george[flytampa] wrote:Italian Airports more prone to piracy? What did they say to give that impression?
Here are some quotes among many from FSDT and Aerosoft on the subject.
Umberto from FSDT said:
Europe IS complex. Each country is different, different languages are a barrier to make advertising and to support users, and even the very use of the PC as a gaming platform is not the same across Europe, because there's a big difference between, for example, Germany (and the other german-speaking countries), were the PC is still quite strong, and other countries like Italy or Spain, were the PC is relatively strong but plagued with extreme piracy rates, and consoles are keep taking over market share away from the PC every year.
Mathijs from Aerosoft said.
Italy is harder as blatant piracy (and the total inaccessibility of the retail stores) make it not really worthwhile. Without piracy we would for sure have done at least 4 major airports. Now we just got Venice.
There are other similar quotes from both developers on the subject but that is the jist of what they always say. If you google Italy and piracy you will see that Italy is one of the worst countries in Europe for pirated software/music.
Not long ago, FSDT ran a poll for their next scenery which included LIRF (Rome) and LIMC (Milan) and someone or some people created a bunch of fake usernames to vote for LIRF. After they backed out all the fake votes by that person/people, it would have amounted to hardly anything and FSDT figured that it would be to risky to even come out ahead on the project.
Frankly, in essence I dont think either dev feels that there is enough legitiment demand for Italian airports vs. the amount that would be cracked and uploaded to pirate sites.
Personally as a consumer of FS airports and as an owner of a limited amount of European sceneries, I would probably pass on a title for either LIRF or LIMC. There seems to be so much demand/requests for more medium to large sized US airports that still have yet to be developed for FSX, that I would wager sales would be much greater if more time was spent in that area.
A massive percentage of our paying customers are from Germany & the UK. Those guys definitely want European fields.