Quote Originally Posted by bazzar View Post
Unfortunately, for developers interested in FSW as a platform, one of the major issues was with the licensing rules. Unless a license was held for a particular brand, an add-on of that subject could not be supported. That made the whole thing too limiting and just too hard.
Yes. That's DTG policy for things distributed by DTG - they and the add-on author have to be licensed to use imagery and names.

The same does not apply if, like JustFlight/JustTrains for instance, you don't sell through DTG/Steam - then it's your decision what licenses you get and your head on the block of you don't get them. One of the most popular TS third party developers, Armstrong Powerhouse, got a very snotty letter from Virgin Trains a while ago, which forced him to stop selling products with their branding on it - he evidently hadn't licensed it. Other developers have sorted out their own licensing and are happily selling properly branded products through their own sites, with no DTG involvement at all.

The FSW team said that they were going to be using the same terms that the TS team used, so the same would apply there. It's this whole "Official" versus "Unofficial" add-on thing, still.

I do agree entirely that they clearly hadn't fully thought through what they were getting into with the flight sim hobby/industry. They might have had a roadmap, but they didn't communicate it clearly, they had an utterly pointless "early access" period, where the product barely changed from a consumer viewpoint from it entering and exiting the EA period, plus they knew exactly what had happened with Flight and yet they did almost exactly the same thing again. You cannot enter a marketplace that contains a number of fully-featured incumbents and expect to get away with an unfinished product. Again, I also agree that they should have started small and marketed differently - like the bush flying sim currently in development is doing - if they weren't going to put in what is considered "core" content (particularly jet powered flight) at the time of launch.

XP11 and AeroflyFS2 should, realistically, be what we as a community are now pushing to become what we want. Both have most of it already and add-ons that provide the rest, but both could be improved upon as core products. Unfortunately, because so many people choose to misinterpret or blatantly ignore the P3D licensing, they have invested heavily in "what they know" and now want that to become the default sim, even though L-M have no interest at all in supporting them and could cancel pretty much all of the licenses that people hold with a broad stroke. It wouldn't put a tiny scratch in their balance books to lose the consumer market that they specifically state the sim is not to be used in.

Ian P.