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Folks,
In the immortal words of a Denver area talk show host, let me tell you where I sit before I tell you where I stand.
I'm a professional C/assembler/WindowsAPI technical programmer with a product under active development. I've been doing technical computer programming on and off since 1963. My long career has made me strongly sympathetic to the plight of FS add-on payware developers. Trust me, it's very difficult to produce software that works really well for most customers -- and it's impossible to make it perfect for all.
Remember this: While a product like Windows can have a beta test phase that involves thousands of people, in the FS world it is usually the paying customers who conduct the bulk of the testing -- because the world of FS is very small and there is no alternative other than to not bring products to market in the first place. Lucky indeed is the developer who can recruit as many as ten committed beta testers, i.e. ten people who'll continue to work with his product regardless of its faults in order to help the developer rid the product of those faults.
So don't expect perfection. Over time a buggy product may well be improved to the point where it becomes reliable, but this cannot be guaranteed.
I'll discuss vendor and customer ethics below but to come straight to the point, if a payware product fundamentally doesn't work for me I simply delete it from my system and move on. This has always been my attitude regarding freeware, and with the advent of high fidelity add-on aircraft it has become my policy regarding payware as well.
If a given payware aircraft doesn't work for me I don't spend time trying to determine exactly what's wrong. I don't spend time trying to work with the vendor's or developer's customer support people. I might do a few quick forum searches for a solution but typically I don't do even this. And I don't even ask for a refund. I simply move on.
Why? Because my time is valuable to me, as is my emotional tranquility.
If I buy an aircraft to use in my own testing, I don't want somebody else's faulty product to prevent me from getting my tests done. Instead I'll test with some other suitable aircraft because I'm here to debug my own product, not to help debug somebody else's.
At the moment I have a need to test with complex turboprop aircraft. I installed a well known one today only to have both its FS2004 and FSX versions break DirectSound on my Windows XP flight computer. In each case I used System Restore to uninstall the aircraft. By the time you read this I will have moved on to another product that I've had on the shelf, the Captain Sim C-130. (But no, I'm not going to tell you the name of the product that failed, because what didn't work for me might very well work for you. I don't want to be unfair to the developer.)
Similarly, if I buy an aircraft for pleasure flying then I want to have fun flying it, not to spend my scarce free time being a tester of that aircraft. I recently bought the A2A B-377 Stratocruiser for FSX and am immensely pleased with it. I wanted to fly a complex propliner and the developer has brought exactly that to market, with a remarkably low level of bugs. If the product is never improved I will still be happy with it.
See? My FS life remains uncomplicated. When something doesn't work for me simply I accept the financial loss and then forget about it. With rare exceptions I don't let another developer's problems become my problems. My blood pressure remains low and my satisfaction level remains high. Of course this posture comes at a price: Probably half of the payware add-on aircraft I buy go directly into either a bankers box labeled "Dead Games" or into a folder in my offline computer archives labeled "Dead Downloads".
That's right. You've got the picture. If I want to benefit from the purchase of N dollars worth of add-on aircraft that will work for me, then I must budget 2N dollars to cover the additional cost of the aircraft that won't work for me.
Is this an extravagant attitude? For me, no. For you...Well...How valuable is your own time? How valuable is your own inner tranquility? If a $40 purchase is worth your spending weeks of time to get it working, that's fine with me.
Yes, we have rights as consumers but is it worth asserting those rights every time some add-on software doesn't do what we want or expect? That's a highly personal decision. I'm not going to tell you what to do regarding this matter, only what I do. However, just as there is such a thing as desirable vendor/developer ethics, so are there desirable customer ethics. If you're not going to do what I do -- sidestep the whole issue of buggy payware -- then you have to strike a balance between your rights as a customer and the developer's rights as a businessman.
What are those rights? Here are my views...
As a paying customer you have a right to expect a product to perform reasonably as advertised. If it doesn't do that out of the box then you have an obligation to give the developer a reasonable amount of time to either fix the problem or give you a reasonable workaround. If you're not willing to do that for each and every developer with whom you do business then either a) stop buying stuff, or b) ignore such situations, as I do.
But the developer has rights too. He can't instantly fix every bug that's reported to him. Instead he has to prioritize them based on some rough notion of which bugs are important to fix versus which bugs can be postponed, or even ignored altogether. This is because his obligation is really to his customer base overall and not just to individuals with pet bugs that they want fixed. (And he has the right to batch his fixes in service packs and successive releases.)
In fact, the developer has a right not to fix a bug even if it's a show stopper for you personally. However, when this is the case the developer has an obligation to give you a refund if the bug truly keeps the product from reasonably performing for you as advertised.
And now for another shocker: The developer has a right to offer you a refund at any time and ask you to take your business elsewhere. Once you have been made whole, either through bug fixes or a refund, you have nothing to complain about and no further claim on the developer. You have a right to tell other people the facts (as happens with product reviews) but you don't have the right to interfere with a developer's business by burning him at the stake in a forum -- not if you've been offered a refund -- even though you may not have requested the refund and may in fact not want it.
To paraphrase the old saying, three things are certain in life -- death, taxes, and software bugs.
But forewarned is forearmed. If you're not willing to do what I do you should instead pay attention to product reviews, including the raw per-product customer comments posted at the Pilot Shop, and including reviews posted at other flight simulation web sites. Also do forum searches. Also ask questions on the forums about products you're interested in, and ask pre-sales questions of their developers. If you become a wise consumer the frequency with which you're disappointed will be greatly reduced.
As for me, I don't have time for this. But I also have no grounds for complaint. If I delete a payware aircraft five minutes after I installed it, that's my choice and it should not be allowed to reflect badly on the developer.
After all, what doesn't work for me may work beautifully for you.
Mike McCarthy
mike@pcgamecontrols.com
http://www.mikeswritestuff.com
P.S.
Now that I've inflamed the developer community ...
I'm not saying that 50% of payware is garbage. Rather, I'm saying that 50% of the add-on aircraft I buy either a) won't install correctly on my flight computer, or b) run sufficiently badly on my flight computer that I choose to consign them to the scrap heap.
Most likely I could cut my DOA rate from 50% to 5-10% percent by following normal support procedures, but as discussed above I choose not to because of the man time and calendar time this takes.
In all fairness to payware developers, most of them do a very good job. Many serious problems with add-on aircraft are due to users not following installation installation instructions, or to installing into dirty systems.
Quite often problems are simply minor configuration interactions that end up crippling the product -- because developers simply cannot test against every possible combination of hardware and software environments.
Discuss this in the Outer Marker message forum
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