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Calling all Developers

S

Smuggler

Messages
3
Country
unitedstates
Greetings,

My name is James and I am an entrepreneur and a Flight Sim Enthusiast. I have noticed areas of FSX that are lacking and I would like to help fill those gaps. However, I can't do it on my own. I need people like YOU to help me!

WHO am I looking for? I am looking for everyone who would like to make money! I need aircraft developers, REAL WORLD PILOTS, web designers, texture artists, and even scenery designers!

WHAT will they be doing? They will be creating aircraft that have been constantly neglected in the Flight Sim world. These aircraft will be sold as payware.

WHEN will they do it? Whenever is convenient for them! I understand that these developers have lives outside of Flight Simulator and might have full-time jobs or families, so they may dedicate times that are convenient for them to working on these aircraft!

WHERE will they do it? In the comfort of their own homes! There is no physical place for the developers to report to.

WHY should YOU join me? To further the enjoyment of Flight Simulation for everyone! (And to make a little cash on the side).

If you are interested, email me at atlantis737@gmail.com and tell me a little bit about yourself, your experience with flying/flight simming, and a picture of your favorite creation (if you are a developer/artist/designer)

Thanks,

James
 
Also, which airplanes do you have in mind that haven't yet been made?
 
Yeah, what are your credentials? I think the people who are good at what they do can do it without someone taking a cut of their profits for nowt.
 
I've already made some money, but it wasn't in FS addons. Get too many other people involved and the profit disappears PDQ.

I'm also baffled as to how any "entrepreneur" would base their plans for global domination (or even making money) on a workforce that is allowed to work when they feel like it - that doesn't add up.

Making money requires the spending of money - in this case on a full-time team working when they are told to for wages that are agreed in advance employing skills that you've verified as being up-to-scratch. Otherwise the idea is dead in the water, IMO.

Sorry if I seem unduly cynical, it's my fault. I got some exposure to reality without a protective suit. :duck:
 
As for my credentials - I am currently working on a degree in Business from the local community college through a program that allows students to spend two years at a lower-cost community college and then transfer to the more expensive state college to finish the degree (the Community College program provides an associate's degree and then students can transfer to the State college for a bachelor's degree). Most of the work I will be doing will be organizational.

However, if my input into the work of these projects is your concern, I can assure you that I will not be making any money from this. The reason why I plan for these aircraft to be payware is to make the projects more enticing to developers, and the sales from any aircraft will be distributed evenly among its developers (this will be paid monthly) although I will remove a small portion from the monthly income to pay for web hosting costs. To assure all of the developers, I will be making quarterly finance reports available to them to make sure they can see where the money is going - not one penny to me!

The motivation behind me trying to recruit developers here is because I see aircraft that have been neglected by the freeware and payware developers (just as an example, the Beechcraft Queen Air and the Beechcraft Musketeer and variants, but I can name many others) and I would like to see those aircraft be created.

I am NOT trying to create a for-profit company here, or to become a payware tycoon. I am also NOT trying to hire professional developers to sit around and make me some money. What I am trying to do is attract developers who do this as a hobby and would like to make just a little bit of money from it - income is income and for those who would regularly be putting in the same time to create freeware aircraft, I would like to offer them a shot at pulling some income from that.
 
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Well good luck with your studies, but you might like to check aircraft manufacturers' attitudes to copyright for some aircraft. Me, I'm sticking to the hobby side, I have no illusions there.
 
Hi James,

You'll have to excuse some of the cynicism. There is a history of people touting for developers here, with themselves as the conductor in an orchestra of talented individuals.

Unfortunately the hard bit of developing ... is the developing itself! It's not the marketing so much, or the selling. There are many avenues for both of these aspects.

What may not be so intuitive, is that niche aircraft in a niche market (ie flightsim) doesn't really sound like a great business plan.

niche x niche = very small market

What do you perceive the paying audience to be for such a product, and does it offset the (albeit part-time) man-hours developing?

Might be worth looking at these things as part of the business model.

FSdeveloping as a hobby is good.
 
Guys

The OP made a request for developers - perhaps we can stay on-topic please....
 
John - You and I know that this is not really that good of an idea, and that this young fella isn't going to find much takers, if, indeed, he finds any at all.

Perhaps it would be better to explain to him why it is not really a good idea, than to leave him wondering why nobody seems to want to talk to him.

Now some things have been said here already, some more may need explaining (and from an MSc with a business major, this idea is lacking in some quite important areas, even if Smuggler has a lot of enthusiasm.)
 
James, I admire your passion, however, I thought your initial position as imprecise. You say people can make money etc... But what/where/when? I think you should have a plan of action.

Of course you're going to get some blunt responses; why would anyone want to collaborate with someone who has no experience in FS software development? Or if they have, haven't mentioned anything. You gotta say what you can do for people. :D
 
James, perhaps I could help explain..

This is a hobby in which folks learned long ago how to model, and slowly learned to market payware in return for the longer and longer hours required for a growing quality expectation.

When the developers on this site decide to build a beech queen-air, they just do it. They don't look around for a business school graduate to start the project using organizational management tools.

Think about any small business, like three people in the garage building a new cool whizbang...how much organizational management is going on? Not too much.

This is a community of developers. Anybody that visits and can't "develop" is welcome, but when such a person asserts they are appropriate team leaders, this feels like an affront. It as much as says "you guys aren't good enough the way you currently do things, because you all don't have me!" That comes off pretty brazen.

When folks ask what you bring to the table, they are trying to decide why you will help them be more successful. Offering your schooling as a "credential" doesn't make anyone here more successful, unless our current problem is not enough business school. Maybe that's where you should start....ask the developers here whether there are any services you could provide?

Rather than suggest you lead teams, why not ask if any teams could use your talents, and then outline your talents.

Best,
Bob
 
I'm going to be 100% up front and honest with you guys, I don't have a "plan of action" or a scheme for payware market dominance. What I am offering here is organization and some cash for casual developers. I am not using my business major to get ahead financially here. I am using it to apply some organizational/leadership skills, but that is all. I understand that many of you are not interested in my idea and I 100% respect that, I am not going to send out further propaganda. Currently I have recruited a texture artist and a gauge developer.

So if what I've said since the original post isn't up-front enough (I only say that because sometimes I can be a little wordy), here's the "tl;dr":

I don't know when/if you'll get your money, I don't have a single clue if I'll sell one single copy of whatever is developed. And if you're a full-time developer who's not okay with that, then that's okay. If you're a hobby developer who'd just be doing this for fun and releasing it as freeware, or only creating it for personal use, then this might be more up your avenue.

(end "tl;dr")

So if you're interested, my email's in the original post. If you're not, I really do sincerely wish you a nice day and ask that you don't be rude - and thanks to the folks who have given me some friendly input :)
 
Whatever you do, take care and consult an attorney before you go making payware aircraft. A lot of air-frames design, engine designs, name, logo, etc have a copyright or trademarked.
 
I'd like to extend an apology to the original poster. In the future I think that I will just put this section of the forum "off limits" since I seem to reply like I did more often than not to this type of post.

Smuggler, good luck in your endeavor.
 
Smuggler said:
I'm going to be 100% up front and honest with you guys, I don't have a "plan of action" or a scheme for payware market dominance. What I am offering here is organization and some cash for casual developers. I am not using my business major to get ahead financially here. I am using it to apply some organizational/leadership skills, but that is all. I understand that many of you are not interested in my idea and I 100% respect that, I am not going to send out further propaganda. Currently I have recruited a texture artist and a gauge developer.

So if what I've said since the original post isn't up-front enough (I only say that because sometimes I can be a little wordy), here's the "tl;dr":

I don't know when/if you'll get your money, I don't have a single clue if I'll sell one single copy of whatever is developed. And if you're a full-time developer who's not okay with that, then that's okay. If you're a hobby developer who'd just be doing this for fun and releasing it as freeware, or only creating it for personal use, then this might be more up your avenue.

(end "tl;dr")

So if you're interested, my email's in the original post. If you're not, I really do sincerely wish you a nice day and ask that you don't be rude - and thanks to the folks who have given me some friendly input :)
Click to expand...

You seem to assume that more of the high-quality freeware is being released as a freeware just because the good folks who make them don't know how to sell them - and you do.

I really don't think this is true... Services such as Flight1 or SimMarket make it relatively simple to start selling what you made. There are however several other factors that factor into the decision, including, but not limited to:

-Higher development cost. There are many development tools that are free or cheap for non-commercial use, but get expensive when a commercial license is required.

-Higher support cost/workload. Logically, more people request support for something they have paid for, while if it were free, they would just either hunt around a bit more, or just leave the thing completely. With freeware, you also often get a bigger user-to-user support base, easing your support workload.

-Higher requirements. Expected quality jumps a fair bit up right after you start charging even a dollar. What might be an excellent and loved freeware creation, might be considered lacking, even if cheap, payware. It is logical, though, that people expect the stuff they actually pay for to be better.


Another thing to consider is the market, the demand base. You have to realize that FS market is purely a hobby market. It was never too big to begin with, but last couple of years have seen a global recession. When available budget of general public decreases, first expenses to go are these ones. People redirect their money to essentials and saving. While signs are good that we are starting another growth cycle, we won't see people opening their purses for a while yet. Combine that with a plan for less popular planes... not a sound business idea.
 
Hi James,

I would suggest you use your entrepeneurship qualities for other purposes than to dedicate them to FS. You will be in for disappointment as far as I can tell.
Most reasons have already come up and I have nothing to add to that. Unless you manage to convince some already established payware companies like Aerosoft to hire you on the fact that you are an entrepeneur who can give them something extra, the fact that you are an FS enthousiast alone will not convince them nor anyone else.
This is not meant to be demeaning at all, just trying to put things in perspective in my way, just as the other FS addicts did in their way.
But please do stay with your hobby and keep considering it a hobby and one day you will find out that it is not about the money but about the pleasure of having contributed something to the FS community.
 
I would add another factor to consider for anyone setting up a group for FS development.

It is a sad fact that FS teams never really last, especially if they make flightsim objects. There are some groups that are predominently "talking shops" and who wisely keep development in the hands of the individuals responsible. There have been blow-ups in quite a few groups over copyright and ownership matters and, conversely, collections of like-minded friends who've sustained a decent working relationship no matter what comes. Milton S on these forums has been involved in so many projects I can only imagine he's a joy to work with!

Putting profit, money, into the equation seems to be rather like lighting the fuse on a far greater problem - one that you would have to "manage expectations" on by contractual arrangements. For the niche market that wise folks up-thread have already mentioned I would imagine that would be overkill.

I don't think anyone here wants you to fail in whatever your goals may be, and anyone can buck a trend if they strive hard enough, but sometimes the nay-saying voices of experience are well-intentioned attempts to steer you shy of a quagmire. This is a technical group and most people here develop stuff, some professionally, and if the amateur developers are anything like me, they are less concerned about the demon dollar and more concerned about making things for their own fun in a "work environment" that doesn't involve bosses, deadlines, appraisals (well, okay, appraisals in the form of peer reviews) or the expecations that come along with a payware release. You would, after all, be committing these "employees" to support roles down the line once the payware product has been released. Freeware developers are really looking to keep things casual, not formal, in my experience.

If I was to try getting some experience in coordinating the efforts of a team I would probably approach it as already suggested up-thread, and offer some organisational/co-ordinational experience to an existing team rather than trying to drive.

On a personal note I'd also suggest a smaller "sell". The OP came across as full of "pep" and "vim" as people used to say in the old days, but I would reckon that most people here have spent years being pepped and vimmed by various vacuous management types and the effect is lost on such jaded (oops, experienced) people. I'm averse to this kind of sell to the extent that I went freelance (in IT) in order to be excluded from corporate culture and all its team-building BS - the money was better, but secondary to freedom.

So, getting back to the point I began with, who would "own" these products at the end of the day, when team stresses enter the frame? Would a modeller be allowed to withdraw their model from the collective effort, and if not, how would the model be legally restrained as a group possession? What efforts would be made to stop developers withdrawing their labour and the copyrights/permissions on the work they have already done? What would stop that modeller from thinking "hmm, this is a great model, I really ought to go this alone"? These stresses have broken up freeware teams in the past, I can only imagine that with payware you would be compelled to formalise who owns what and what rights they may freely exercise. For little or no return, I can't see too many people wanting to complicate their lives in that way.

Nobody likes negativity, I'm sure, but sometimes it is well-intentioned advice that you can heed or discard as you will. It might help to review some of the other requests in this subforum to get a feel for what people are expecting and, in some cases, getting.

Good luck with your courses and whatever you decide to do with them downstream. Chasing education is the smartest use of our earlier years - and not so bad later either (I'm doing a Humanities degree here in my 50s, so all is not lost). I wish you well.
 
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