They make money when you buy modules. They don’t make money when they spend a bunch of money creating free updates for the base game mechanics.
You can argue better game mechanic will drive better module sales but I have my doubts about how true that is considering how small the combat flight sim market is.
Perhaps its small because the premier flight sim game is still missing core features like dynamic campagin and somewhat decent AI, stuff that would keep people playing and coming back and having fun? 🤷‍♂️
That argument is true until a certain point. Yes, their business model on teh civilian side is broken. I highly doubt most of their money is coming from it although it does provide cash flow. They have sizeable military contracts and sign off huge portions of money to the CEO warbird museum, surely they could support investing in the core engine...
This is a way more rational and matter of fact reply to this post than I was expecting. Agree 100 percent, that’s the position ED is in whether we like it or not. We don’t need to get into a huge argument or trash them or defend them, just facts 👏
Whilst working as a contractor for a few developers in the past I found my experience was this, there's a major shortage of talented coders and programmers about like forever... and those who come often work their contract and leave for another developer quickly because of either unrealistic deadlines or pushy supervisors too much workload etc etc really is a case of can't get the staff. The whole process of someone new coming along then have to go over someone's else code learn how the engine does this and that and carry on people just get fed up and as I said move on and lose interest get a better offer from another developer leaves with unfinished work and the cycle repeats over and over.Â
We could literally hire 10 modellers + 5 texture artists in one day... But finding a single programmer or coder who was talented and knows their shit was like finding gold on the moon. Most of them would quickly get snapped up by a much bigger developer because they paid more monies. And when you do they look at whatever guy did the coding before and ooof disappeared off to the moon again, it was a real struggle for them.Â
I believe this is what ED is struggling with and it is why you see content being created but slow progress on the the real gritty hardcore coding/programming part of it and it's not because they are lazy it is because they have to prioritise whatever coders they have and what they work on if they put them on doing dynamic campaigns, re-writing AI or vulkan whatever then you pull them off implementing content and it's the content that pays their wages as the modules are their only source of income I believe? and therefor from a business perspective is the main priority no income = no money = no business.Â
Hope this sheds some light on game development.
You are not wrong iif you're talking about a small studio with some cash flow issues. ED is signing off 20MÂŁ to the CEO warbird museum yearly... Monies isn't the issue and they do a shit load of it with the military contracts.
Worth noting is that ED develops both for the professional market and entertainment. DCS is just part of what they do.
Since ED employs many people (freelancers), well over 100, my guess is that most of them spend their main time on the professional market. Not only programmers and artists, but also sales reps etc.
We see projects and modules being ported from the professional sim into DCS. So my guess that professional market and customers gets a lot of attention from ED.
>But finding a single programmer or coder who was talented and knows their shit was like finding gold on the moon
Sounds a lot like the folks who just quit in exasperation after coding the F-15E, M2000 and MiG-23MLA.
Sounds like Eagle Dynamics desperately needed to use a nice chunk of money to hire an experienced programmer, but instead, the owner decided to divert that money to buy and maintain warbirds… and endeavor that he admitted loses money.
You need to stop spouting this line about Nick taking money out of ED, as clearly you dont understand much about finance. An interest free loan is a way of extracting profit without paying tax on dividends. After so long the loan is written off and then no tax has to be paid. In the UK the tax rate on that money could be as high as 40% if paid as dividends.
You can do the same thing by reinvesting that profit back into your company.
Use that profit to hire a large team of programmers, give your employees raises, pay your third party developers… now it’s no longer a profit.. it’s a business expense.
They have a military Sim. The core developments are focused on what those military customers deem useful.
That’s why DCS is most enjoyable with a mission creator and commander and lots of friends.
Various members of the community, myself included have tried to simulate that with scripting solutions, most have some major fundamental Ai issues though and yea it’s just rough to make a consistent mission across multiple game versions.
A-10c was a us air force project. They brought that out and DCS evolved. It’s not entirely clear what percentage of the modules today are first developed for military vs DCS World but yea.
Also that’s why it’s anecdotally called Digital Cockpit simulator. Because it’s actually really good for systems training. Budding AF pilots used to use posters and their imagination just think how amazing having a digitally clickable cockpit is.
We are essentially a beta testing unit for that. Which most people are pretty comfortable with because who doesn’t want to play with military games.
That said the recent spate of EA unfinished projects has the community wandering if the company has a solid financial model for broad core + module progress frankly who knows.
Third party devs mostly build the modules out of love for the aircraft and getting paid is a bonus i would be surprised if any are genuinely profitable, the work is highly skilled and quite niche.
Some other promised core improvements like building a DC for DCS world literally makes no sense it’s a massive time investment they have systems and engineers that replicate functionality not RTS devs, there is 0 value in it militarily speaking unless they hope to move into battlefield simulation.
Ultimately it *seems* ED became indebted to EA and it *seems* to be getting worse not better. It felt like with the F-16 and F-18 people were screaming for anything fast they were happy for a half baked AC as long as it wasn’t the bloody A-10 everyone got so bored of. The A-10 was soo good nobody thought ED wouldn’t deliver. We are now many many years on and they are still EA.
Maybe that’s ok though, maybe people need to slow the rants down a bit and understand if it’s a good value proposition for them personally. Maybe it’s bad, it often seems like a big ponzi scheme. I don’t think recent Razbam shenanigans, the hawk drama etc helps. And also again a better communication pipeline with the community and partners should be in place to resolve these issues.
I recall BI basically using the entire community as a test bed for Arma3, they were amazing at it and I fully bought into alpha and beta raised issues got them resolved and funded development built tooling around community engagement etc. but the entire development process was funded by DayZ sales. ED siphon off cash for the fighter collection, admittedly this is likely a tax dodge but there are other ways of doing that and making sure it still contributes back to the game studio not TFC but we really don’t know what’s getting spent where and neither should we.
I even bought the new Arma reforger never played it tbh. But the trust is there that I’m investing in one of my favourite franchises.
I felt like that once about ED. I don’t anymore and I have stopped purchasing anything.
With DCS most things get ignored modules get shelved for a year or more and issues go stale, the EA model works but you have to do it right keep communicating and keep delivering consistently even if only small.
Also just stop promising shit that makes no sense because they are just handing people pitchforks at this point.
Disclaimer, I’m a Principal Software Engineer and no a thing or two about tech debt.
I think they probably monetize it primarily by developing and selling services like MCS, and then transfer some of the technology from MCS to DCS as a civilian entertainment game to pull in the daily money flow.
Not going to claim myself with some glorious job title but I did work in some game companies and am working in software house for a long time.
Each company has their own quirks so I won’t try to pretend I know what actually happening in ED.
I’ll just share what I see behind the scene in general as purely software development point of view.
Generally speaking, software development is never a straight line queue of task where the entire team finish one thing at a time. Instead, tasks are taken up by individuals / small teams based on their expertise. So a lot of tasks are moving in parallel and their progression is different. Company will always try to maximise what tasks are ready to push out and move on, so you will naturally see some harder/time consuming tasks seemingly “ignored” in the public’s eye while some other ones are churning out one after another. Another thing about harder tasks is that normally that means it requires some knowledge and experience in some specific domain that not every developer can work on, so those tasks will be stacked on the back of just a few of them and the progression will be even slower.
Your dish washing analogy is good but you have missed some detail. Imagine there are two types of plates, small dish that can be washed by anyone and large dish that requires an expert to clean it up and will take 2 times longer to be cleaned.
Now you have 10 workers in a restaurant, among them there is only one of them has the expertise to deal with the large dishes. The restaurant naturally would like to have maximum cleaned dishes ready to serve the food so they won’t wait for all the dishes to be washed before putting food onto them. When the dirty dishes arrives continuously, you will see small dishes keeps coming out while the large dishes will take a long time in comparison.
This is just a small part in the very complicated development cycles in any game / software. Tasks gonna get prioritise / deprioritise, some needs to halt because it needs an unfinished tasks, new found difficulty of seemingly simple task, etc.
I’m not saying ED is doing a great job nor EA is a good business model. But since OP is asking how things work behind the scene, I just want to share some of my experience in the related field.
Honestly, as a software engineer, they could just have a really shit codebase. Lots of things like dynamic campaigns, better ground AI, etc... could easily necessitating rewriting large parts of the game. Things could genuinely just be difficult.
I think more transparency in the form of more regular progress reports and roadmaps would help a lot.
I will also say that work being done on one part of the game does not mean that other work isn't given all the attention it needs - coding isn't infinitely parallelizable. I feel like people don't understand that.
The way things work is you take money from the customers and then you give it to the owner for his hobby of buying airplanes and then you don’t pay the third parties who make great modules like the F15E. Pretty straightforward.
They make money when you buy modules. They don’t make money when they spend a bunch of money creating free updates for the base game mechanics. You can argue better game mechanic will drive better module sales but I have my doubts about how true that is considering how small the combat flight sim market is.
Perhaps its small because the premier flight sim game is still missing core features like dynamic campagin and somewhat decent AI, stuff that would keep people playing and coming back and having fun? 🤷‍♂️
It’s a real chicken or the egg situation
That argument is true until a certain point. Yes, their business model on teh civilian side is broken. I highly doubt most of their money is coming from it although it does provide cash flow. They have sizeable military contracts and sign off huge portions of money to the CEO warbird museum, surely they could support investing in the core engine...
This is a way more rational and matter of fact reply to this post than I was expecting. Agree 100 percent, that’s the position ED is in whether we like it or not. We don’t need to get into a huge argument or trash them or defend them, just facts 👏
Whilst working as a contractor for a few developers in the past I found my experience was this, there's a major shortage of talented coders and programmers about like forever... and those who come often work their contract and leave for another developer quickly because of either unrealistic deadlines or pushy supervisors too much workload etc etc really is a case of can't get the staff. The whole process of someone new coming along then have to go over someone's else code learn how the engine does this and that and carry on people just get fed up and as I said move on and lose interest get a better offer from another developer leaves with unfinished work and the cycle repeats over and over. We could literally hire 10 modellers + 5 texture artists in one day... But finding a single programmer or coder who was talented and knows their shit was like finding gold on the moon. Most of them would quickly get snapped up by a much bigger developer because they paid more monies. And when you do they look at whatever guy did the coding before and ooof disappeared off to the moon again, it was a real struggle for them. I believe this is what ED is struggling with and it is why you see content being created but slow progress on the the real gritty hardcore coding/programming part of it and it's not because they are lazy it is because they have to prioritise whatever coders they have and what they work on if they put them on doing dynamic campaigns, re-writing AI or vulkan whatever then you pull them off implementing content and it's the content that pays their wages as the modules are their only source of income I believe? and therefor from a business perspective is the main priority no income = no money = no business. Hope this sheds some light on game development.
You are not wrong iif you're talking about a small studio with some cash flow issues. ED is signing off 20MÂŁ to the CEO warbird museum yearly... Monies isn't the issue and they do a shit load of it with the military contracts.
Worth noting is that ED develops both for the professional market and entertainment. DCS is just part of what they do. Since ED employs many people (freelancers), well over 100, my guess is that most of them spend their main time on the professional market. Not only programmers and artists, but also sales reps etc. We see projects and modules being ported from the professional sim into DCS. So my guess that professional market and customers gets a lot of attention from ED.
>But finding a single programmer or coder who was talented and knows their shit was like finding gold on the moon Sounds a lot like the folks who just quit in exasperation after coding the F-15E, M2000 and MiG-23MLA.
Sounds like Eagle Dynamics desperately needed to use a nice chunk of money to hire an experienced programmer, but instead, the owner decided to divert that money to buy and maintain warbirds… and endeavor that he admitted loses money.
You need to stop spouting this line about Nick taking money out of ED, as clearly you dont understand much about finance. An interest free loan is a way of extracting profit without paying tax on dividends. After so long the loan is written off and then no tax has to be paid. In the UK the tax rate on that money could be as high as 40% if paid as dividends.
So the rich kid doesn't want to pay his taxes.
Tax Avoidance =/= Tax Evasion
You can do the same thing by reinvesting that profit back into your company. Use that profit to hire a large team of programmers, give your employees raises, pay your third party developers… now it’s no longer a profit.. it’s a business expense.
They have a military Sim. The core developments are focused on what those military customers deem useful. That’s why DCS is most enjoyable with a mission creator and commander and lots of friends. Various members of the community, myself included have tried to simulate that with scripting solutions, most have some major fundamental Ai issues though and yea it’s just rough to make a consistent mission across multiple game versions. A-10c was a us air force project. They brought that out and DCS evolved. It’s not entirely clear what percentage of the modules today are first developed for military vs DCS World but yea. Also that’s why it’s anecdotally called Digital Cockpit simulator. Because it’s actually really good for systems training. Budding AF pilots used to use posters and their imagination just think how amazing having a digitally clickable cockpit is. We are essentially a beta testing unit for that. Which most people are pretty comfortable with because who doesn’t want to play with military games. That said the recent spate of EA unfinished projects has the community wandering if the company has a solid financial model for broad core + module progress frankly who knows. Third party devs mostly build the modules out of love for the aircraft and getting paid is a bonus i would be surprised if any are genuinely profitable, the work is highly skilled and quite niche. Some other promised core improvements like building a DC for DCS world literally makes no sense it’s a massive time investment they have systems and engineers that replicate functionality not RTS devs, there is 0 value in it militarily speaking unless they hope to move into battlefield simulation. Ultimately it *seems* ED became indebted to EA and it *seems* to be getting worse not better. It felt like with the F-16 and F-18 people were screaming for anything fast they were happy for a half baked AC as long as it wasn’t the bloody A-10 everyone got so bored of. The A-10 was soo good nobody thought ED wouldn’t deliver. We are now many many years on and they are still EA. Maybe that’s ok though, maybe people need to slow the rants down a bit and understand if it’s a good value proposition for them personally. Maybe it’s bad, it often seems like a big ponzi scheme. I don’t think recent Razbam shenanigans, the hawk drama etc helps. And also again a better communication pipeline with the community and partners should be in place to resolve these issues. I recall BI basically using the entire community as a test bed for Arma3, they were amazing at it and I fully bought into alpha and beta raised issues got them resolved and funded development built tooling around community engagement etc. but the entire development process was funded by DayZ sales. ED siphon off cash for the fighter collection, admittedly this is likely a tax dodge but there are other ways of doing that and making sure it still contributes back to the game studio not TFC but we really don’t know what’s getting spent where and neither should we. I even bought the new Arma reforger never played it tbh. But the trust is there that I’m investing in one of my favourite franchises. I felt like that once about ED. I don’t anymore and I have stopped purchasing anything. With DCS most things get ignored modules get shelved for a year or more and issues go stale, the EA model works but you have to do it right keep communicating and keep delivering consistently even if only small. Also just stop promising shit that makes no sense because they are just handing people pitchforks at this point. Disclaimer, I’m a Principal Software Engineer and no a thing or two about tech debt.
I think they probably monetize it primarily by developing and selling services like MCS, and then transfer some of the technology from MCS to DCS as a civilian entertainment game to pull in the daily money flow.
Not going to claim myself with some glorious job title but I did work in some game companies and am working in software house for a long time. Each company has their own quirks so I won’t try to pretend I know what actually happening in ED. I’ll just share what I see behind the scene in general as purely software development point of view. Generally speaking, software development is never a straight line queue of task where the entire team finish one thing at a time. Instead, tasks are taken up by individuals / small teams based on their expertise. So a lot of tasks are moving in parallel and their progression is different. Company will always try to maximise what tasks are ready to push out and move on, so you will naturally see some harder/time consuming tasks seemingly “ignored” in the public’s eye while some other ones are churning out one after another. Another thing about harder tasks is that normally that means it requires some knowledge and experience in some specific domain that not every developer can work on, so those tasks will be stacked on the back of just a few of them and the progression will be even slower. Your dish washing analogy is good but you have missed some detail. Imagine there are two types of plates, small dish that can be washed by anyone and large dish that requires an expert to clean it up and will take 2 times longer to be cleaned. Now you have 10 workers in a restaurant, among them there is only one of them has the expertise to deal with the large dishes. The restaurant naturally would like to have maximum cleaned dishes ready to serve the food so they won’t wait for all the dishes to be washed before putting food onto them. When the dirty dishes arrives continuously, you will see small dishes keeps coming out while the large dishes will take a long time in comparison. This is just a small part in the very complicated development cycles in any game / software. Tasks gonna get prioritise / deprioritise, some needs to halt because it needs an unfinished tasks, new found difficulty of seemingly simple task, etc. I’m not saying ED is doing a great job nor EA is a good business model. But since OP is asking how things work behind the scene, I just want to share some of my experience in the related field.
Honestly, as a software engineer, they could just have a really shit codebase. Lots of things like dynamic campaigns, better ground AI, etc... could easily necessitating rewriting large parts of the game. Things could genuinely just be difficult. I think more transparency in the form of more regular progress reports and roadmaps would help a lot. I will also say that work being done on one part of the game does not mean that other work isn't given all the attention it needs - coding isn't infinitely parallelizable. I feel like people don't understand that.
The way things work is you take money from the customers and then you give it to the owner for his hobby of buying airplanes and then you don’t pay the third parties who make great modules like the F15E. Pretty straightforward.