Until and unless DCS becomes taxpayer-funded, their only way to bring in revenue is to release new products. Fixing bugs brings in nothing. Correcting a recently created bug in an existing module whose sales are likely rather low now and only to new players or players who finally got a Hornet or Tomcat is not going to bring in revenue.
In order to increase the size of the team to correct these bugs, and like komemiute said there is a WORLD of difference between seeing an issue and fixing it, they need to increase their revenue.
You are under no obligation to buy any of them pending their fixing these bugs or completing early access. Clutchâs comments, however, are neither a solution nor an accurate assessment of the root cause.
This is akin to saying because the person you voted into office has correctly, in your opinion, identified what you feel is wrong with the government, they will fix it to your satisfaction during their term. I know some people actually seem to believe that, even though centuries of experience have disproven the likelihood.
Oh yeahâŠIâve gone head-first into the mission âtreeâ out of necessity (for my goals) and Yikes! IMO you get a hint at the complexity of all the âconnectionsâ possible - and how frangible it all is - by trying to decipher this data structure.
DCS-erâs should try it, just for fun. Once. Changes your perspective.
EDâs priorities and mine donât line up on everything and their biz model is a head-scratcher. But in the end I want them to succeed. My version of a âfantasy worldâ requires it
The code has to be performant AND versatile (abstract enough) all at the same time: and run really, really fast!
And mod-able, or âmorphableâ (I donât mean texture mapping, more creating your own mini-worlds in that sand box). You can argue, and I do, that they place odd restrictions here but I understand why: and run really, really fast!
A hint I think as to the complexity on display in a flight sim is illustrated by [pick your favorite PC hardware reviewer] when they benchmark âgamesâ.
On XYZ GPU/CPU all settings on âMax Blingâ
Exhibits 1 - 50 << note the amount, ie most every FPS out there:
FPS average: 300!!!, âWow!!!â
On cutting edge hardware? From a HUGE corporation (likely part of the problem there in contrast). I suspect a few reasons why you donât see MSFS on HW benchmark reviews often - makes the HW look bad. Why is this? I have my thoughts, but Iâm too busy.
DCS is I think MORE complex than MSFS.
Iâm gonna say it: people want things, shiny things, all in their complex military flight sim. Things they see in a First Person shooter, to include performance and consistency/reliability (that uses, likely, a common code base - engine- that the HW people can optimize for) - Then they want MORE! For the same price as a FPS that has the benefit of a MUCH larger customer base, ie; revenue potential. The âmassesâ in the the game world.
EDâs biggest problem as I see it is they are too closed off. My good nature says this is due to keeping control not out of greed but out of managing the chaos that can result. Itâs a moving target.
I certainly have stopped any form of spending on DCS, due to work and other time commitments over the summer I stepped away from DCS entirely for the first time in a long time and I donât know if I can go back. With distance the issues seem all the more glaring.
I see some people take criticism of ED very strongly around here. The question of if other developers are better or worse can be answered by the products. Are other users routinely having systems that were working just fine become nonfunctional after an update? I canât say that I see that happen if any other game that I play regularly. Getting the fog that was previewed 3 years ago doesnât make up for game breaking bugs.
Heck the launcher menu now that Iâm forced to use shows me modules that arenât released every time I open it up. From a video that was posted a year ago! Nothing makes the community feel good about a game like seeing the developers of said game unable to work faster then the pace of a glacier. Especially with the community pumping out mods that are high quality gap filling content. Remember ED admitted that it took 3-4 months to get one single AI asset working in the game. Meanwhile there are modders maintaining 300+ assets for free and doing it 3x faster.
I dont know how that is good marketing. You should not show products you dont have.
I do agree that fixes on one thing, have nothing to do with another. Carrier fixes have nothing to do with a Map release. Map release has nothing to do with Ai fixes. Different teams do different jobs.
DCS is still so random that the days when we sat glued waiting for a release so we could run to buy it⊠Them days are over. I dont want an MB-339⊠Im not mad if you do and I get it. This aircraft is near an dear to someone. But I will wait until they release stuff I am interested in. Ill also wait until Iraq matures and goes on sale. God I want it! But Ill wait.
I am also learning that just cos there are a dozen products to be released, IN THE FUTURE!, does not mean they Will be released. Third Party projects are unpredictable. So I have cooled my jets (pardon the pun) and I learn the modules I do have. After all, I still suck at the Mustang and I have owned it forever lol.
I got plenty of goodies in my garage.
What DCS really needs⊠Is Competition.
Yes agree, Iâve made this same post a few times over the last few years (mostly on YT channels however).
Why donât they have any competition though?
Is it them, ED, or is it us, the market? Iâve seen this comment, and again made it myself, but not many offer up why this is so. On one level I think itâs too obvious:
Youâd have to be crazy to want to invest a ton of time and money in the 1% of the gaming market (just a guess of overall game market coverage on my part).
In the end I am both frustrated with yet thankful for what I have here. Two things can be true at once.
Yeah, in building my project I had of course a chance to count the number of modules I own. Which then forces me to estimate what Iâve spent (just on modules). And each one of them deep enough to keep me busy for a long time.
Why did I do that? My imagination is bigger than my time budget?
I have no excuse when it comes to module complexity to ever be bored.
Now, the âworldâ presented is another thing. Iâve mostly fixed this. Maybe too good. Now that Iâm done adding âstuffâ Iâm doing full-on play testing and it is in some ways too much, even for me. Compromises are being made in the name of player realities.
And after installing Iraq I noticed my DCS dedicated drive is 80% full. Uh, oh.
So, Iâve gotto go run an Air-to-Air 2V1 training scenario at the NTTR, in my Phantom (or maybe the MirageâŠor the new F-5?). Itâs day 25 and I want to be ready for the ârealâ war in the Syria map Still finding a few edge-case B U Gâs. Itâs complicatedâŠtake care all
Dawned on me this week, now that Iâm testing it al through (as much as possible) that Iâve created not so much a campaign engine as a career mode. Kind of old school. Doubt many will like this, in practice.
All the competition folded due to lack of profit.
So you can either fly modded 20 year old games or you have to soldier on with DCS.
Every other possible competitor has been primarily one-man teams (Strike Fighters, CAP2, that Apache sim that was Unity I think) that have fallen by the wayside because with ONE person they werenât making enough money.
You need expertise in coding and flight, physics and tactics, AI and history, geography and gaming, just to attempt to make a product. That requires money up front to pay for things before first release, and getting people to invest with a reasonable ROI is not easy.
When Microsoft, Microsoft, keeps trying and quitting because they werenât making enough back, you know the marketing issues are serious. MS could afford to throw money at the problem to fix it, but they wonât back a money-losing product anymore. So we got MS FlightâŠyeahâŠ
They appear to have âcracked the codeâ with 2020, but I have no idea how that and 2024 have done vs the old FSX that was its main competition.
Do theyâŠreally?
Or are they commenting errors and unjust criticism?
Criticising ED for releasing buggy code is one thing. Saying they prioritized a map release over bug fixes is plain wrong. Has nothing to do with eachother.
Saying that these bugs should never have existed had ED tested properly shows a lack of understanding of how testing is done and what can be done about the bugs that are revealed.
Do you see what Iâm getting at?
I doubt anyone here think ED and DCS are perfect and that thereâs nothing wrong with either.
Who here wouldnât want faster development of faultless modules and maps?
But just compare DCS today, with DCS 2-4-6 years ago. A lot has happened and it is a better product today. This is true:
So if someone goes around dropping hyperbole statements about cashgrabbing, arrogance, lies and glaciers, it kind of looks like they are out to ruffle feathersâŠ
Interesting discussion and insightful comments hereâŠ
I can add one thing, more speculation than fact though.
Home Assistant is now the biggest open source project (by number of contributors) on Github. Itâs backed by a company of a few talented individuals that manages the project, releases hardware prepared for it, and it has grown from a nerdy project for IT people to probably the best and most versatile Home Automation product, with plug and play usability for most common usecases.
Given the amount of talent, dedication and passion in the DCS mod community, I sometimes wonder what is holding back ED from trying the same.
I know FlightGear exists but FG is not backed by a strong company and is just not that good. DCS has a huge passionate talented userbase because it is the best in many ways.
If the DCS core were open source and all those talented passionate people could contribute, what could DCS be?
My guess is that the main reason not to do it is fear and culture.
Fear that someone else could fork the code and steal their users and revenue stream. I donât think this is justified because ED has a lot of talent and so much to bring. I think the help will make them even better. But theyâd have to accept it.
The culture: I built it, it is mine and no one elseâs. Open source requires a zen-like letting go, being open to contributions, changes and feedback, and letting your code grow beyond your own initial idea.
Oh, and third: owners/stakeholders are probably even less ready to accept the reality that open source software backed by strong companies leads to better products.
Of course, it could be a terrible idea, flood DCS with half-bakes modules that access the âPFMâ interface but suck, and collapse the core team and the whole ecosystem due to loss of revenue from licensing third party modules (interfaces are open, thus free).
But I can also imagine volunteers and talented third parties like HeatBlur devs contributing to the core and improving the architecture even more and speeding up dev work.
Perhaps a large enough fraction of consumers voluntarily paying subscriptions to ED or a foundation-like entity that pays core developers for project work, for faster downloads or small benefits lile that.
Keeping in mind my perspective is from, oh, nearly 40 years ago (when we wished for the coming of 32-bit processorsâŠwadda you mean 16-bits isnât enough!?).
And Iâm not up on 21st century software practices, but it has always seemed to me that MSFS got it right in one way (roughly, things may have changed with MSFS as Iâve not time to dive deep):
They produce the base engine, get paid for it, support an API and license creations made with it, thereby creating more goodies, by third-parties, thus driving interest in the base game, via variety, etc. This creates a âcottage industryâ if you will.
Thereâs incentives there. Maybe that model takes too much up front money?
A circular/feedback system. ED seems to be the doing the opposite. All just a WAG on my part.
Then thereâs timing; perhaps the MSFS model came about at the right time to support the above.
EDâs current model is not that different from the old MSFS business model. Official mods use the SDK, for which they enter a contract in which they presumably agree to pay a percentage of revenue to ED.
Main difference is that ED has opened up less and kept a strong quality control, only allowing vetted devs and companies to join.
Kind of the opposite of open source. And it has worked very well for them so far. So the whole open source model probably does not apply well here.
MS with FSX made their money of initial sales, and then stopped spending money supporting FSX with updates etc. FSX had a stable code base for over a decade. DCS could have stopped pushing development on the current engine and simply pushed out a few patches, and then taken in the money from module development, while working on a new product (DCS 2010, DCS 2012, DCS 2014, etc). Lets be honest, as the only game in town for a very long time, if DCS was on a 2 or 4 year cycle, the majority of us would buy the new version, and rebuy our favorite modules. Weâd even be happy if we got a loyalty discount. ED hasnât done this, and instead has kept the core free (or at least a 1 time purchase for those of us who started back when it wasnât free), and continued to support a lot of things that a lot of devs would have called âlegacyâ and let drop off, or forced paid updates to continue to use.
If DCS had a 1 and done sale with no further support, then open-source development to allow for free (for the developer) updates of the core engine makes good business sense. Sit back and let the community do the work, take in the revenue from licensed modules, and work on the new product to be released a few years down the line. If youâre going to be releasing continual updates to the core, or even be on a multi-year development cycle for new products, you donât want the community releasing something for free open source that you spent a bunch of money working on at the same time.
âOfficialâ is the tricky part, right? ED is, from what I can see, very closed up regarding how things actually work.
I recall when MSFT wanted everyone to pay for their API documentation (it came via a stack of CDâs). They had been giving it away for free before.
I thought that was nuts - why wouldnât you give that away free, to the world? (there are other less appropriate models here ) Locking it up stifles creativity. Sure, 9,999 out of 10,000 âproductsâ will be âiffyâ but a few will be great. THEN you enter a contract to sell your product under their license.
Eventually someone else, at MSFT, agreed, with some modifications.
Thatâs what it kind of feels like. A moving target. Though they seem to be in an in-between world in some ways. If it wasnât for mods, or mod-ability (single player anyway) - and I count the mission editor + lua in this - I wouldnât be interested, as is, for very long.
On one hand they provide some access yet on the other they seem to be a âbotherâ. I get it on one level: the complaints when an update breaks a mod. Mod-ability IMHO helps them (in this genre) but causes them problems too. Tuff nut to crack.
Hey, Iâm not supporting mods either (except the community A-4E-C) cos I donât need any more variables
I think DCS could do more to support mods. I donât generally like the mods that just repurpose the FC avionics, but mods like the aforementioned A4E-C and Iâd add the AH-6, HH-60 and VNAO T-45 add a lot to the game - particularly when youâre introducing new players to the game in a multiplayer setting!
) Locking it up stifles creativity. Sure, 9,999 out of 10,000 âproductsâ will be âiffyâ but a few will be great. THEN you enter a contract to sell your product under their license.