Is that a comment about the free-to-play or about the actual quality of the simulator? If it's the later, carry on, I've not looked at it yet.
I think that free-to-play makes a huge amount of sense for simulators. Train Simulator 2012 [1] isn't free to play but if it were, I think that it would still be a money maker. Digital models cost real money at $19 for a locomotive (and some scenario type things). If you buy all of the DLC for Train Simulator 2012 you'd have spent $1,700.
I'm not a sim vehicle sort of person. I enjoy city building and SimAnt (so /r/OpenAnt's OpenAnt [2] makes me happy). But I can see the DLC model (which I hate) causing companies to invest resources into more modern simulators. I think free-to-play also allows younger players and unfamiliar players to be exposed to something that they could really truly enjoy.
Yeah, it's depressing that as computer and graphics power, multi-monitor, and eye tracking is becoming mainstream, realistic flight simulators are apparently no longer an interesting market niche...
Time to kickstart(er) a new project to prove them wrong, then ? Just like double-fine was being told by publishers that Adventure games were a thing of the past.
I'm mostly interested in the realistic WW2 online combat genre, which seems pretty dead. The only things around I know of are Warbirds and its cousins WWIIOL and Aces High. While all of them appear to be actively supported, they all date back to the last millenium.
Well... I've been involved quite a bit with World War II Online, and they are not exactly growing by miles and bounds. The customer base for a hardcore sim seems a lot smaller than for more arcade-style games, so I don't know how you get funding for a large, complex piece of software with quite a limited payoff. I'd love to work on it, though...
