Microsoft Flight Simulator Gets Massive Update & Content Roadmap for 2023; ATR 42/72 Coming in March

Microsoft Flight Simulator is getting a ton of content in 2023, starting with New Zealand, the ATR, and more.

[jznrpg]

75$+ planes is crazy . You buy the game and 4 planes you get a PS5 . I see people complain of 70$ games but not 75$ planes . Madness

[LabRat]

Yeah it is overpriced for sure. But these planes are developed by 3rd party companies or individual people and get to choose their own pricing unfortunately. Can't imagine they make a lot off of them as it is a hard sell for the average person. They'd probably make more in the end if they sold them for 10 dollars cause even an average player might bite.

[Abriael]

The "average person" isn't the target of the kind of aircraft that costs that much. Aircraft for the "average person" cost $15.

[Abriael]

1: you don't need to buy them if you don't want them. The sim provides *plenty* of aircraft at no additional cost. Aircraft that cost that much are advanced software for advanced simmers. If you think that's too much, you're likely not at the level required to even understand their worth, let alone fly them.
2: Aircraft that cost that much usually require an entire team years to code, as they're absolutely not any less complex than most games out there without counting all the research. MSFS, like all flight simulators of its kind, is a platform, not simply a game. Complex aircraft can provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for those who enjoy them, and they're not comparable to your usual DLC in terms of what they offer and what they require to be created.
3: Prices are determined by the market. People simply compare the amount of work hours that went into creating a product with how many copies they expect to sell. While MSFS provides a pretty large market, so developers can afford to be more adventurous about pricing than in other sims (but that's a risk), complex and highly detailed aircraft are a *niche* product. Most MSFS users wouldn't even care to go through the 30-40 minutes it takes to get to the point of starting the engines.

[Firehazard5]

Man, it absolutely does not take PMDG remotely the same amount of man hours that it did for the hundreds of people at asobo to make the entire game. Asobo is charging $60 for 20 functioning aircraft with the sound recordings and the performance modeling involved with them, the entire in game physics system, textures, lighting maps, UI, sound design, ATC and ILS systems, weather physics, camera systems, cloud computing, licensing costs. It's absolutely rediculous to claim that a small dev team puts more effort than all of that to make one plane. Especially since they can use pre existing code/flight systems they didn't even have to create. Indie Devs put hundreds of hours into games all the time, it doesn't mean that it's reasonable for them to charge 1.5X the cost of a AAA title.

Them charging $85 is what limits their market. Millions of people bought the game which is a huge market if they priced it accordingly. 200k X $20 = 4M 5000 X $80 = 400,000

[Abriael]

@Firehazard5: you just displayed ridiculous amounts of ignorance.
It took PMDG 3 years to finish the 737 series. Yes. it was in the works since before the game launched. That is entirely comparable to the amount man hours required to create a full game.
The "functioning aircraft" Asobo created are extremely simple. There's zero ground for comparison in terms of complexity between default aircraft in a flight simulator and advanced payware airliners. Even just the autopilot programming of the 737 is likely more complex than all the code done for the entire lineup of aircraft that MSFS had at release.

The market isn't limited just by price. It's also limited by the nature of the product. Sure. Millions of people purchased MSFS, but how many of these millions did it to fly around in a cessna and see the sights, and how many did it to sit on an apron for 30 minutes flipping switches before they can even push back and start the engines?

Assuming that people would buy the 737 only because they have MSFS is a ridiculous assumption. The percentage of core simmers who even want that kind of core aircraft within the full addressable market is much, much smaller.

This without mentioning that aiming to go full mass market by dropping the price to $20 would have one obvious effect: creating thousands of customer support complaints from people who can't even start the aircraft.

Could PMDG possibly afford going cheaper? Sure. But they would have to take a risk, and you don't take a risk with the work of a company for 3 years. They launched the 737-600 cheaper exactly to explore that possibility, and will adapt according to the results.

[deleted]

I really need to upgrade my PC. I've seen videos of people playing this in VR, and it looks absolutely insane!

Yea, the pricing is pretty crazy though.