New Pay Model

[antagonist]

Not just no, but <profanity> the hell no to a subscription model.

[Quicksplice]

Didn't read because it wasn't written by anyone from ED or RB.

[AvgeekJoe]

I'm all for a subscription model on three tiers using Flaming Cliffs 2024 (FC 2024) as the entry-level hook:

Tier One: Pay one annual or monthly subscription and get everything.  USD 100 annually or $12 monthly sounds good.  I'd pay $25 or so monthly to get this tier.

Tier Two: There is a much lower fee; get only FC 2024, a few maps, and whatever freebies are compatible.

Tier Three: FC 2024, Caucus plus Nevada maps, and that's it.  $4.99 a month/$50 year.

Oh, and for this to work, there will be no sales on getting into Tier One/full access.

Edited April 27 by AvgeekJoe

[Hiob]

[snocc_]

hace 1 hora, Apollonaut dijo:

First of all, I love DCS and my only motivation with this post is to help it exist forever.

The beginning of the post will be slightly controversial, but I have tried to avoid this framing. The end of the post contains a suggestion that I made on the DCS Facebook group to which several commenters expressed agreement. 

Hypothesis

If we accept the recent gossip with respect to Razbam and ED as true, then it means ED is surviving off of Early Access buys and mod developers are not getting paid on time because of it. I have suspected this for a long time, so I'm biased toward accepting it. So to start off with, I am assuming everything both ED and Razbam said in their posts is generally true, and I am not accusing anyone of lying or acting in bad faith. I have seen this happen before, to other studios developing other games which I will not mention. I do not believe ED or Razbam are acting in bad faith, I believe we are all only human, and ED is just responding to incentives embedded in their business model, which is not an easy thing to work around or change. I am making these assumptions with the full understanding that I may be wrong to do so. I am pulling this thread recently because this pattern matches other patterns I've seen in the gaming industry.

But I could be wrong. The point of this post is not to validate these assumptions or accuse anyone of wrongdoing but rather to explore what could be done in the case that they are true.

I don't see an easy, incremental solution solution here. Why don't I see a solution? Because ED can't really sue. They can, and I'm assuming they'll probably win, but if Razbam lost two developers, it's likely they actually can't perform their duties under the contract (if two key employees left, perhaps a judge would consider that a legalistic 'act of God'). And even if a court were to disagree, the practical outcome would be Razbam formally declares bankruptcy and stops existing, still leaving the modules without developers and with nothing changed on ED's side except an even bigger hole in their pocket from legal fees.

The Pitch
 

This might be stupid and naive because I'm an engineering student (with 14 years in the working world, part time and full time, mind you), but maybe the solution here is to come clean, show us their books, share blame with Razbam (or better, agree to apologize to each other, not blame each other, and publicly bury the hatchet), blame the Early Access model's terrible incentive structure, admit to only being human, and ask the community for donations to reset their finances on the condition of abolishing the Early Access model while agreeing to not litigate with Razbam and other third party devs. The agreement to not litigate the issue I believe would be necessary in order for ED to set a crowdfunding goal without exposing themselves to legal liability. However of course I'm not a lawyer and I have no real idea about this, but it would be counter productive for ED to say "we need $2M to cover all debts" and then to have a third party developer say "but you said your finances were in good standing when I decided to work with you, I'm suing!" And there would have to be an agreement about how the raised funds are distributed between ED and the third parties. 

The Case for a Subscription Model
 

From then on ED could change to a subscription model to take a lot of guesswork out of their business model: with more consistent income it would be easier to estimate the rate of module development they can sustainably afford, and therefore they'd also be able to give more precise answers to what third party developers can expect in compensation.

If $50 a year for access to all modules results in double the development time, I'm all for it. To be honest, I would be willing to pay substantially more, but let's just say $50 for the sake of argument. This would also end the ridiculous partitioning of the community via "modules" that affect the core game and even server access (The Super Carrier and the WWII Asset Pack) as well as incentivize ED to work more on the core game (map updates, AI, performance etc. mostly AI and dynamic campaign).

Under a subscription model, these core game improvements would become a force-multiplier that increases longevity of subscriptions and word-of-mouth subscriptions since each individual module would become more fun to fly as more features are added, more bugs are squashed, the prettier the graphics, the higher the framerates, and the AI gets more intelligent and the campaigns get more dynamic.
 

Incentives Beat Willpower

I got fat during COVID. You know how I lost weight? I didn't just will myself into not eating junk food, I deliberately kept it out of the house. I set my alarm on my dresser so I'd have to physically get out of bed earlier than I was used to, to encourage myself to go to the gym. When I lived on campus, I would leave my car keys in my locker in my building's gym so I couldn't get to school until I'd physically entered the gym. I created incentives for myself so I wouldn't have to rely exclusively on willpower. Does this mean I'm still lazy and undisciplined? Yeah probably, but so what, the point is the problem has been fixed (well I should still lose more weight...).

Early Access creates bad incentives. Maybe the right team of people could muster the collective will to avoid the pitfalls of early access. But maybe it's much easier to just make the incentives the team is subjected to less error prone.

It might be easier to endure a transient disruption for the benefit of a steady-state incentive structure that is easier for ED's team to understand and which presents much less temptation to spend money ED may not have. The subscription model, however much some people may hate it, would better align ED's incentives, the third party developer's incentives and we, the customers' wishes and dreams. 

The Devil's in the Details

People should receive free temporary subscriptions depending on how much money they've already spent. And a lot hinges on the exact subscription fee too. $50 a year, in my opinion, is on the cheap side, while I would say the price of an inexpensive monthly cellphone bill is on the higher side. And maybe it should be stratified by module, or by 3rd party developer. Maybe each module costs $5 a month (use a transferable credit system for this, don't make people go through customer support if they want to simply substitute one module for another), or maybe you can get all ED modules for $10 a month. If the subscription is too low, development will slow to a crawl, and if it is too high, too many customers may be lost. And maybe the optimal quantity doesn't even exist. Maybe the fee required to sustainably develop the product(s) at a sufficient pace (according to we the customers) doesn't exist or is too high to retain customers and this whole post is pointless.

Feasibility and Credibility

I'm not an expert of business modelling or marketing. But I'm not an idiot either and I think some folks at ED should take this suggestion and run some numbers just to see if it's feasible. The first step after this would be that non-litigation agreement with Razbam and possibly the rest of the third party devs before ED would be able to admit without liability how much crowdfunding they'd need for a reset. Suppose for example every American user and every European user donated $10 to this campaign. How far would that go? Add in the Chinese and Russian users and do the purchasing power parity conversion. How far would that go? I think ED says they have close to 200k total customers. Maybe half stopped playing the game. 100k give $10, that's $1M. Maybe not enough for a reset, but maybe this would be enough to facilitate a transition to the subscription model? 

Anyways, I want to acknowledge that the premises of this post may be wrong. Maybe one of the parties is misrepresenting something, maybe I'm completely off the mark, maybe I have been drinking too much and not sleeping enough and my logic sucks, maybe I am arrogant to presume to know anything about ED's and Razbam's internal considerations, and maybe nobody has considered this and just needs to see it articulated in writing in order to consider the possibility that it might be just what they need. I just want ED to see this and consider it. I think a subscription model would be better for every party here.

Thanks, 
your biggest fan, who does not want to see ED or any 3rd party developer fail

PS 
I pretty much exclusively fly the F-18 (4 years), am proficient with the F-14, F5, and have dabbled with the F15E, AV8, and both Mirages.

PPS
Some context for the uninitiated: the product ED and third party developers are producing for us are complicated, relative to other software projects. The talent ED needs is expensive. People who are good C++ programmers *and also* able to read papers on electromagnetic wave theory (radar), or computational fluid dynamics (flight model), or artificial intelligence (dynamic campaign, dogfighting, BVR etc) do not come cheap, and they could be doing things more interesting than making games. I don't believe it's an understatement to say that a real time system which simultaneously models multiple complex processes like AI, CFD and EM waves, while synchronizing these processes with 3D graphics, is near the bleeding edge of software engineering. That's just a fact. 

"It's not just a game, it's a simulator" (of complex physical phenomena that no other game even bothers with)  

lmao

[Slippa]

28 minutes ago, Doughguy said:

The moment subscription comes, im off.

Same here.

[sun4eg]

What makes you think ED will magically start deliver product if you throw money at them *yearly*, rather than *yearly* buying EA module which they are not able to finish for let's say 4 years already (Supercarrier)?

[ColdClaws]

Never type again.

[slughead]

Then when you retire you can't afford the subscription... along with all the other subscriptions such as Adobe and all the other games and applications that you're advocating to switch to a subscription model for. You'll have nothing left to live for. If ED have financial problems, they need to sort it out through marketing and getting a constant stream of fresh blood into the game.

[Korbec]

Seriously not interested.  If ED provided servers with campaigns, complete modules with new modules in the pipeline with reasonable ETA's perhaps. Don't get me wrong I really enjoy DCS but if not for modders, campaign designers and groups that provide their content and servers at no cost to ED what would we really have anyway? A subscription would likely drive more people away than the income would cover. Just my opinion.

[Crossmann]

If this is the case for ED and subscription is a solution I think that ED should consider this option and come with a proposal.

[Lykurgus]

I would go from buying most of the modules to not playing anymore if they went to a subscription based plan. Did you put any thought into how much that would need to cost to effectively pay the third party developers monthly to have access to their modules as well. I pay for what interests me not all the other stuff that would have to be covered in that monthly cost. 

Smooth Brain Solutions 

[supersylph]

Obviously with the development costs of each DCS aircraft, wanting to be able to experience all the aircraft through a subscription is almost like doing charity. Unless the subscription is expensive. But players will be dissatisfied. And the subscription mechanism is also a problem for third-party development groups. How to allocate income to them? The only thing I support subscription-based is the global map. In an interview about two or three years ago, they revealed that the global map would be a cloud map similar to MSFS. If true, it would be independent of existing free and paid maps. And additional servers may be required. So I think it is acceptable to adopt a subscription system. Of course, if it is a cloud map, what worries me is that if your Internet speed is too slow, the ground effect may not be very good. And for DCS operations, when you are looking for ground targets, it is simply fatal if the ground is not loaded.

[felixx75]

Making suggestions based on assumptions and speculation, i.e. without knowing the real facts, is nonsense and does no one any good.

And no, I would not be ready to accept a subscription model.

Edited April 28 by felixx75

[LucShep]

1 hour ago, Doughguy said:

The moment subscription comes, im off.

1 hour ago, Slippa said:

Same here.

Ditto here.

[diego999]

So I've already spent money buying many modules and now I'd have to keep paying to use them?

Sure..

[apaluq]

A subscription model would mean someone else can get my ED account and I go back to BMS which I haven’t touched in ten years BECAUSE of DCS.

[SMH]

Deal breaker. We literally wait major portions of a decade for our modules to become complete (and even then, only to have them suddenly broken again at any time) and now you expect us to PAY to wait? Two wrongs don't make a right.

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

Here we go again!

That ship has sailed a long time ago. There will be no subscription model.
 

 

[upyr1]

It's that time of the month 

[JonathanRL]

As a member of the community; I am strictly against any sort of subscription model that limits what I already have purchased. The very idea that I, who own almost every jet module would lose it all if I did not pay a subscription fee is ludicrous.

I can see a subscription being used in the same way as it is used in the gaming community today being applied to DCS but the option to pay a fixed sum should always be there and its addition cannot limit things already purchased. (i.e you can purchase FC2024 for a fixed sum or pay 5 bucks per months to EA Play; both options give you access to the game)

Edited April 28 by JonathanRL

[AndyJWest]

Given just how common it is for people to buy DCS stuff they never get around to using, asking them to only pay for the stuff they actually do use instead looks like a highly effective way to lose money...

Edited April 28 by AndyJWest

[P1l0t]

The player base should be increased because DCS World is a complex game,and the subscription system would turn many customers away from ED! Yesterday, I discussed the genuine Free to Play concept on the forum, suggesting that, in general, offering something for free alongside paid content tends to appeal to a broader audience. This is because individuals contribute either their time or money. Everyone's preferences matter, whether they simply play or are willing to invest significant sums, into ED due to their enjoyment.

ED should expand its development team to generate a steady stream of new content, thereby attracting more players and catering to a wider range of needs. I believe the genuine Free to Play model could also be implemented successfully!

 

An example of the Free to Play concept: When playing with the Su-25T, where you pay with your game time to get another FC aircraft. (you can only get FC-level aircraft through simple play). So anyone who just wants to play gets something, and his presence helps more people play, for example, on online servers. Time is also valuable! Finally, if you fall in love with DCS World, go to the E shop and buy a fully clickable airplane or helicopter!

Currently, when a new player comes here, they get nothing interesting, just two boring planes and a map. If you start playing, you are motivated to stay here because you get valuable rewards and finally, if you become a fan of DCS World, your presence is honorable because it contributes to more people in the community.

Edited April 28 by P1l0t

[Marco Schaap]

I think it's fair to say considering a subscription model could be a way to overcome financial worries or debacles associated with 3rd party module creators, but I think we'd overlook the fact that that doesn't magically fix the business model and might create an even worse situation.

If there's really a problem with finances between Razbam and ED, let them deal with it. The modules impacted by the debacle are AFAIK all Early Access modules and come with no guarantee whatsoever. Although the intention of creating a module and selling it as Early Access will be finishing the module; there's no actual guarantee from ED or 3rd party it'll ever will.

The influence we should and could have as community and users of the products is pay full prices for full functioning and complete products, and stop rewarding developers for incomplete products.

[TimSell75]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Vector1:

Apollonaut , GO AWAY PLEASE, idiot

The fact that somebody may have a different opinion than you, does not justify insults! Bad manners!