For many months I had been saying that under no circumstances would I pay more than USD $30 for a payware addon aircraft. Well, like a politician running for office (any political party) my position has ... er ... evolved ...

... As in "I never said it. But if I said it, it didn't mean what it means. And anyway it was taken out of context, even though what was quoted was a complete sentence. And in point of fact I've been saying exactly the opposite all the time." :D

... Ahem ...

I'm now willing to pay roughly USD $40 provided the aircraft comes with both FS2004 and FSX versions.

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You see, for most of a year now I've been eyeing the CLS DC-10, wanting it for FS2004, lusting for it ... But my policies of the time argued against buying it. So I waited, figuring that it would go on sale at the Pilot Shop some weekend.

Wrong. Completely wrong. In almost a year of waiting, it never happened. So yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered the download at a price of USD $40 and change. I did it only because I finally noticed that the product includes both FS2004 and FSX versions, important to me since I run both sims regularly.

So there is now a chink in my armor. A vendor can get USD $40 out of me by offering both versions of an aircraft, though it may be as much as a year before I order, and even then I will be very selective about what I buy.

In contrast, Friendly Panels has extracted something like $140 from my wallet over that same one year period -- by tempting me with very nice panel and gauge products priced at around USD $15-20.

This is price elasticity at work, folks, Economics 101. Had CLS reduced the price of the DC-10 to $30 I'd have bought it a long time ago. Similarly I'd love to own the newly announced highly detailed A2A B-377, however, the vendor has not been listening to me.

They want ... Are you ready for this? ... USD $37 for the base package, and then they apparently want an additional USD $25 for the stuff that adds all the detail. That's USD $62 for the aircraft, even though they're trying to make the price seem lower, in my opinion ... And this product is for FSX only, even though FS2004 still represents half the addon market.

I don't think so, A2A. Not me, moi, Mikey. On a similar note I will not be buying Space Shuttle Simulator 2007. (But thanks for the free demo, which may be all I want.)

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During the past year I have written many times about "optimum price", another Economics 101 concept. I'm not going to do it again other than to observe that the investment a vendor has in a product has zero to do with what the optimum price is. The fact is, most addon vendors are leaving money on the table -- my money. So they're going to have to work very hard to get it.

They're going to have to work as hard as Friendly Panels does. Those folks clearly understand the concept of optimum price.