create a “light” version.The 747 had a flight engineer when first introduced but has evolved into a 2 person crew like all modern airliners. Some of the Beta team are able to fly the aircraft without the AFE, some of us welcome the extra set of hands. BUT the same switches and controls have to be set and activated to fly the aircraft with or without the AFE.
The DC-6 will cost what it costs, how much I don’t have a clue. What I do know is it will be as close to right as possible. There will be documentation. The systems and switches will do what they are supposed to do. And the aircraft will react and behave as it should related to those actions.
In the meantime we continue testing and working on it as well as the continued work on P3D airframes and GFO.
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Thank you for the update. Shame to hear that the sim update blew up the autopilot. 
Kind of like building a house when they keep updating the foundation…
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it’s not an autopilot, it’s a gyropilot
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