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Your P3D intentions?


ahuimanu

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Hello Aerosoft,

 

In the Airbus fora, you convey both your excitement for MSFS and your displeasure with P3Dv5.  On the topic of aircraft, sceneries, and tools, what are your long-term intentions for P3D? 

 

Thank you.

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30 minutes ago, ahuimanu said:

Hello Aerosoft,

 

In the Airbus fora, you convey both your excitement for MSFS and your displeasure with P3Dv5.  On the topic of aircraft, sceneries, and tools, what are your long-term intentions for P3D? 

 

Thank you.

 

Hey Jeff.

 

I know why you're asking, and I think Mathijs has been pretty clear in several of his posts.  Aerosoft, and for that matter any large developer, will produce products where there is a market for them.  So if the P3D market remains viable and profitable (and I'm still using it as I'm an airliner guy) then you can expect developers to continue to develop for it.  At present, there is absolutely no way for anyone sane to predict this.

 

Now in my opinion P3Dv5 was released about 1 year before it should have been, so beating P3Dv5 and LM up is warranted. I manged defense contracts under which LM was a primary contractor and I would have flayed them alive for their decision to release P3Dv5 to the flight sim community had it been under my purview (contract).  The flight sim user community should not let them off the hook for what they did, however their attention is presently elsewhere.  I'll also say that Mathijs is letting them off the hook very, very easy. 

 

Will P3Dv5 mature into a rival sim to MSFS?  It's well within the realm of possibility, but I don't have a crystal ball. The only ones who know the answer to that is LM and I'd bet there are also contractual issues that have to be considered (I won't elaborate or speculate further about this).

 

Back to your question, if the market is there, the products will follow across the flight sim developer world.  It's not up to Aerosoft or any other developers, it's up to you guys. Create the market and the products will follow.

 

Best wishes.

 

 

 

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Well we are still working on our P3D aircraft and they will continue to get updates because we need those for the new MFS versions and it is actually easier to develop those in P3d then it is in MFS right now. I very much doubt there will be new versions because sales of P3D aircraft have dropped tremendously, perhaps crashed is a better word. That might pick up, who knows, right now there are simply not enough customers to warrant any serious new project. The fact we are not big fans of P3d V5 at this moment (we assume most of our issues will be fixed though) has nothing to do with that. In our most recent (last week) market research we learned that P3D V4.5 is still by far the most used P3D version. A lot of people own P3d V5 but a lot are not using it. It's the same with FSX, we still see a massive amount of FSX users, they just do not buy add-ons anymore.

 

As we always say, we do not tell customers where to go, we go where the customers are. 

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Thank you both for your clear answers.

 

It is up to LM to maintain whatever market share that suits their business model as well.  For certain use cases, for the moment, I do not deem the latest Microsoft platform to be suitable.  While there is nothing quite like the marketing prowess of a large company to really drive the market, I didn't imagine, given the long lead time for development projects, that Aerosoft would place all of their eggs in the basked that is the new simulator from Microsoft.  However, it is apparent from your kind replies that this might be the case given you presently see no basis for "... any serious new project." In the end, those aren't my decisions, but one way to change a market is to deprive it of oxygen and that is how it seems you are interpreting the data.  That clear and honest answer is appreciated.  

 

I agree with Dave's observations regarding the premature release of the latest version of P3D - Alas, I too am on 4.5HF3 for stability.  However, I could make very similar arguments regarding MSFS.  It would seem the difference is that anything related to MSFS is selling like hot cakes.  In all cases, as you've both alluded to, "time will tell."  The maturity of the ESP/P3D platform helps me make my own decisions, but I had hoped that a multi-platform strategy would be Aerosoft's position moving forward.

 

Thanks for the replies!

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The difference between P3d and MFS is the amount of users. Microsoft said two weeks back that over a million people had downloaded it. It is my personal opinion that P3D v5 could not have had more than 15k sales. 

If you had to invest the work of our development teams (say 25 people), in what basket would YOU put your eggs? 

 

Again, we do not make these decisions, customers do. 

 

Aerosoft loves all sims. If we find enough customers to do a FS2002 add-on with love. We were the one company that kept on releasing FSX add-ons even after the sales made that rather unattractive,  we are probably the biggest X-Plane 11 developer, we do AFS add-ons when we think they break even. It is NOT a chicken and egg issue as some customers believe. We are a 'large' company, we got the cash to sell a product we know that will not make a profit but will make our customers happy. We sell on average 8 products to a customer, it makes sense to invest in products that are loved but do not make a lot of money. 

 

The simple fact is that we need to make money to keep Aerosoft doing what we do. And at this moment (as said, this can change) P3D does not do it. MFS and X-plane do.

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vor 1 hour , Mathijs Kok sagte:

MFS and X-plane do.

 

Does this mean X-Plane addon sales are still running reasonably fine at this time? This would be great news to me as I'm somewhat afraid MFS is eating up the X-Plane community based on overall communication, forum activity and steam charts...

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That sounds good... There is another aspect: Most developers/publishers seem to charge just about the half price for MFS sceneries compared to the usal price tags for the same sceneries in XP oder P3D - is there a technical reason behind this or is this a strategy to make MFS more attractive to the users?

 

 

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And this works out? Interesting... I did not expect those coming from the 'gamer' side of things paying the typical FS addon prices. One of my gamer friends once laughed at me when I told him I payed about 30 € for a single aircraft addon.

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  • Deputy Sheriffs

Well, MS as lately announced having already 1 million MSFS users. P3D not even came close to such numbers. That's what I mean with "much larger user base".

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Yes, this is what I have expected but I did not expect all these users buying a significant amount of addons, I don't expect 'gamers' investing money into thei simulator the way 'flight simmers' do. Maybe I'm wrong, time will tell. 🙂

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I think MSFS has many new users which are potentially new simmers (I wouldn't call them gamers as they won't be interested to buy addones :)). And that's the beauty of MSFS that is opening a new market segment and introduces new users to be new generation simmers. 

And regarding P3Dv5, I am also skeptical about it, unless LM bring stability updates, maybe there will be chance to it to bounce, but buying an expensive GPU card with a lot vram on it just to run P3Dv5 with no crashes and with less quality graphics as MSFS, makes nosense to me, why would I invest 1800euro on RTX3090 whereby my RTX2080 working beautifully with MSFS? 

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Yes, new simmers are welcome everytime because we aren't getting younger :).

I have the feeling that certain people are not amused about the circumstance that a million of customers are investing in MSFS instead of XPlane. Maybe the times of landclass-products are over in 2021.

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Mmmh... so you really believe that about a million of downloaders will in the end become simmers and invest sigificant amounts of money into their flight simulator? Honestly, I do not believe this will happen, I think most gamers will leave us later on.

 

 

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No, of course not a million; we are a kind of nerd for a lot of people :)! But many of them maybe will become flightsimmers, who knows?  I started flight simulation with FS5, but only a little bit; it was too strange for me. But in 2000, I don't know why anymore, I was interested in the 767 PIC from Wilco. This was a big overload of knowledge for me of course so I started sharing and learning in forums too. That is my hobby until today. That's why I believe that many people could be interested in flight simulation via such an eye opener like MSFS. 

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5 hours ago, FlyAgi said:

Mmmh... so you really believe that about a million of downloaders will in the end become simmers and invest sigificant amounts of money into their flight simulator? Honestly, I do not believe this will happen, I think most gamers will leave us later on.

 

 

Well not all the one million but good percentage of them will definitely show their interest in simming, we are all gotta start somewhere, I remember that I started with FS9 and I was super happy to just fly the default 737 (that default 737 of FS9 if I recall waaay basic than the NEO) when I was 16years old, hence with the new generation their new start would be with MSFS and its appealing accessibility ;)  

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On 9/26/2020 at 12:28 PM, FlyAgi said:

Mmmh... so you really believe that about a million of downloaders will in the end become simmers and invest sigificant amounts of money into their flight simulator? Honestly, I do not believe this will happen, I think most gamers will leave us later on.

 

 

The basic fact is that the less copies of the sim were sold the less potential customers we had. Please believe me, when Dovetails sold FSX on Steam the amount of potential customers exploded. I know three companies selling sim add-ons that were saved by that. 

 

At this moment we have the first sales data of MFS add-ons. From our free Paderborn to the stuff we charge money for.  We also have our market research. And we are looking at numbers we have not seen since 2002.

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I am no doubt heavily invested in P3D.  But that doesn't mean I was the type that then was hoping for the failure of MSFS.  In fact the opposite.  I've purchased it.  I was an alpha tester also.  I've purchased a handful of addons.  My problem is that I like to fly realistic airliners.  I'm not sure the progress being made there.  Other than one developer who recently said we could be waiting a year.  That was very disappointing to me.  As right now MSFS is basically a platform for very nice visuals and VFR flying.  I'm hopefully that DX12 will come to MSFS sooner rather than later.  While we can sit here and look at so many things that P3D got wrong with the execution of V5, we also can't look past the massive performance gains that were achieved.  I mean I can have a packed vatsim flight into JFK or BOS in bad weather, and get very good performance in V5 in a realistic airliner.  The same cannot be said for MSFS right now.  Again I truly want MSFS to succeed and hope it's my future flight simulator.  I've been doing this for 25 years and have seem the winners and losers in this niche.  My biggest concern is not whether I can achieve realistic airliner flights from A to B.  Because I think that will show up eventually.  My concern is one day MS pulls the plug on the servers.  In the old days this wasn't a factor.  Microsoft could pull out and all that would mean is that updates would stop.  But in a simulator with a heavy streaming component, pulling the plug would be game over.  So for the first time there is actually now a very large risk in investing in addons that was much less of a threat in the past.  Mathijs: I do appreciate your transparency and timely communications with your customers.  Not everybody does that and it's refreshing.  

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On 25.9.2020 at 22:14, FlyAgi sagte:

And this works out? Interesting... I did not expect those coming from the 'gamer' side of things paying the typical FS addon prices. One of my gamer friends once laughed at me when I told him I payed about 30 € for a single aircraft addon.

 

I've spent 140€ for a single aircraft addon, and I don't regret a single cent of the investment, because I have flown it hundreds of hours and I will keep on doing that with great pleasure. I think flight simmers think a bit different than the typical "gamer". For example, I have a lot of friends, but no "gaming friends", as I have absolutely no interest in "gaming" - I fly FS because I'm interested in flying and can't afford a real aircraft and fly that around the world. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I love my airliners as much as the next crazy simmer-nut.  Some here may recall that I even painted a few of them for the community...

 

For now, MSFS is not our sim for this facet of simming. However, nobody can deny that this is just about sums up the diversity of the amount of simmers in the current market:

Please login to display this image.

Now of course ALL those new customers will not continue to become even casual simmers that developers will count on for sales (when they're done showing all their friends their house in MSFS, and realize they can't fly it like GTA and crash into anything with graphic, gory results...they'll be gone).

 

But even if 20% of them stay and become potential customers for devs, that's around 200,000 new simmers.  I don't know the real numbers, but you can bet @Mathijs Kokhas a way more accurate viewpoint of the market, so you can assume anything he says about the numbers is going to be as accurate as it can be.

 

And with MSFS being in the limelight that it is right now....especially if you remember where the launch announcement was made way back...literally as the largest Flight Sim Conference was being held in Orlando (basically a snub to the "real, hardcore" simmers out there), you start to see that this sim has had thousand of times the exposure to the general public than P3D or FSX ever had.  More proof....you even see the major hardware influencers and gamers on youtube, twitch, etc even including MSFS in their benchmarking for new GPU/CPUs!   NEVER in the history of simming has that ever happened!  

 

Anyway, all our "speculation" of the flight sim customer base is moot.  The chips will fall where they will fall, and Aerosoft (and all vendors) will go where the revenue is, that is the only fact that is undeniable. (Well....all the smart vendors who want to stay in business that is, hehe)

 

 

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Plus, no doubt MSFS is mostly used for GA/VFR flying right now. I can foresee the number of MSFS users to explode the moment advanced airliners will hit the market and people can take off with their high-level Boeings, Airbuses, and Business Jets. This may be a year from now, give or take a few months, but the moment will come (and personally I think it will come earlier).

 

Aerosoft is well-advised to be early in that market, which I understand they are working on.

 

Kind regards, Michael

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