Since you are so informed, what is their position towards the forming of an eventual freeware market? Could not find any info on the net.
The company that makes RoF is a small company compared to MS & it couldn't survive only on sim sales alone so they probably won't turn to freeware any time soon.
This is not because they are greedy like MS, it's so they can keep on developing the sim & keep it evolving.
I wish to correct you here. M$ are not greedy. They are STUPIDLY greedy.
I call as proof of my statement the M$ Flight enterprise. One of the most effective ways to squander the followers base of a brand EVER devised in the last 50 years. I am offending NO ONE by calling what I see with its REAL NAME.
They already had a big downward hit with the unwieldy FSX (
in its first years it was, beyond any reasonable doubt, when the hardware powerful enough to make it work decently was not available on the market no matter how much money you wanted to throw at it)... but now with Flight... 90% and mounting of the old followers alternating between being those strongly disappointed and others frothing at the mouth in rage... WOW! What a peerless commercial success... for X-plane.
Anyway, returning to RoF, the fact that they won't allow for freeware WILL put a crimp in its potential success.
As a GAME maybe it won't be hampered, as M$ well knows. But if they have in mind to make a shoot for it to be a SIMULATOR, the absence of freeware won't let it go too far... as M$ has yet to realize.
That and, sorry, I call it a travesty the act to release the models of the planes freeware only to make one pay the cockpits. As already written, give bikes away for free, but make the ones taking those bikes pay for the handlebars and the saddle. More honest it would have been a hard-nosed approach of everything payware. Not unlike M$, who makes you pay the outer model even if with no cockpit fitted. Choosing to "
give me for free" the model only to make me pay the cockpit makes me feel mocked.
Biplanes can be a lot of fun, but having ONLY biplanes will get old fast.
Well they do have the Fokker D.VIII Monoplane from World War I.
The plane the Ford Trimotor came from, down the line... which remains STRICTLY pre-1935... no, actually it's pre-1930... if not before, even, if I'm not confusing the models. :-?
My question remains and even develops further, as you can read below.
Fact is that is the downsides of their current project are WAY more steep than any promised future upside.
What do you mean by this?
777 are introducing the Channel Map & Seaplanes this year, along with the Airco D.H.4 & other planes yet to be announced.
Try RoF & you'll start whistling a different tune.
Look, I am a LOVER of older planes. I prefer classics MORE than modern kerosene burners. Yet EVEN I from time to time like to wander along the timeline.
I always like to fly the Calclassics Constellations... actually ALL their planes are just sweet (
some of them payware grade given away free, those guys are simply GREAT, full stop), but from time to time I throw myself into a jaunt in the Ford Trimotor, on the Ansaldo SVA (
mostly the beautiful one made for X-plane 9, but the FS one too it's not half bad), on the P-51D, and from time to time I don't disdain to jump on its jet-powered big bro, the F-86 Sabre, to burn some kerosene in the transonic range of flight speed... and on others too. Be they powered by reciprocating engines, old jet units and even turboprop, and which complete list I don't write here for reasons of time and space.
So you can see, even not having taken the commands of a simulated modern airplane for a while, my interests quite dynamically sweep all the way from 1914 to 1960 and sometimes, though rarely, even beyond this time interval.
Now, my question is: even WANTING to forget the need to be compulsively connected to their server to fly even off line (
thing that could spell a premature death to the program, should said server go and remain down for whatever reason) to make the whole thing work, would RoF be able to entertain me the same way, or will it ask me to confine myself and my interests in the matter of flight simulation only in the years BEFORE the first half of the 30ies, if even THAT FAR? :-?