So many airports and so expensive ...

[Nats]

Arent there any decent airports in this game or something? There are so many airport dlc packs available and they are so flipping expensive - nearly £20 each! That's just mad. No way I would even consider getting into this game if that's what I need to buy to play it properly. How can anyone be prepared to pay £20 for one airport? That's half a new game's cost - for the price of just 2no airports you could buy yourself a whole new game! Mad. Completely bonkers.

They are literally worth like £2.50 each surely? Thats the most I would pay for them.

But people must be buying them or they wouldnt be priced like that?

[LeadCatcher]

There is a program WorldEditor https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/ . Download it and make an airport comparable to the payware ones and tell us what your time was worth to make it. Once you see the effort that goes into making a quality airport, you won't be so judgemental on the price.

Good thing though, is many in the community has made 1000s of scenery packs you can download for free at http://www.X-plane.org. There are many decent airports in the game, especially the major hubs.

[🐉 Ðŗąçø 🐉]

LeadCatcher knows how it works. Many of the 36,000 airports or so in X-Plane are custom-built by the X-Plane community using X-Plane's 'Lego brick' objects.

Custom airports, the ones listed in the Steam store and on store.x-plane.com, take thousands of hours to make - and flogging them for £2.50 almost certainly doesn't justify the sheer amount of work that goes into making custom airports. Custom objects, custom textures, field trips to the airport, aniumations etc. Then you have the very small flight simulation community, which means there will never be as many sales, even with a small price tag.

This is just flight simulation. If you don't like the prices, don't buy it. But X-Plane is the cheapest flight simulator by a mile - plenty of freeware to be had. Same applies for aircraft and some plugins.

[Kosmozuikis]

Just mark them as not interested on steam and move on. The prices are ridiculous for what you get. It's a cashcow because flight sim fans would pay for anything, no matter how opverpriced or worthless it is.

[Prezidentas]

Originally posted by Kosmozuikis:

Just mark them as not interested on steam and move on. The prices are ridiculous for what you get. It's a cashcow because flight sim fans would pay for anything, no matter how opverpriced or worthless it is.

This is true.

Most freeware airports are very good.

[opjose]

There is also a single download available on X-plane.org that populates almost all of the remaining 25,000 2D airports with 3D buildings and features.

While the building placements may not be accurate, they do look VERY good. The building placement is accurate enough that you do not get say, buildings in the middle of the airfield or surrounding grass areas... in other words the 3D buildings, cars, fuel pumps, etc. are where they should generally be.

Look for the MisterX airport downloads too, they are first rate.

[Nats]

I will just keep my old FSX

[opjose]

Ok.

[John W]

To be honest I don't think the prices are that bad for custom airports, especially if you buy them when they are on sale. You say you'll keep your old FSX. Well I fly FSX steam edition and have spent a lot of money on scenery. Mostly ORBX. In FSX if you purchase ORBX Base Pack, and OpenLC NorthAmerica, for instance, you will get enhanced ground textures and enhanced airports in the OpenLC area you purchase. But these are not cheap either. The enhanced airports are also generic in nature with more scenery added, but not necessarily replicas of each individual airport. You have to purchase individual airports to get that.

By comparison, X-Plane 11 default scenery looks as good as the ORBX scenery I paid for. The default airports keep getting enhanced over time and while generic, look pretty good. They are not replicas of the real airports. That would cut into the addon scenery market so X-Plane stays away from doing that. But the default airports in X-Plane 11 look much better than the default airports in FSX. So I purchase some airports for X-Plane 11 for the region I like to fly in because I wanted to have replicas of those airports. Not that it really makes that much of a difference. To each their own.

[PvWolf666]

I've never bought an airport in my life. You don't need to. They are either modeled in game or downloadable for free. I'm pretty sure you don't take flight simming that serious anyhow and just came on here to whine

[Nats]

Originally posted by PvWolf666:

I've never bought an airport in my life. You don't need to. They are either modeled in game or downloadable for free. I'm pretty sure you don't take flight simming that serious anyhow and just came on here to whine

I don't and I did.

But even for games like Project Cars that I do love far more I would not consider paying anything like £20 for a race track which I would get far more use out of than an airport for a flight sim. The fact is for a single race track plus eight cars for PC2 costs you £8.50.

And in American truck Sim you get a full american state for £8.99 - that might give me a full months use at least.

Now I am not saying that time doesnt go into an airport but realistically its just a few taxiways/aprons and 3d buildings with a few standard 3d kit pieces thrown around. Maybe a few weeks work for an artist - possibly £1500 worth of work? Assuming 1000 people buy it they could afford to charge £3 and still make a reasonable profit.

And its not the work thats involved than the use anyone could get out of them. I mean how can anyone possibly get value out of a single airport costing £20+?? Even if you spent a week doing nothing but flying around it its still not worth that surely?

It just astounds me thats all - the price some people are willing to pay for these things.

[Kosmozuikis]

Exactly. We get much better DLC's for other games which have more content and are polished more. These payware airports don't even look that good and there are only few low quality buildings, besides they're done poorly because they impact performance too much. We get the same quality in cities skylines for free with mods.
All this payware crap like airports, or in FSW case such things like moving map or camera controls(which is absolutely stupid) exist because many flight simmers pay for anything. There even are paid liveries LIVERIES!
The good thing about x-plane 11 is there are plenty of free addons to make it look better than that P3D crap with 1000€ worth of addons.

[opjose]

Originally posted by Kosmozuikis:

These payware airports don't even look that good and there are only few low quality buildings, besides they're done poorly because they impact performance too much.

What?????

Have you actually purchased any?

http://store.x-plane.org/Washington-XP_p_591.html

"Don't even look that good?" That's a strange statement.

I've had people watch X-plane flights to DCA using the above who thought that they were initially looking at the real thing.

Even close up once they saw it was a sim, they were calling out the buildings they recognized due to the accuracy.

Other payware airports and areas are no less accurate.

[Nats]

Well looking at the Frankfurt one the fire engines doo look rather rubbish and the buildings certainly don't look photorealistically textured - they look more cartoony. Some of the other ones are better.

[Kosmozuikis]

Originally posted by opjose:

Originally posted by Kosmozuikis:

These payware airports don't even look that good and there are only few low quality buildings, besides they're done poorly because they impact performance too much.

What?????

Have you actually purchased any?

http://store.x-plane.org/Washington-XP_p_591.html

"Don't even look that good?" That's a strange statement.

I've had people watch X-plane flights to DCA using the above who thought that they were initially looking at the real thing.

Even close up once they saw it was a sim, they were calling out the buildings they recognized due to the accuracy.

Other payware airports and areas are no less accurate.

Dude you can buy a whole game for that price. These are only low quality buildings. This should be free or cost 2-3€. And please don't tell airports are harder to make than a game.
Some people get excited when they see reflections or rain effects on the windshield like it's something new, i'm not surprised they think that airports look amazing. They're not bad but not very good either.
At 10k feet everything looks like real

[opjose]

Originally posted by Kosmozuikis:

These are only low quality buildings. This should be free or cost 2-3€. And please don't tell airports are harder to make than a game.

That statement tells me you have not actually looked at the buildings but are going by a supposition.

They are NOT "low quality building". The DCA airport even has the proper counters INSIDE the buildings with people moving around. The buildings in the downtown area are highly detailed.

The poly count does not approach "on rails" shooters but the results are never-the-less amazing even close up.

These are sold by other people not Laminar.

While the amount of effort is relative, you don't know their distribution and developement costs.

Steam is repleat with small developers that invested in writing games or DLC only to find that no matter how they price things, they simply cannot cover their expenses.

So yeah we may WANT it to be $2-$3, the reallity is that the people who do this would not begin to think about releasing high quality payware items at the costs you would like.

That's the nature of the beast. What we/you want will ALWAYS cost more than what we want to pay for.

While I don't disagree that there are a myriad of things that should be cheaper, the reality is that prices will only go up over time.

I personally balk at the $75.00 aircraft and even those that I buy at the $50.00 USD level MUST be "study level" planes, which I only purchase if I am passionate about that particular aircraft. The developers would sell me three times as many planes if they were half their current prices, but they choose not to.

I wait for Steam or other sales, which I stil think is a way for them to lower their prices to what the item should have sold in the first place.

Steam is not immune to the "sale pricing" game and some here say the developers on Steam don't do this... Here is some news to them: YES THEY DO!