Triple-R

Definitely would like to see Russian airbases for the 80's war.

The announcement of the preorder for the F-15E Strike Eagle module reminded me that I first played a flight sim when F-15 Strike Eagle was released on the Apple II back in 85(?) or so. Then it was Jet and Falcon 1.0 on the high school IBM PCs. Falcon 2.0 on the Mac, F/A-18 Hornet from GraphSim on the Mac, and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat in college, and briefly playing around on the flight sim on an SGI Indy. Then got into building my own PC just so I could play Falcon 4.0. And now DCS World. What a long trip. Wish I had kept the boxes/disks/manuals for most of them, though I still think I have the Falcon 4.0 binder.

Following my post in the other thread, I think the J and the E are pretty much baseline. If you can do early and late E variants, I think you'd get a lot of support from those who don't care about early versions. Following that, I'd like a K or M.

I hope you don't mind, I snipped a bit for brevity. I get your point, and I think we're on the same page. The Phantom was widely used and had such a long service life, that it covers multiple technological eras and operational theaters. There's no way 1 variant will please even half the people, in my opinion. If I could be sure that a variant I was interested in was coming out, I'd be happy to shell out ahead of time for a variant I'm not so interested in - assuming module prices stay fairly static. I realize many people cannot afford to do that.

So, brand new to DCS: World, and came across this topic as I was looking for info on a module for an F-4. I've worked in software long enough to know that developers have to balance the time and effort (and therefore money) required to develop a product vs the projected revenue the product will generate. Add in the fact that any time spent on such a project is time not spent on some other possible revenue generating work, or even necessary non-revenue generating work such as bug fixes. So, while there is definitely demand for the F-4 and while I'd love to see a variety of F-4 variants, I just don't see it happening. Once you factor in that purchasers are going to want a useful AI back-seater, which is going to have to operate differently for each type, I don't see how they can offer multiple variants at the cost of a single mod, or even necessarily develop multiple variants each at the cost of a full mod each. Would they get enough purchases of less popular variants to pay for development, and how could they encourage people to purchase those variants that may not be their favorite? That having been said, if I was picking variants, given that Vietnam was where the F-4 made its name, so I'd like to have a US Navy version (J), and a US Air Force (D or E) version. And given how many other variants there are, I'd like to see at least one more, maybe an F-4K or F-4M, and finally maybe some other version TBD, such as a late E. Now, how to pay for it all, I'm not sure. Maybe offer some graduated discount structure, where the first is at full price, the 2nd is at 75% and the 3rd is at 50% when purchased together.