Well worth reading!
It seems flight sim producer never deliver enough! At the same time they are making wonderful productsâŚ
Talks between users and producers is always hard⌠and it could be much better and constructive!
The response from TFCâŚ
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your very detailed message.
I am the Founder of ED with my good friend Igor Tishin in 1991. We released our first product in 1995 with a 3 man dev team. It has been a labour of love ever since.
Today we have some 125 programmers in the team, all dedicated men and women who are committed to doing their very best. Each and everyone of them can find jobs which pay significantly more but stick with ED for the love and passion. Since Igor passed away last year from septicaemia post cancer treatment, Katia has taken the job of CEO with both hands and is doing a fabulous job. This is a first class team of guys and gals on a level I have yet to meet in my 37 years of business.
Your post is very insightful and we appreciate its content and the tone is honourable too. Please know this:
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without early access we would spend 50% more time and money to engineer the products as developers work better and faster with direct user feedback and when they see their product in the market.
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we would not be profitable.
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we would be vulnerable to customer âfadeâ as they switch to other products or genres.
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we would not enjoy the ârightâ to imperfection
You have very cleverly identified some of the above along with other realities we face such as the need for permanent innovation and engine renewal. Boyond daily bug fixing, the fundamental issues such as new graphics challenges (Vulkan, effects, mutli-threading etc), network improvements, sound improvements, new damage engine, dynamic campaign, web RTC, new game statistics engine, new weather engine, etc etc are all part of our roadmap and more than 50% of our staff work on these elements which are not directly module related. Without âearly accessâ few of the these could be done and yes you are right, we only have this avenue to finance ED as well as my personal investment. I wish we had âoffice or IOSâ to make life easier believe me.
Needless to say, I welcome all community input, in fact I read all community messages in order to help me guide our small company to a level where we can do a better job for you, our faithful community. I apologise if we donât live up to your expectations but believe me we are really doing our best to satisfy our customers in good faith and with honesty.
Thank you for your faithful involvement and for your continuing support and thank you all for your help in making us a better company but please do keep us loving our job⌠in the words of Abraham Lincoln: âA drop of honey gathers more flies than a gallon of gallâ.
Respectfully yours
Nick Grey TFC/ED
I, for one, am thoroughly bored of the forums for ED, and others, being a love fest of people swooning over them because they might just deliver their next favourite plane, and the other side that just moans because their favourite plane is not included or not how they expected it to be. TF are a case in point, and it is the same on Facebook.
You canât ask a genuine question anymore without one, or both, sides jumping on you.
Itâs hard to learn anything genuine from the forums these days and too much is speculation or opinion and not borne out by fact.
We get the EA model, IL2 and DCS both do it. I donât mind. I know it is going to take a long time to develop the module and that it is not going to be feature complete. I also know this gives me time to get to grips with what is implemented without being swamped by too much detail and too many things to work out. The Harrier is the perfect example. Itâs not the end of the world that the way some things work has changed either, as Iâve got a basic working knowledge of whatâs meant to happen I can adapt. When presented with the A-10C when I first got it I didnât even know where to start; thereâs too much.
If the F-16 was released fully finished it would be exactly the same, especially if the Hornet hadnât already been released.
Like he guy that wrote the post, I have invested a lot of time, money and resources into DCS; or at least flight simming in general. I like it when things are finished. I donât like it when things happen with developers like VEAO and we see modules like the Hawk pulled instead of completed; but I get why it happened.
I just wish the community could be more productive, less confrontational and capable of not being so condescending.
In the meantime, I will continue to fly and enjoy DCS whether it is early access or not.
Great response by Nick Grey! It gives lot of hope!
Also i sense the same about ED and Sturmovik forum⌠too much talk and confusion! Probably they would need to moderate them better, but being so huge it would take away resources from codersâŚ
But there are other sources to get in touch with happens in the community!
I like Mudspike over there the community share the passion (both DCS, BOX, aerofly, Xplace etc) with maturity.
Never saw clashes or fanboysâŚ
Hear, hear OD! I totally agree.
Iâm not totally in love with the business model of ED and IL-2 BoX, but I can totally understand it. And compared to getting a âfinishedâ game in the old days, say like Falcon 4 where it went from almost playable to fairly good single player (only) with the one or two patches that was released (as far as I can remember) before they went bankrupt, I actually prefer the perpetual updating we get with DCS and BoX even if it means some working parts get broken with some updates, just as long as it get fixed again (though it can be excruciatingly slow sometimes).