I don’t see this as “blindly throwing away money” I look at it as a calculated risk, a gamble. I have a chance at being near the front of the line to enjoy a sim I’ve been waiting years for. I have a chance of being a tester. I have a chance to see progress maybe even make comments or suggestions to the developers. Sure maybe something will happen and I’ll out the money I’ve put out but this a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe when it’s done I won’t like it and it’ll become a coaster, I can’t tell you the number of coasters I already own. There’s nothing wrong with playing it safe too. Hold your money in your own pocket. But where would be with out people taking a risk? There are no guarantees in life. We should all know that. I doubt there’s a court in the world that would listen to the idea of a lawsuit for something like this and shame on anyone who consider filing one. Sure it does have the potential for becoming a headache for Aspect. But Seriously, when has anything worthwhile ever been easy?

I have faith in these guys and I’m willing to risk a few bucks. I expect no guarantees, I don’t expect any say in the product, I hope for a progress report I don’t think monthly is too much to ask for. I hope to be considered for testing if and when it gets to that point. Mostly I hope that Aspect is able to complete this sim and I can have “joy in my heart” of being a small part of making that happen.

Well some of you nay sayers obviously don't care about WWI aviation or flight sims very much. We haven't had a new WWI flight sim in years! There are no others in development so we are trying to ressurrect KOE so we can all have it. Porkchop, no one said KOE will cost $150.00, those were ideas, not official policy. I see your an obvious Bush supporter there as well and I have no idea how that's relevant, but hey guess you are entitled to a semi rant if you feel the need to.

Its really easy to just let things die. It's real easy to give up and walk away forever, a lot easier then not giving up. And it's also really easy to take the big dreams of a man or group of people and call them fools and then wander away thinking you've "told them how life works". If the founding fathers of the USA listened to logic like this they would have said "yeah your right, we can't defeat the British, we can't beat king George, lets just be realistic and continue living under the opressive monarchy" And the USA would never have existed.

Maybe KOE can't be ressurected, but maybe it can! If you give up now I'll give you the answer, nope it will never be finished. But if we try, if we pull together and work on this, there is a damn good possibility it will get done, and that is better then doing nothing and failing immediatly.

So continue calling people with vision and dreams unrealistic idealists, I'm sure someone said that to Thomas Jefferson, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. at one point in time. But they tried and they changed the world forever.

"No statue has ever been constructed for the critic"

And now we come to the reason we need Aspect and they need us...........cause once an idea is forwarded everybody wants to be a critic!

Guess what guys, and quite a few of you have laid this out loud and clear already, but maybe it needs to be said again............KOE isn't vaporware, it's not finished for sure, but I believe those screenies came from some developer's real game computer screen, and I believe KOE can be completed if given a chance!

Don't want to give it a chance, then you won't ever have to worry about "wasting" your precious money............it's call the self-fullfilling prophecy!

Here's something else to do a bit of soul-searching about, when's the last time we had a WWI sim this close to reality...........did 17-Hours succeed, has BoP materialized, what about an IL-WWI? I for one shouldn't need to remind any of you that Aspect has come closer to making this "first genuine WWI sim product" in the past seven years a reality than anyone else! So it's time to step back and face the facts...........you want to let this last best chance slip through our fingers.........what an unbelieveable SHAME that would be.

You know what's even worse than that, some of you would even be arguing over the bones when it's dead and gone!

Like I've said, this can be a Pheonix, or you can surely watch the vultures circle over Colorado.

That's not economics, that the cold hard facts!

I'm waitin' for Xeidos2 and Gary Stottlemyer to put something before us, because they have something I (WE) want, and that's the cold hard facts!

Sorry, but I'm listening to the guy who has the goods!!!

Well..... I could probably sneak 75 bucks out of the cash flow if I could be convinced that it MIGHT get me a copy of a game that was better than Red Baron. Of course, my real cost would be much, much more, as I KNOW it wouldn't run on my P3/500.

Pierre

Hi Pierre! Nice to see you here.

I'd be flying RB more often if I could get it to play even on my old system (when I upgraded I got a new box so I could keep my old system with the Voodoo 2 card). I think I'm going to have to re-install from scratch, which isn't bad - but the real pain is getting all the paints transferred over

It's also kind of depressing to only see a few people on the servers nowadays. I'm glad that FCJ saw some fresh people getting interested in WWI flight, but I think what we really need now is something like KoE. I hope it stays afloat - or should I say "in the air"?

-FranksValli

I'm not even a WW1 nut, and been a while since I touched a flightsim (currently busy with real life(TM)...but what the heck, I waste 50 bucks on a lot more stupid things than a chance for a new sim made for the simmers, not the arcade gamers.

I think the risk is a calculated one. By what John descripes right now you can load up the game, fly a plane and shoot others. So the basics are there.

If they really go TU in the future and after community funding it would be a nice safeguard if they agree to release their beta code so people can play with it and improve it.

So, that's the worst scenario...not to bad for 50 bucks.

That's a gross over-simplification of "basic economics". How much you charge is heavily dependant upon who you are trying to sell to. A product that is marketed as a toy to be used for a month or so and then discarded is very different conceptually from a product that is marketed as a serious hobbyist item intended to be a major part of someone's leisure time for a serious period of time.

Sims traditionally get sold at the same rate as games in order to get sales to non-simmers. My suggestion was to create a game and a sim from the same code base, and sell the game at game price to gamers and the sim to serious simmers at a price that reflects the fact that it's a huge piece of work and that its target audience get one new sim every couple of years and may have to rely on it for 5 or more years as their chosen sim for that era. Moreover that they will probably invest $500 or more in hardware to run it. Good simulation software is a rare and valuable commodity to the serious sim hobbyist.

Well said, Mahoney. I’m not so much afraid of idealists or taking a calculated risk with a controllable amount of money as I’m wary of people who want to ‘enlighten’ others with ‘objective’ facts or science. Economists are, as the saying goes, people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. One could say the ideas ventured in the poll are a very direct form of a micro-market, made possible by technology in a way that Adam Smith and Keynes could never have foreseen. ‘Regular’ products’ pricing is based on imperfect market perception and mobility by both producers and consumers, something that economic theory cannot cope with well. Involving the community in the development of KoE can reduce these market imperfections. And I think a whole lot of good is done by people who do not want to always surrender to market forces. I wonder how many sims we would have had if designers had maximized their market value in their choice of jobs. They’d probably be making risk assessment software for invertors, or something. Should pay much better.

Without creativity and idealism we would still be walking in bearskins and be living in caves, but without creative people and idealists we probably wouldn’t have mind.

Exactly. I was at Dusmania, which in europe is THE event for people wanting into professional games development. One discussion was about people that already are sw developers and want to change, since game development is "sexy". Actually some do, but very few older ones (older meaning over 30 ). One reason is quite simply that their families do not like them jumping down a lot of pay levels.

I am sure people like TK or Oleg could get better paying jobs if they wanted to.

BTW, one important area of economics is how to sell to those people that have only little money and how to sell for a high price to those that accept a high price. This is the norm in applications. This was one of the things I found interesting about Mahoneys ideas. OTOH, MS did it with MSFS (BTW, I bought the expensive version) once or twice and then stopped doing it, so it seems not to have worked well.

Osram - I wonder if the MSFS idea of splitting between a basic and a more expensive pro version fell down because they were both simulations? Just one had more functionality than the other?

I note that they can still get away with charging £50 for the latest version - twice what Il-2 retailed for in the UK. But then if you are a civilian flight simulation hobbyist, what choice do you have?

I do think we have to take those people serious that either fear it is a hoax altogether or that some money will be taken, some development done behind closed doors and then the sim dies.

Most people really active in here do not think so, for example I know Eddie as well and so I am completely convinced it is no hoax.

However, these people are too few to finance devlopment, so we need the "lurkers" or those that are interested in WWI but not on (these) forums and among those the number of sceptics will be larger.

Therefore, I still think that any development/financing scheme has to take these fears into account.

Like I said, if you ship the newest test version to everyone that pays, then the people do get something for their money and also they do have proof something is happening. If, for example, for 3 month there is virtually no difference between the versions, they can still decide to stop paying.

Let EVERYONE test, even if you do not need as many testers. The only bad things about too many testers is that you will get a) redundant and b) bad test reports. So, I would let a community volunteer sift through them and clean them up and pout them into a neice bug database .

What I probably underestimated at first is psychologie. It is very important how you name it. Do NOT name it game or people will expect playing to be fun. Do not name it investment. Do not name it demo or people will think it demoes how bad the game will be. IMHO you should name it "alfa" and "beta" tests.

I like that idea, Osram - as I've said before, in my experience no-one picks up bugs like end users, too. Use Bugzilla and get one of us with genuine development experience to organise it and remove duplicates, categorise properly etc.

I liked the idea someone had of a guarantee that in the event of failure after the community financed development the unfinished code is made open source, too. Would mean that even if the money was from the consumer's point of view "wasted" something like the BDG could gently push it along as a hobby. It would certainly encourage me to buy into the scheme.

Maybe. I do "admit" that what they did is somewhat different to your idea. However, I know very very few games that attempted this (two versions with two different price levels at the same time). I do know a tank sim, Steal Beasts will attempt it shortly.

The reason I bought the MSFS 2002 PRO version was gMax. Also, it had a plane (or some?) more and a few minor goodies that I forgot.


Yes, indeed.

BTW, about selling in stages. FWIW (I am not saying Aspect has to go this route):
Joel Sponsky is IMHO one of the brightest sw developers around at the time and writes books about methology. He is a MS fan. He worked on the Excel team. He says, paraphrased , one of the great things MS did and why they became so large is that for every product line they sold an unfinished version or two at first. He says to make a good product of a major piece of software, you need 10 years. You can have it under wraps for 10 years and get no money and no feedback on what customers want and customers have to twiddle their thumbs or you can do Windows 1 and Windows 2 before you do your first windowed operating system. I am not really going along on ethical reasons, but if someone of his calibre makes such a statement that on first sight seems so strange, it makes you think.

I'd pay $100 for a Red Baron 4 equivalent with a solid campaign and MMP. Pass on the newsletter.

Interesting times. I've voted 'yes' five times in the poll, though obviously with some reservations.

On business models for such things as niche games, I also play boardgames, and GMT http://www.gmtgames.com have an interesting setup - Project 500 - where they take advance orders for games, but don't actually take any money until the game is ready to ship; the advance orders just guarantee a certain level of interest, and they will only put a game into development/production when they have 500 orders. Don't know if something similar can be done with software (I would guess that production costs for boardgames are much higher than they are for software, but the reverse for development costs - and timescales).

Also how about the little software players - I'm a fan of 'Microflight' and 'Virtual Sailor' - http://www.hangsim.com - these are developed by a one man band, but I think there is some relevance for the situation we have here; the developer produces the basic software engine, with an open architecture that allows the fan community to add new 3D models and maps. Purchasers pay for a download of the software, and get free minor upgrades, and free downloads of the user-created add ons from the website. Periodically a major new version is released, and this has to be purchased again. I think this model works brilliantly. The fan community does what it is best at - modelling new aircraft (and ships) - leaving the developer to perfect (over many iterations) the basic model. Purchasers don't have to keep upgrading if they don't like the software or lose interest, but those that do help fund further developments. From the developer's viewpoint this locks in a certain number of consumers to buying the new versions (rather like the Microsoft way - resistance to upgrading is much less than resistance to buying a new product).

If I were in Aspect's shoes (glad I'm not) I might try to produce a full featured game of limited scope (no more than two or three plane types a side, smallish map area, small chronological scope). Then set the community loose on adding new planes, new maps, new graphics etc. Meanwhile perfect and improve the basic game and release a new version (full price to first time buyers, reduced rates for upgraders). Rinse and repeat.

Personally I would love to feel that the game I had bought was going to be supported and improved and enhanced (and I don't mean just have sequels released). All too often if a game as released is flawed, that's the end - maybe a patch to fix the crashes, but no hope of improvements to the gameplay.

Notice I use the 'G' word - I firmly believe that it is VERY important to remember that even the most serious sim is still a first and foremost a game, and good gameplay is vastly more important than good graphics or (even) good historical realism (IMHO of course). I think that is why RB is still popular - the campaign career mode provides great gameplay. It would be a big mistake for Aspect to concentrate on producing a 3D engine, great artwork, loads of reasearch, detailed flight models, and forget to include a game in there. On the other hand, if they could produce a great game, then the community could take care of the graphics.

But then what do I know...

And what type of "guarentee" would really mean anything? A lot of you don't remember a guy named Paul Hinds and a "flight Sim" called Tactical Aero Squadron" (think thats it?).. Look on Google.. I'm not saying THIS has anything to do with that type of scam, just to always be cautious of the carrot...Hey, i'm all for paying top dollar, for supporting a newsletter, for internet distribution, for being a beta tester, etc. etc. but won't take this seriously until I see more than screenshots.

Icer

Von Stalhein, I see much merit in your idea, but I’m concerned about quality control with community-added planes. There seem to be many more external modelers than flight modelers, and what I see with the CFS series is that many planes are so-so, some look pretty and only a few give me the idea that the flight model, cockpit graphics etc. approach realism. When one receives a gift one cannot bee too demanding, but I’d rather pay for an add-on with well-researched and well-made aircraft so that I could trust they are as authentic as possible (which is, admittedly, difficult for me to judge so I have to trust the developer) than download five planes of the same type, none of which is satisfactory. Of course, payware and freeware don’t exclude one another. I believe that with Il-2 many freeware designers contribute, but Oleg Maddox, the Game Overall Director, guards quality. So while I agree with you, I would like to have either some direct quality control, or a ‘stamp of approval’ that the developers can give to freeware. Non-approved freeware need not be locked out, but at least the community can see which freeware is developer-endorsed and which is not.

Well, if the "stages" will be like the second group of stages you mentioned than I agree with it also!
What I meant in my previous post and that I'm totally against is if those stages will have the following example aproach:

Stage 1: Single player with quick or simple missions only (but without campaign).
Stage 2: Introdution of new objects (Ground, Air; Naval, etc...).
Stage 3: Single player with more elaborated singles missions (again without campaign).
Stage 4: Single player with campaign.

If the "Stage" aproach will be something similar to the above you can bet that I will NOT support and buy the game.
If otherwise (like the second case scenario posted by Chevelle) I certainly will buy and support the game.

The example of the second stage shouldn't be taken literally. The point is that staged releases should mean better degrees of debugging. It should mean increasing number of features, functions, and capabilities. Each stage of release should include as much debugging and testing effort as is practical for the development team and to their testing specifications. (I presume you do/will have such a spec.)

Of course, I understand that bugs will be present and that each release will/should include bug fixes along with any additional features.

I answered yes to everything but the second poll question.

I'm a bit concerned with giving out money for something that I would have no clue as to when I would get it.

I like the investment post early on. I think what I am being asked is if I would invest in this game now.

I think to do this, I'd want to be more closely aware of what the dev team was doing, and treated more as a investor than just a gamer/customer.

Obviously the first question is a no brainer - and that is good to see

I would be concerned with pirating - I would hope strong measures including key authorization could be put into place to make sure pirating is kept to a minimum.