Mr maddox. Maby A2A is someone to talk to??

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by swiss

Why would there be a gap if there's money to be made?

Just a thought.

That's exactly my point. MS is out of the game (at least until their MS Flight is on the shelves and we don't know how much of a sim it will be), so all these people will need an optimized, modern simulator to cut their teeth into sooner or later, as FS9 is showing its age and FSX is a resource hog. More money for team Maddox, more expansions for us

If you mean that MS closed it down because they don't make enough money out of it, this also depends on the demographic you are targetting. It's true that the base FSX package is something one buys only once and the real money comes from the myriad of 3rd party add-ons, which MS doesn't see a penny out of.

However, MS lost the combat crowd to IL2 so all they had was the civilian flyers. In that case it could be true that the profits didn't justify the expenses and effort required to keep making MSFS titles, since their target audience was limited during the last few years.

In the case of SoW however, the main audience is the combat oriented folks. Again, the civilian fliers will generate more income for the add-on companies that the developer of the base engine, but that's not a problem when SoW's main base of support will be the combat flyers. The success of SoW doesn't rest on the civilian crowd, they are just a welcome bonus. A guy like that might spend 150$ on various add-ons and only $60 on buying a copy of the SoW engine to run them on, but that's still a few thousand people spending $60 each on SoW. The sim can't float on them alone, but that doesn't mean they're not a welcome boost in sales.