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Even that seems a bit of a stretch. Contracts can be amended if both parties agree. Publishing rules for new products can be changed. Steam and other webstores change the publishing requirements for developers all the time, doesn't matter how long your product was in development, or when you've signed up the first project on Steam. You work by the current rules, not the ones that existed 20 years ago, just because you've made your first game when Half-Life 2 was a new thing. If ED decided an Escrow was now a requirement to sell a new aircraft in their store, that would be it. Yet, it was not done in this case, and seemingly noone thought about that possibility before they took an open action against Razbam. Actually, when this thing first blew up more than a year ago, Chizh and other devs on the Russian forum were pretty firm in their statements that they're just a webstore for 3rd parties, not responsible if the module is completed or not, and have no means of picking up the development after 3rd party is not able to do so. Interesting to see how the narration changes over time, and we're now at "we'd like to continue but Razbam doesn't want to give us the codes". So a serious question. Which 3rd party modules are actually protected from something like that happening again? Corsair - that thing was in development for a very long time, signed ages ago. Kiowa - Polychop has been around since the early days. Tomcat? Your guess is as good as mine. All confidential information of course, at least until another 3rd party goes belly up. At this point I doubt even ED knows themselves. And if they know, it's not the answer the community would like to hear.

How convenient. And who do you think made that stuff confidential in the first place? Ultimately ED controls which information they decide to share with the public.

Makes you wonder what other important bits of information ED leaves out of their press announcements.

No, thanks. Two years ago I'd have probably bought it just to support the developers, but now after Razbam debacle I'm much less enthusiastic about spending money on DCS.

It took Razbam more than 10 years to make those 4 airplanes. Sure, you could argue than a more focused and competent developer, already familiar with DCS, could make them a bit faster, but who's available? ED barely makes one aircraft a year, more like 1,5 years to early access. Heatblur takes even longer. Hope we'll all live long enough to actually see those "replacements".

Very true. From an outsider's perspective is seems that for both companies the best outcome would be to continue working together, sell more products, keep customers happy. Yet here we are. Razbam needs to go find other business venues, while ED is only starting to feel the brunt of customer dissatisfaction. Just imagine what will happen when they'll actually have to remove those modules from the game going forward. What that initially presented itself as gross miscommunication between the two parties, has spiralled to a point when the best outcome we can realistically hope for is that one company leaves DCS ecosystem and ED takes over barely maintaining the existing modules? Something that Chizh and other ED developers on the Russian side of the forum initially dismissed? Yay. Well done ED & Razbam, you've killed most of my "passion and support" for the game. Gone are the days of me buying more modules just to support DCS as a whole. Ah well, more time and money left to spend on other things.

Yes, haven't played dcs recently, but that was still bugged a few months ago. Come on guys, with stronger ffb hardware this becomes a real safety hazard.

It's even simpler than that. Don't touch Steam, just copy the folder from old drive to the new one, turn off PC, replace drives, turn on PC. Last but not least check if Windows assigned the same drive letter to the new drive as was used by the old drive, if not, correct that in Disk Management. That's all. No need to fiddle with 3rd party cloning or partitioning software.

You can order from amazon.com with shipping to eu for a few extra bucks.

That's more of an opportunity cost than straight money loss. Maybe those users won't pay money for the next product, maybe they spend credit on something they would not purchase otherwise.

Only for the Eagle. And it does not cost them anything to do so (other than support time), they already have that money. If anything, it frees the money that was put aside for Razbam, to be used by ED freely.

There was some talk about it a long time ago, but either that never materialized or Razbam was exempt. It's all hush hush NDA so as customers we know very little about these things. ED barely has the manpower to maintain their own modules, without the burden of handling 3rd party code.

Why would they, and where? Razbam probably does not even have the resources to sue a Swiss company across from another continent. ED has little incentive to do so, they already have all the cards, cashing in all the money from Razbam sales for over a year. They can prolong the current situation indefinitely. The only thing ED is loosing is a bit of consumer trust and support. Not a big deal when there is little competition on the market.

1. ED does not have the Razbam code. 2. Nothing really prevents VEAO situation from repeating again. Except maybe this time ED will be more careful not to introduce game breaking changes that would render older modules non-functional. I think the arrival of Vulkan rendering will be a big test, in the past such major changes to DCS rendering pipeline usually broke something in every module and required developers to scramble and make fixes.

Not only bombs but also 530 missiles are fired in a salvo now.