chopper_nut wrote:.... at the end of the day though, it's still cheaper than cocaine and prostitutes...
...or as I call them, 'my other hobbies'. This is a good point, really I guess we all have hobbies which end up costing us a lot of money, which we are happy to pay. I don't buy expensive aircraft, and I am always careful with my money, but I can't imagine how much money I've spent on photography over the years. I can recall paying more to stock a darkroom back in another century than I could ever hope to spend on flightsim. (I almost said ' I remember buying an enlarger' but these days I'm not sure that people would even know what that was, except for those emails which use to be all the rage.)
But...
From a development point of view, I can understand the spread of prices across our hobby. It is a small market, and although there are some amazing success stories, which may or may not be fact, it is tough to make it pay. Some time ago I did the exercise of working out what I needed to live on, and how many customers I could expect, and arrived at the subscription price of $100. That is, almost every customer would need to pay me $100 a year to keep me from going broke. Of course this didn't work out, as that's not how the flightsim market works, but that sum hasn't changed. Of course I don't produce enough to get this sort of income, so I continue to do it mainly as an obsession.
I did once win a PMDG aircraft, I think in the NZFF screenshot comp, but that was for P3D2, I think, and the license didn't survive long. Plus I never got the hang of getting it in the air.
For aircraft, though, there's a good spread of prices unless you want the best and biggest. Same with scenery, although the price range is not as huge -- my NZCH is at the higher end of the scale not because I'm a greedy sod who takes advantage of the local market, but because I need to pay my rent.
