Great post 111. I like your ideas!

Is there any information on how many copies have been sold? I read a few years ago that the IL2 series sold 600,000 in Russia and the same in the rest of the world. How do CoD sales compare?

How about communication with the customers? Rise of flight has it and that game is still going strong!

Is this target - I mean us, middle age COMBAT flight sim lovers - big enough to make such a huge project pay off?

No idea about Russia or China (pirate's copies prevails there I presume) but the rest of the world deliver some thousands souls of this kind (as far as I can quess from popular server s like SimHQ etc.) Twenty, fifty?

Does anybody have an idea how much the costs are to develop, create, promote and keep such a sofisticated game alive for some years?

Can we compare the costs with potential gains talking about the market you suggested?

Those are probably based on American development studios though, I expect labour costs are different in the Russian job market (though I am only speculating).

Luthier did mention it was difficult to find competent programmers.

1. Make it a free-to-play online MMO with micro-transactions and/or DLC if you want a lot of people to play.

2. Make it the traditional "hardcore historical accuracy accurate FM's flightsim way" and very few will buy it.

Basically, if you want BoM to sell you can't make it the traditional way. Too expensive to develop it especially when you consider potential sales. I don't like that it is this way and I bet few fans of the il-2 series does either but it's the harsh reality. Casual PC gamers (those who play Crysis, Skyrim, Torchlight etc.) don't pick up hardcore sims anymore, not in general anyway.

I think if you are expecting things to be the way they used to be, you should really think again. Even the biggest publishers with the biggest game franchises are being "forced" to go free-to-play with micro-transaction because let's face it, a lot of people like to play games but they can't afford each 50€ game that is released. They prioritize, do I want to buy this obscure Russian developed flightsim or do I want this critically acclaimed and awesome triple-A action/adventure game for my 50€? I'd say most gamers will go for the latter and those very gamers are needed for this franchise to survive and prosper. It doesn't help if you bought 3 copies of CLoD if only a few tens of thousands have been sold.

If you have a free-to-play model you can at least say, "hey! just try it out for free to see if you like it". At least then there's a chance to hook new recruits. Maybe I'm wrong though, maybe our little core community is enough to sustain further hardcore WWII flight games but even if that's the case, I bet those bean-counters we keep hearing about all the time wants to see their investment grow and not stagnate.

This is ridiculous. Salaries are 3-4 times smaller in similar positions in the gaming industry in Russia.

That makes sense to me, addman

Chris Roberts will hire a capable dev team to make 'Star Citizen'... these are his figures to make a decent game.