I notice that the vast majority here sticks to FS9...
Our data doesn't show that.
Of course we can't really estimate sales, because our products are sold as a single license for FS9 and FSX. We only have download data and right now, there's no "vast majority" of FS9. It's about 50/50, with FSX slightly improving during the months (when Zurich was released, it was about 60/40 for FS9).
If we had to estimate sales, it's not even said that FS9 and FSX have the same download/sale ratio. I think FSX might have the edge here, because there isn't much competition for scenery in FSX and for big airports there's basically none. But let's just assume the download/sale ratio is the same.
Judging sim usage based just on forum activity will give misleading results: the only evidence is that the FSX version has less issues. If you take out from the FS9 section all the discussions about Harpsi's AFCAD (they are for FS9 only), about FS9 crashing because of not having it patched for >2GB properly (FSX doesn't need that), not much remains. The "perfect" product, should have its support section basically silent, but that would not mean the product wasn't a success: rather the opposite, in fact.
However, that's not the point, it was only to clarify there's no such thing as a vast majority of FS9 users, it's basically a market splitted in two, and that is the worse possible situation. If we *really* had a "vast majority" of either sim, we might do a clear choice of supporting just one, but this is not the case.
The market splitted in two forces us to still support FS9. It's not a secret, as we said many times, this is less than ideal. Having to support FS9 it's a burden, not much because of the additional effort it takes to do two versions, but because it forces to design both versions with cross-compatibility in mind right from the start. Because of this, both versions are not 100% of what they might be, and the FSX one it's the one that pays the higher price.
However, this is what users want, so we don't have any other choice than supporting both sims, for commercial products.
Greystone it's a free product, the fact it can only be used by O'Hare customers, doesn't change the fact that is free, I really don't think many will start buying O'Hare now, just to get Greystone and, even if some users will do that, it might just pay the bandwidth for hosting it.
When making two versions of any product, there's some overhead involved, like setting up our shared servers to host the source codes (we are not working in the same office, we are not even in the same city, so we work over a versioning server), compiling two versions of the scenery, taking into account SDK differences (photoreal terrain is *entirely* different in FSX), compiling two installers, uploading them.
While this overhead is manageable for a commercial product, it's simply too much for a free product. That's why there's no FS9 version.
And, why not accepting the simplest explanation of all ? This scenery was made basically as a pastime and as a way to test a couple of things and, since we ARE FSX USERS, we did it for FSX. Plain and simple. Would have been better if we kept it onto our hard drives, instead of sharing it ?
We said already that our FS9 support it's confirmed at least for KJFK and KDFW. After that, we'll have to decide, considering the market at the end of the year.
But that's just for sceneries. There are other non-scenery products we are working on, and those will be FSX ONLY.
We said already there's no way we'll ever do an airplane for FS9, because there are simply too many differences there, and FSX is VASTLY superior to FS9, for an airplane developer (just consider that we did the F/A-18 in about 3-4 months, when other airplane developers are working on their stuff for *years*, probably because are lost in the Black Hole of figuring out how to move an existing FS9 project into FSX).
Also, there is an unannounced product we've been working on for a while, that is not scenery nor airplane, that's for FSX only, and it wouldn't be possible in FS9.
And, we have an ongoing project, that is not something users will directly get in touch with (it's some kind of an engine), but that will hopefully enhance the simulation experience a lot, and it will start showing up what FSX REALLY can do and, because it's entirely tied to Simconnect, will be FSX only.
