After over a year and a half from its release, Microsoft Flight Simulator has naturally reached a stage of maturation in which advanced airliner aircraft add-ons have completed their usually long development cycles and are finally being released, but their prices may be shocking to those not used to the flight simulation hobby.
Over the course of fewer than two weeks, Leonardo released its McDonnell Douglas MD-82, Just Flight released its BAE 146, and PMDG released its Boeing 737-700.
Their pricing ranges from approximately $65 to $80, which is higher than the price of the standard edition of the whole simulator ($59.99).
It’s not surprising that many at her first simulator consider these prices excessive, or even outrageous. Yet, there are reasons behind this.
First of all, we have to clarify that Microsoft is not directly involved with the development and pricing of these add-ons. They’re created by independent third-party developers that decide their own pricing autonomously. Microsoft is simply providing the platform and tools for them to operate.
As a matter of fact, the house of Xbox has been extremely generous in providing users with regular injections of free content in the form of airports, scenery, and even aircraft. Later this month, we’re getting a free expansion based on the Top Gun: Maverick movie and another that will add content in Italy and Malta. Even when they have asked for money for paid DLC aircraft, these were much, much more affordable than those we’re talking about today.
It’s important to mention that advanced add-on airliners for this kind of flight simulator aren’t your usual DLC. They’re extremely complex pieces of software that require years of work and research, often across different generations of simulators.
They’re so advanced and realistic that they’re often defined as “study-level,” an admittedly fairly vague definition (and at times tainted by marketing) that indicates that they could even be used to study the systems and procedures of the real aircraft.
In order to get a good example of the complexity I’m talking about, you can take a look at the tutorials above for PMDG’s brand new Boeing 737, shared by real-world pilot 737NG Driver, who takes several hours to take us through the ins and outs of the procedures required for a single flight.
All these complex functions and features, reproduced to this level of realism, require considerable time and resources to develop, so we shouldn’t underestimate the value of the aircraft that we get with the purchase.
Third-party developers are businesses, so of course, they need to compensate their employees for the months and years of hard work. On the other hand, dedicated simmers can easily receive hundreds of hours of entertainment and even learn from these aircraft.
That being said, there is an additional, more subtle reason that compounds the objectively high prices, and it’s hidden in plain sight within the history of flight simulators.
In the early years of the genre, flight simulators were quite popular, especially the Microsoft Flight Simulator series. With all the commercial and technological weight of Microsoft behind them, the installments of the franchise were considered true AAA games at the cutting edge of PC gaming. They received plenty of marketing and regularly appeared on gaming magazine covers when the printed gaming press was still a thing.
Following Flight Simulator 2004, the PC market started to turn, with other genres that used to be more popular on consoles rising to prominence, and Microsoft starting to push the series less and less.
Microsoft Flight Simulator X in 2006 was already starting to show signs of this decline, while the closure of Aces Game Studio in 2009 and the much more gamey Microsoft Flight in 2012 marked the end of the first Microsoft Flight Simulator era.
The baton was taken up by other companies, prominently Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research, with the various editions of Prepar3d (which is itself based on the licensed Microsoft Flight Simulator X engine) and X-Plane.
Yet, these companies lacked and still lack either the will or the resources to push and advertise their products as mass-market AAA games, content to serve a small niche of hardcore flight simulation enthusiasts. The inability to keep up with the meteoric technological and graphical advancements seen in the gaming market as a whole also severely limited the appeal of these products among the wider gaming audience.
This situation lasted for approximately a decade following the decline of Microsoft Flight Simulator X until the triumphant return of the series with the new Microsoft Flight Simulator in August 2020.
During that decade, the flight simulation genre became increasingly unpopular, stuck in a small and insular niche of highly engaged but numerically scarce enthusiasts.