As a matter of fact, considering the number of add-ons released basically daily, things are going very well (If you’re interested in that part of the industry, you can read ou r interview with Anna Cicognani, CEO of ORBX, one of the largest players in the add-on scene), perhaps contrary to what some expected before the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
This doesn’t mean that the business for third-party developers is gone. To give you a rough idea, the content of the latest World Update would easily cost you about $150-200 if you wanted to purchase something similar from third-party developers, and that’s just for one update.
This established flight simulation as a very, very expensive hobby, especially if you wanted to purchase a good number of airports and aircraft, improve the (usually terrible by default) terrain data, and so forth. Microsoft and other developers used to release very basic packages lacking detailed airports, cities, and terrain, and simply leveraged third-party developers for the production of paid add-ons that took care of adding the eye-candy. This pretty much subverts what flight simulators have been like in the past twenty-plus years.
The amount of free content included in this kind of update is massive, and pretty much unprecedented in this industry for a title that isn’t technically a game-as-a-service, especially if you consider the frequency and the fact that Microsoft Flight Simulator also receives a large “Sim Update” every other month, focusing on improving aspects of the simulation instead of adding content.
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