C
Cerberus
Guest
If you get a chance go to http://www.fspilotshop.com/ and look on the right hand side to see what is this months best selling FS aircraft. At number 5 our FSX Texans are the highest rank aircraft on the list. I assume this list is accurate if not then maybe my thoughts are presumptuous. In addition, another of our aircraft also made the list for a period of time this month, the reason being was we had a massive 50% off sale in which you could get the Texans for only $10 over the Fourth of July Weekend, but I didn’t come here to brag.
Well when I first saw the Texans on the bestseller list I was really shocked. The reason being was that only 53 products had sold when I noticed it at number 5. That’s about $530 with fspilotshop taking 30% leaving our entire team with $371 to spread amongst ourselves for being gracious enough to put a plane on sale for only $10. I think a lot of people wonder why most FS products cost as much as the actual game did, and I’m proud to have some of the lowest priced products on the market, the first Fs2004 product I ever I released cost under $15. I actually had to increase price over the next several products I released and sales improved despite the first product being of higher quality than some of the later ones. I guess in the case of our first Fs2004 product a below standard price put a stigmatism on the quality and scared people away.
Assuming the list is accurate and our FSX Texans can be the number 1 ranked selling aircraft this month at only $371 in company profit, then it really makes you wonder what the hundreds of other designers selling products with Fspilotshop are getting? Frankly I highly hope this list isn’t accurate and others are getting more than 53 sales in a 15 day period, otherwise I think we are going to see a ton of companies closing their doors and not releasing anything new, and the financial frustration in the community and among developers is going get in the way of us having fun pushing even more revenue from our hobby. I also hope the list is not accurate because honestly I dream of my company growing to one day be able to develop our own games and simulators, but if 53 sales is really the monthly peak then their isn’t much hope of this happening any time soon.
Another point I’d like to bring up is piracy. I know most will argue that the people that will pirate would have never bought the products to begin with. Well this is not true. When I was in school over the years taking 18-21 hours of classes and could not release new products or promote the products the way I wanted to we had a number of slow months. During this time I visited a few of the forums that distributed our aircraft illegally and noticed that the owners took donations so that they could buy our software legally and then give it away for free illegally. Well to my surprise the amount they gathered in monthly donations was far greater than the amounts the company had been ending up with from actual sales. In addition, one slow month I decided to compare the number of illegal downloads of our products to what I actually made. I added up the download counter for just 1, repeat just 1, pirate website and the monthly illegal downloads exceeded $30,000. You wonder how much did I make this month? Only $600. I’m blessed to have the people that paid me that $600 legally, I know a lot of you came from SOH, and it sure helped get me through school, but with a $279 car note, $315 in rent, college books, food, utilities can you imagine how I felt to only get $600 and have over $30,000 stolen from me? Can you imagine what the amount had been if I had been able to calculate every site that illegally hosted our planes?
Now I could have released all of this information along time ago, and hoped all of the whining would help increase our sales, but that is not my intention. I thought the community could use this information to help better understand how little we get in return for how much we put into this. That topped of with having to deal with some publishers that never pay us, and the frustration of piracy. Yesterday marks 4 weeks and 3 promises broken on when we would get paid by a foreign company that was selling one of our products on store shelves.
The recent sales information just really reinforced that other companies were having just as hard of time as me, and it appears for this month even a worse time. Now what good can we get from all of this seemingly bad news? Well its easy to see why customers get frustrated in these hard financial times, but few if any developers have taken the risk by releasing the type of information I have, so we never hear their side of the story. Now is the time more than ever we are all going to have to band together if we want this community and hobby to survive. To do this we are going to have to start having more empathy for each other and strive to better understand the frustrations that are going around. If we don’t then we are going to have even more developers close doors and even more financially stressed people turn to piracy.
Well when I first saw the Texans on the bestseller list I was really shocked. The reason being was that only 53 products had sold when I noticed it at number 5. That’s about $530 with fspilotshop taking 30% leaving our entire team with $371 to spread amongst ourselves for being gracious enough to put a plane on sale for only $10. I think a lot of people wonder why most FS products cost as much as the actual game did, and I’m proud to have some of the lowest priced products on the market, the first Fs2004 product I ever I released cost under $15. I actually had to increase price over the next several products I released and sales improved despite the first product being of higher quality than some of the later ones. I guess in the case of our first Fs2004 product a below standard price put a stigmatism on the quality and scared people away.
Assuming the list is accurate and our FSX Texans can be the number 1 ranked selling aircraft this month at only $371 in company profit, then it really makes you wonder what the hundreds of other designers selling products with Fspilotshop are getting? Frankly I highly hope this list isn’t accurate and others are getting more than 53 sales in a 15 day period, otherwise I think we are going to see a ton of companies closing their doors and not releasing anything new, and the financial frustration in the community and among developers is going get in the way of us having fun pushing even more revenue from our hobby. I also hope the list is not accurate because honestly I dream of my company growing to one day be able to develop our own games and simulators, but if 53 sales is really the monthly peak then their isn’t much hope of this happening any time soon.
Another point I’d like to bring up is piracy. I know most will argue that the people that will pirate would have never bought the products to begin with. Well this is not true. When I was in school over the years taking 18-21 hours of classes and could not release new products or promote the products the way I wanted to we had a number of slow months. During this time I visited a few of the forums that distributed our aircraft illegally and noticed that the owners took donations so that they could buy our software legally and then give it away for free illegally. Well to my surprise the amount they gathered in monthly donations was far greater than the amounts the company had been ending up with from actual sales. In addition, one slow month I decided to compare the number of illegal downloads of our products to what I actually made. I added up the download counter for just 1, repeat just 1, pirate website and the monthly illegal downloads exceeded $30,000. You wonder how much did I make this month? Only $600. I’m blessed to have the people that paid me that $600 legally, I know a lot of you came from SOH, and it sure helped get me through school, but with a $279 car note, $315 in rent, college books, food, utilities can you imagine how I felt to only get $600 and have over $30,000 stolen from me? Can you imagine what the amount had been if I had been able to calculate every site that illegally hosted our planes?
Now I could have released all of this information along time ago, and hoped all of the whining would help increase our sales, but that is not my intention. I thought the community could use this information to help better understand how little we get in return for how much we put into this. That topped of with having to deal with some publishers that never pay us, and the frustration of piracy. Yesterday marks 4 weeks and 3 promises broken on when we would get paid by a foreign company that was selling one of our products on store shelves.
The recent sales information just really reinforced that other companies were having just as hard of time as me, and it appears for this month even a worse time. Now what good can we get from all of this seemingly bad news? Well its easy to see why customers get frustrated in these hard financial times, but few if any developers have taken the risk by releasing the type of information I have, so we never hear their side of the story. Now is the time more than ever we are all going to have to band together if we want this community and hobby to survive. To do this we are going to have to start having more empathy for each other and strive to better understand the frustrations that are going around. If we don’t then we are going to have even more developers close doors and even more financially stressed people turn to piracy.
ffice
So I try and write positive posts about the products I buy and enjoy. No one aircraft is perfect considering the nature of art, perfection is an impossible goal! But there is always something positive to find about each product. I always try to be tactful and honest and hope that I contribute something positive.
:mixedsmi: