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The economics of modules


Lace

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The economics of modules

 

If one were to commission a module what would be a reasonable ball-park figure for something like the community developed A4, or a limited FC3 module, versus a full study sim like the Hornet or Tomcat?

 

so what do you think?

are the numbers posted so far large enough for your module?

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I did a simple "calculation" of the user base based on forum names. I think I came up with ~70k users on ED forums (I don't remember the exact number) but just go to user names, and you get a page with X names, and there X pages so its easy enough to calculate.

 

Total number of people registered in the forums is at the bottom of the front page and is currently just under 78,000 so you are very close.

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so what do you think?

are the numbers posted so far large enough for your module?

 

I'm not a developer. Not even in the software industry, just curious about how much money goes into this kind of thing. But since we have some idea about the top end i.e millions for the big boys, what about the A-4 end of the spectrum? How many hours do we think would go into a project like that?

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I think the scale from $1.5-4m kinda covers the gamut. F-18 would be higher given the more systems to model. A-4 on the lower end.

 

 

 

One other point of clarification - Devs to me = programmers, artists / modelers, and consultants (someone who can provide experience from the aircraft). So much goes into these modules - more than we all probably realize.

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55? Damn. A typical AAA big budget game from Rockstar could have 1000+ people working on it. If that is the case, people really need to recalibrate their expectations. I'm surprised the modules are as good as they are with such small teams.

 

 

Yea, but consider that today's DCS dev teams are probably closer in size to game dev team size in say 1999-2002, while the giant "console BLOCKBUSTER!!!1!" projects have grown stupid-massive.

 

It might be like comparing a low budget "independent movie" to say the latest "Transformers" monster... different budgets, different goals, different customers, different ROI expectations, and different people working on the teams to accomplish it.

 

I'm just glad DCS and it's related products exist at all! :pilotfly:

 

Edit:

Ok so as a for instance, the RAZBAM team is apparently numbering ten employees, if I'm understanding their page correctly:

https://razbamsimulations.com/index.php/our-team


Edited by Rick50
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Total number of people registered in the forums is at the bottom of the front page and is currently just under 78,000 so you are very close.

 

Bam, and I had to go and do it the hard way :thumbup:

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For what it's worth, there are 16000 users on the DCS facebook group, and we can safely assume that is also a small subset of the total population of players. I can easily see popular modules like the Hornet and Tomcat selling around 15k if not more.

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The link was already posted:

http://www.thebattlesim.com/about/

 

ED is involved in a variety of software products and services which include air combat simulation for the DCS World commercial entertainment market. We have over 200,000 active users and over two million product downloads.

...and that was probably 2016 info.

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Yeah its probably grown ALOT since 2016.

New hotness: I7 9700k 4.8ghz, 32gb ddr4, 2080ti, :joystick: TM Warthog. TrackIR, HP Reverb (formermly CV1)

Old-N-busted: i7 4720HQ ~3.5GHZ, +32GB DDR3 + Nvidia GTX980m (4GB VRAM) :joystick: TM Warthog. TrackIR, Rift CV1 (yes really).

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