Infinite flight pro is a bit overpriced in my opinion. A 12 months subscription is $79.99, which is more nearly twice as expensive as a Prepar3d Academic License, and 36 months of subscription means that the amount you pay for Infinite Flight Pro is greater than a Professional License in Prepar3d.
P.S I am not sure where this topic should be categorized as live or not, tell me if I’m wrong.
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Hi there,
The reason to move to a subscription model wasn’t made lightly. I see lots of good thoughts in this thread, but I’ll add something from a company perspective.
Server upkeep is definitely one thing that plays into this. It seems everyone is satisfied by this being a major component of it. Good… onward!
Next, we have improvements. There are many improvements that need to be made beyond new aircraft. We could continue to do IAPs (In App Purchases) which would allow us to keep adding new aircraft, however here are some things that IAPs do not cover:
Satellite imagery updates and processing. As you can imagine, we’re not launching satellites into space to take images of the earth, but someone is! This costs money.
Aircraft reworks: This is a major request that we get. It’s impossible to continue updating based on IAP and App purchase revenue. If we collect money once to cover the initial build of an aircraft, we’re reworking for free down the road when the simulator is advanced past that initial aircraft build. Not only could the company not move at the pace we are now with reworks, we would indeed get slower due to lack of resources.
Development you don’t see: We have a lot in the works and due to the nature of app development and managing customer expectation, we can’t always share it. As you can imagine, Laura and Philippe aren’t the only ones coding and working on these items. Developers (even the ones you don’t know exist) don’t come free and they don’t come cheap. We hear the cries from the mountain tops to “ADD CLOUDS AND 3D BUILDINGS!!!”, but we don’t hear pleas to continue the subscription model to fund those efforts ;)
Free-to-play games and apps are certainly awesome, however Infinite Flight is a subset of a subset of a subset of apps. You have to want to play a game on your phone or tablet, then you have to be into simulation, then finally, aircraft simulation. Free to play games (take a look at Warframe) make their money by letting anyone play, but if you want a more awesome experience (and arguably a winning experience), you can pay. With Infinite Flight, you can get the full feel of the simulator with HD imagery and even a brand new aircraft model (CRJ200) for $5. That’s not a bad deal. If you’d like to take advantage of our live servers and the continued work to bring new and reworked aircraft, you can pay for that.
We realize a subscript model isn’t for everyone and that’s okay. We’ll never find the perfect model to please everyone. In our case; is a pro subscription necessary? Yes.
Happy landings!
Basically, server upkeep, satellite imagery, and development isn’t cheap. There are many more devs working behind the scenes than we see.
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Then how can P3d be cheaper than IF Pro
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Because P3D runs on a computer, which has a HUGE advantage in terms of processing power, RAM, and graphics than your phone or tablet. It’s not easy to keep up all of this stuff unless you can get the proper money for it. (Hence why there is a subscription.)
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Well P3d has way more developers than IF.
Connor
November 8, 2018, 11:55am
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FDS is a smaller company than the developers of P3D. Henice the lesser number of devs working on IF
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How do you know? And like I said, it’s because of better performance on a computer that IF has a disadvantage on. Not developers.
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This have been discussed multiple times in multiple topics. All the answers are there.
Prepared also doesn’t care what computer you use - you have to get one that’s good enough. We are obligated to support a very wide variety of mobile devices; some of which don’t have a lot of processing power.
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