Keyser

I agree that it's definitely not as clear cut as I made it sound in my previous post - there is obviously a continuum with many greyscales between something like the A-10C and something like HAWX. Personally, I just put the bar a little higher for something to be called "simulation". In Counterstrike an AK-47 does more damage than a Glock and has a higher rate of fire than an AWP, but I wouldn't call Counterstrike a ground combat simulator. I would reserve that for something like the (properly modded) Arma games. Anyways, my point wasn't to bash War Thunder. I'm sure it's a lot of fun. I was saying that it's not really helpful to tell a developer of a high-fidelity sim and the high-fidelity sim community: "Look at all these low-fidelity sims! Just become more like them and all the problems will be solved"... Yeah, except the one where we lose the most central aspect of why we play the high-fidelity sims in the first place.

Nono, I think we got you on that, it's still a ridiculous statement. If you want to think about the whole WW2 flight simming community, think hundreds of thousands, not a few thousand. I'm getting the feeling you are overly quick to jump to such conclusions. "X had good graphics, X sold a lot of copies, therefore X sold a lot of copies because it had good graphics". I'm sorry, but that faulty logic doesn't prove your point at all. CoD likely sold as well as it did for the most part because of the goodwill that IL2 and 1946 garnered for 1C. I wouldn't claim to know for sure, but your simplistic view is certainly doing the flight sim community a disservice. War Thunder is not a game like RRG are trying to make. There's planes in it, but that's about it as far as similarities go. You might as well bring up Battlefield 1942 as an example of a well-received "WWII themed game", it's about as helpful. Catering to the lowerst common denominator in the high-fidelity study sim market is a one-way trip to Failureville. Everybody will agree that arcade air combat games sell better, but the solution to the current drought in flight simulations can't be to make future games less and less like actual flight sims. You might well be right about that, time will tell. Additional options are always nice, sure. See, when you say stuff like that... People playing DCS are likely a specific kind of gamer, i.e. those that enjoy mid- to high-fidelity flight simulations. The games you mention may be fun, but they are not high-fidelity flight simulations. They are games of a different genre. As for Star Citizen, I will judge for myself after it comes out, but War Thunder is more like an arcade air combat game. It's hard to see how those games can ensure the future of WWII flight sims, if they aren't really WWII flight sims to begin with. Heck, World of Warplanes may be a blast to play, but it's not going to bring the revival of WWII flight sims significantly closer in my opinion.

Just wait it out and then decide based on the merits of the product. But if you will "permanently pass" on it and deny yourself a fun experience just on principle, then I guess that's your decision to make...

I don't know why you would intentionally have them risk legal trouble over something that can be done now completely effortlessly. As I have explained before, the rewards are not only the modules or the spiral bound manuals. The rewards also include the game itself, i.e. the game as described in the Kickstarter. It's really not complicated. A company does very much have an obligation to deliver the product they advertised in the Kickstarter, even if they otherwise fulfill all remaining rewards. You are right that RRG doesn't owe anything to non-backers, but that does not mean they don't owe the backers what they advertised during the campaign, even if that benefits non-backers. An individual who backs this project with the expectation of getting a game with 3 free planes initially can reasonably expect to get that, even if he personally gets the modules regardless. His intentions may be to have his friends make use of the free planes - you don't know and neither do I. The point is you are wrong to say that RRG can do whatever they want after the Kickstarter ends as long as the backers get their modules. They also have to deliver the product they advertised. That is why it's a terrible idea to delay the proposed changes until after the Kickstarter ends. Luckily, it doesn't look like they will do that.

Yes, I already adressed this. If the Kickstarter ends without RRG changing the product, they would be bound to not only deliver the rewards they promised, but also the product they promised. If the Kickstarter ends with them promising a product with 3 free planes and then they were to change their minds after the fact, they might be in trouble. Yes, even legally. Even if they otherwise give the backers all their due rewards. Anyways, they're not going to do it that way, so it's all good. I was just pointing out that the idea to leave the KS as is and change the number of free planes afterwards was a terrible one.

All current aircraft can be had at the $30 level, if the 262 should be reached, you'd have to go to $40. You will be able to fly any module in both WWII and World, no matter for which core the license originally was. If you get the World licenses for the P-51D and 190, you can still fly them in World, however you will receive the licenses at the launch of WWII in about a year. The more expensive levels with DCS World licenses will give you the Mustang now and the 190 when it is publically available. Beta is any pledge level above and including $10. Alpha access will be any pledge level marked as ALPHA as well as any pledge above and including 150$.

Except they will have those expenses regardless. They are making three planes, that means at launch, they will have spent X amount of money. That money is gone, no matter what anybody does. It's spent. What they have to do after that is look at how to get the most money back. The amount of money they paid at some point in the past for something does not enter into that calculation anymore, only the potential profits do. Whether the most profitable will be the Spit, the 109 or the 47 is up for debate, although I would suspect it's one of the former two.

I don't think it is either, but someone had made that request. My reply to that person was the post you quoted.

You are somewhat correct, but what was promised to backers is not only access to a certain module, but a game as well. Namely, the game that was put forth in the Kickstarter description at the time of the campaign. A backer may back this project only because the 3 planes will be free. Maybe he thinks that the 3 free planes will lead to some positive consequence for him, maybe he backed the project because he wanted it to get made so his friends and family would be able to get the 3 planes for free. Maybe he would not have supported the project had he known that only 1 plane will be free. This sounds a little constructed, but the point isn't how many people fit that description, but simply that you are wrong in saying that RRG has no legal obligation to deliver the project they advertised during the campaign. If someone made a campaign to deliver free food to a homeless shelter and backers at a certain level got an iPhone as a reward, it wouldn't be okay to then go ahead and charge the homeless people money for the food after the campaign is over, even if every backer got his iPhone. Legally, there is very much something stopping that person from changing what he promised to non-backers. Just because you deliver the rewards to backers does not mean you can change your project's specifics at will. Having said all of that, I will reiterate that I agree with the proposed change. What I am argueing against is simply the proposal to keep the Kickstarter as is and change the project after its conclusion. Changes have to be made now. It's not only fairer that way, but also legally safer.

That would definitely be the worse option. The second the Kickstarter ends, it gets locked down and RRG would be required to make the product they advertised. You would be very hard pressed to justify having taken money for product A and delivering product B instead. If they change it now, people who disagree (although I don't see how rational people could) can still take their money out of it if they so choose. That wouldn't be possible after the Kickstarter ends - in fact, if they did that, then they would have a real shitstorm on them.

I welcome the change. If I had the choice between maybe losing a few hundred bucks in the Kickstarter (possibly even encouraging more pledges) OR having no product to sell at launch, I know what I would choose. A game's long-term success isn't decided on launch day. It's decided in the long-term. If you run the game for a year and see that you'd prefer some more f2p players, just release an additional free plane at that time. You don't have to give out everything for free right now because of a (in my opinion) small likelihood of a problem somewhere down the road. Let's do the poll and let the backers decide. You don't back, you don't get a say - makes sense to me.

Debatable. There was without doubt a strategy for the Kickstarter. The fact that that strategy didn't seem to work out is unfortunate, but we can see now that the team adapted and is trying to change the strategy right now. How successful they will be in the last days remains to be seen. Your opinion. Also not really born out by the facts. In DCS:World, you don't get the Su-25T and the A-10C for free - you get one. People seem to be quite happy paying for other modules just the same. EDIT: You may have been meaning the same thing I am saying, in which case I misunderstood your "minimum acceptable" phrase. In case you were saying that only two planes should be free, preferably less, then we're also mostly in agreement here. Agreed. Not sure exactly on what your proposition is. In any case, RRG Studios may be collaborating with ED, but they have not been involved with the P-51D to my knowledge, nor would they therefore have gotten any money for sales of the P-51D. Owners of the P-51D might be DCS supporters, but not really RRG supporters. It might be a nice PR move though, sure. I wouldn't be so quick to throw a bunch of new features at a genre and hope they stick. In flight sims, more so than other genres, I think the existing base it key to a game's success. Obviously new things can add to the experience (I have high hopes for the Rift in particular), but such additions should be made carefully. I'm also not sure if it is a winning strategy to try and compete in today's video game market with graphics. The bar is being set so ridiculously high by games who spend mid-8-figure sums on their graphics engine, we may just have to accept the fact that flight sims may never be at the top of the graphics-game again like they used to, back when graphics development made up a significantly smaller part of a game's budget. But I am not one to turn down a little bit of eye candy, so we'll have to wait what EDGE brings, I guess. The comparison might not be quite fair. In sims, even a novice can do an air-start and fly around without any previous experience. The fact that the easy things in flying are also the more boring ones is an unfortunate truth that flight sims have been finding out these last years. I can't do a rocket jump in Quake, but fortunately rocket jumps are a small part of the game. In a flight sim, the complicated things like start-up are just more frequent and integral to the experience. A real-to-life startup sequence will always be what it is, so unless you are advocating the simple reduction of complexity at the cost of fidelity, there's really only better tutorials that will soften the blow of having to study that part of the game. There's no fixing that problem without compromising on fidelity, so I think they're going the right way. Agreed, although that's nothing that can be changed on the software side and yet other sims like Il-2 still sold a million copies. I think that hurdle is in actuality less than one might think. Agreed. That is a very naive statement. This forum alone has about 50.000 members. Only a minority of game owners will generally even make a forum account - some estimates are 1 in 10. Certainly not every flight sim enthusiast will be playing DCS. The "market" for a high fidelity flight sim within the established flight sim community is easily a few hundred thousand people. The rest is marketing. Of the ones you mention, only a couple come close to what RRG are trying to make. Again, I'm not sure how helpful it is to tell the developers "There may not be much money in the genre you want to develop for and are experts in, but if you made a game in a DIFFERENT genre, then you'd be golden". That may be the case, but the fact that low-fidelity sims make money isn't really anything I would call "actionable information" for making a high-fidelity sim, because the main difference to those games is not accidental, it's intentional.

It's in the post. GT 5.0 asked: "llya, will people who pledge at the 40.- level, be able to fly the Dora in WWll and also in World when the game is released?...thanks for the reply"

Good job, and good news :)

I had also understood it to be the way GT 5.0 explained it, though we will of course still require official confirmation at some point. There is always only the mention of "licenses for XXX". If you get a license of a module for WWII, you get it at the release of WWII, which will be another year in the making. If you get the license for World, you get it immediately. You will note that in the rewards section, it is specifically mentioned that the P-51 will be delivered at successful completion of the Kickstarter, but ONLY for the "DCS World" pledge levels. On the other hand, Ilya has guaranteed before that any module will be interchangeable, so now we are looking for an explanation that fits with all previous statements (because I don't want to assume that Ilya has been misleading us to increase the KS revenue). It all fits if the difference really is only the time at which we get the module. If everything is interchangeable, as Ilya said, what core the license is for makes no difference, but if you want the module sooner, you pledge higher. Again, this is an interpretation of the available statements in Ilya's favour and it is his job to correct it if it were mistaken. I firmly expect him to answer the question "Will the $40 Dora be flyable in World" at some point, otherwise we may have to take his evasiveness on the issue into consideration when thinking about rewards... Finally, the unofficial brochure is just that. It's someone's opinion. Its creator does not have any more or less information than any of us and his guess is no more valid.

I don't think that any module will be only flyable in WWII. That was never specifically stated, indeed the opposite has been stated repeatedly: Any module will be cross-compatible between World and WWII. The only thing that is compatible with this original guarantee AND luthier's later posts is, in my opinion, that the $20-$40 pledges get you the ED modules at release of WWII, therefore as licenses for WWII, whereas at $65 or $85 you get the ED modules at successful completion of the Kickstarter, therefore as licenses for World (since WWII won't be released at that time). What core - WWII or World - the license is for is ultimately not important, I suspect, since cross-compatibility is supposedly always guarnteed, so phrasing it that way certainly added a lot of confusion to an already confusing situation... Communication is really lacking overall though in this Kickstarter, unfortunately.

Okay, I'm pretty sure this is how it is going to be, based on everything luthier has posted on the matter: The three new WWII flyables will be free for anyone. If you pledge $20, you get either ED's P-51D at release of WWII or the Dora at release of WWII even if they are released for World by ED earlier than that. You can still copy folders and cross-compatibility will be maintained, the trade-off here is that you get the license later. If you pledge $30 or $40 (provided no stretch goals are met), you get essentially the same, i.e. both the P-51D and the Dora at release of WWII. If you pledge more, say $65 or $85, you also get those modules, but you get them "on successful Kickstarter completion", that is on October 5th for the P-51D and for the Dora the day it is released. You pledge more, but you get the module sooner. Since there will be no WWII yet, you get them for World, but you can still copy the module folder into WWII later since they will be (like every module, according to luthier) cross-compatible. Only if there's no threat of deletion or bans ;)

Page 28 - The 109-K is named "Kurfürst", not "Kürfust"

I am looking forward to the kickstarter video to go a little more into the details of this project. For now I am pretty excited and I wish RRG Studios all the best. In the whole "seperate install" thing I come out as undecided. I have 200 gigs of free space on my SSD, and while I understand that some people are justifiably bothered by the economy of this solution (storage and bandwidth-wise), for me personally it will not influence any purchasing or backing decision much at all. However, I would like to put this concern out there: I am not sure it will be easy or even possible to use the European theater in a proper modern-era mission. I would like that a lot. The modules are cross-compatible, sure, but luthier already said there is some uncertainty about the ground units etc. Can mission designers place modern AAA and SAMs into the European theater? Can the airbases in the theater be equipped with ILS? Will the WW2 core support modern weapons systems, lasing, etc.? Will the European theater only later become fully useable for the modern-era (and will that be for an "upgrade-fee" akin to Black-Shark 2)? I remember you saying that you don't know these details yet, luthier, so I'm not expecting an answer now, but it is something I would hope to have adressed in the kickstarter campaign. It will inform my decision of whether to back (and to what amount) greatly.

Since I think that the bloated F-35 thread with its almost 2000 replies is not only a difficult place for this conversation, but also not quite on the same topic, here's a new thread. I would ask that disparaging comments about any Third Party developer be kept out of it. What I am interested in making is a resource for Third Party developers in general, not only Kinney Interactive, who might be interested in crowdfunding a module in the future. Surely there is something to be learned from this most recent attempt for the F-35 and I would like to distill what that might be. Just as a rough outline, I think it might be interesting to hear the ED forumgoers' opinion on a few questions like these: 1. Are you, in principle, willing to participate in crowdfunding a module for DCS? High-fidelity, low-fidelity or both? If yes: 2. Did you participate in either of the two Third Party crowdfundings so far (those being Beczl's Indiegogo campaign and Kinney's Kickstarter campaign)? If yes: 2a. Was there some item of information, some pledge reward or some interaction on the part of the developers that would have caused you to increase your pledge? If no: 2b. What was the primary reason you did not pledge? Was it the module itself (e.g. not interested in the plane), the developer, the price point, did you simply not hear about it in time, wrong crowdfunding platform etc. 3. What level of existing assets do you require in order to take a crowdfunding campaign "seriously"? Is it enough to see a concept, renders of the model, the model in action, etc. How far should developers go before turning to the community? 4. Finally, what would be your realistic budget in order to help get a module of something that interests you made? These are some questions that might be interesting, although I'm sure there's many relevant data points that I forgot about. Let me start: 1. I would be willing to crowdfund a module for DCS. I would be interested only in funding high-fidelity modules. 2. I haven't participated in either of the two campaigns so far. 2b. For Beczl's campaign I just didn't hear about it in time, though I would likely have pledged if I had found it or been told about it. For the F-35, 30% of the reason was the plane. The F-35 just doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy like an F-4, F-16, F-18 or Typhoon would. This alone would not have been enough to dissuade me from backing though. 70% of the reason was missing confidence about the modules future. I understand that ED was convinced by Kinney Interactive's pitch, but I must make my own evaluations on what I spend money on. This is obviously my personal opinion, but something like a list of specific resources that you have access to would have gone a long way towards demonstrating the kind of module I could expect if I gave you money. Maybe contrasting it with something we already know and love: Make a table with things the A-10 has closely modeled and what it doesn't have closely modeled. Contrast it with what you expect your module to be like. Just saying that "There is far more public information than you may imagine..." was too vague for my personal taste. I was also not convinced by the avionics simulators that were presented because, honestly, I couldn't assess their "worth" in terms of fidelity at all. Once again, for me some more hard documentation would have been more convincing. 3. I do not require the module to be at an advanced stage in order to consider backing a crowdfunding campaign. The most highly weighed items in my decision-making process are "Trust in the developer" and "Interest in the module". 4. All other things being optimal, I would probably be willing and able to go as high as ~$100.

My vote was for DCS level. I do not think I will ever use my time to get into anything that is not an extremely close approximation to the real deal. I do enjoy the complexity itself, sure, but I also feel like understanding the plane is rewarding. If what I'm learning isn't real, it's only half the fun. I don't at all begrudge others their lower-fidelity sims, though. Let them spend their money on it, give ED the funds to make stuff for me, everybody wins, everybody's happy. I'd just like to add a few thoughts about everybody saying how useless the poll is and how everybody should already know what "the fans" want from what ED has been telling us. 1. There is no "Both" option in the poll because it's useless to ED. The information they want is about what to focus on. Telling them "Focus on both" doesn't help them. If you like both, then you would buy either version they make anyway, so you are not the intended target of the poll. 2. FC having higher sales is not the be-all-end-all. 2a. FC is a brand that has been established for much longer (the original FC being from 2006 or thereabouts, LOMAC even from 2003). Its higher sales might not reflect on what consumers want, but on what they know. 2b. People new to flight simulations are not likely to jump into the deep end of the pool right away. Their first (and possibly only, if they decide it's not for them) purchase will likely be an FC-type sim as opposed to a DCS-type sim. I have no numbers on this, so correct me if you do, but I would guess that the drop-out rate for simulations of gamers that are new to them would be one of the higher ones in the game genre spectrum. That means you may have a lot of "dead" purchases that it may not be wise to take at face value. 2c. Getting coverage in today's heterogeneous gaming world is more likely for more inclusive titles which can certainly generate sales for them. "A sale is a sale" you may say, but I would contest that for future planning (which seems to be the intention of this poll), the preferences of the people who are most likely to buy your next module should be given somewhat more weight. If that is you and you like FC more, great! That's what this poll is for. 2d. On the whole, I would claim that military flight simulation enthusiasts favour jets. It's what they have always known from almost all the successful sims in the '90 and it's what has culturally always taken center stage. The desire to fly a fast mover may, for lack of alternatives, lead to a purchase even if the desired level of fidelity is not there and may therefore give a wrong impression of what will actually make them happy as customers (which I assume ED wants). The people who will only accept both a fast mover and high-fidelity, however, don't enter into this calculation at all, because they have bought neither FC nor DCS. Comparing the sales numbers of the two may therefore give a warped reflection of the actual market out there. 2e. Based on the depth of both DCS and FC, I see it as more likely that FC is the "secondary" sim for the majority of people who own both. That is to say, I would say it is more likely to have someone mainly play DCS and FC on occasion than that someone would play FC regularly and DCS on occasion. People are more likely to spend money on things they use more often[citation needed], so looking forward it may also be necessary to take this into account. 2f. The lower the amount of work, research and skill that goes into a product, the higher the risk of significant competition. ED has the modern military aviation ultra-high-fidelity market rather cornered and it's a hard market to enter. The lower-fidelity market? Not so much, on both counts. It is more likely that a serious competitor to FC will show up that a competitor to DCS. This should also influence future expectations. These aren't by any means well-researched marketing facts. They are my thoughts on the matter. I made a lot of assumptions here, and we all know what they say about assumptions, but I don't think they are very far out there. Once again, I know there's a market for FC-type simulations and I am completely in favour of ED's chosen path in developing those games for the reason I stated at the beginning, but I think the frequently made statement that "FC has had better sales so far and therefore, financially speaking, ED should focus on that level of sim in the future" should be viewed with a little more skepticism.

Let me first say, I am personally only interested in high-fidelity products and I understand that ED is pretty much the only game in town. Yes, there's BMS, but from personal experience, I'd say the level of realism in BMS is around 75-85% of DCS and I'm not sure the engine has much more room to go anywhere. Having said that, making simulations is a business and I am a customer. I don't believe it makes sense, nor is in anybody's long-term interest, to bring donations into it. The incentive structure is all wrong. If something like this were to happen, there needs to be accountability. I would not at all be opposed to a form of crowdfunding (I regularly crowdfund games), even one that leaves the artistic decisions 100% in EDs hands. But, I do expect to get something from giving my money to a company and I expect there to be a contract (between the CF-platform and the petitioner, as is usually the case) to settle where my money is going, i.e. towards a specific module. In the end, I don't think donating to a company makes for a healthy business relationship and I don't think it leads to the best possible products.

I think ED is handling this correctly. The end-goal is a DCS level F-15 and SU-27, but they will bring it up to FC3+AFM levels first, release it and then continue working on them to develop the DCS versions on that basis. Basically they get to monetarize their work more immediately and also likely more in total. As Wags stated, taking this course of development takes almost no time away as compared to the DCS:A-10C way of development, so we should be getting the high-fidelity versions at about the same time we would have gotten them anyways, except there will be a "smaller" release in the meantime as well. Sounds like win-win, or at least win-meh (if non-DCS level is entirely uninteresting to you, as it is uninteresting to me). In that sense, I think this plan sets ED up for a much more robust financial outlook and I think we will all benefit from that in one way or another. The only thing that went suboptimally was first talking about DCS:F-15C and DCS:SU-27 only to quietly walk that back via edit when the new information was released. That's a problem in communication more than anything though, and I cut Wags and ED all the slack in the world on that because in return, we get weekly updates and I'm immensely happy about and thankful for that. If not having every sentence of public announcements triple and quadruple checked by the higher-ups, thereby delaying the flow of information by weeks, means occasionally having someone jump the gun or type something not 100% correctly - I'll take that deal.

Wags, thanks for the update and EDs new information politics. Whatever the reaction to the information itself may be, I hope I can speak for everyone when I say that we greatly appreciate getting a better insight into the development process. As for the F-15C and the Su-27: Whenever you will be ready to release them (at A-10 levels of fidelity), I will be ready to buy them and study them and fly them. About that, would the Su-27 cockpit have an English version?

A great new information policy, I hope we, the community, will prove our maturity, even if we may be confronted with the harsh truths of game-development from time to time. I look forward to getting a better insight into what's going on in Moscow!