Things are moving fast forward since Dovetail Games announced the upcoming Flight Sim World. Its public Early Access via Steam will be open on next Thursday, May 18th !
Right from the beginning, seven detailed aircraft will be flyable, from anywhere in the world to pick from the 24’000 airports of the database. The Pro Mission Editor will help the users to create their own free content and share it through Steam Workshop.
The Early Access roadmap is already set including the forthcoming feature of dark and cold starts, full Steam multiplayer functionality, and the developers will share live stream shows with the community to retrieve feedback, fixes and enhancements suggestions. They repeat again their cooperation with third party teams to bring even more addons (like airports, other sceneries or aircraft). Official URL : https://flightsimworld.com/.
I really wish Dovetail well, but if Train Simulator is anything to go by, third party content will suffer and probably be marked up in price accordingly in order to share the profit margin with Steam and Dovetail.. leaving less pennies for 3rd Party Developers and taking more money out of your pocket for a product that might have sold for 10 dollars or so less in the current market.
Additionally, some 3rd party content or offerings, not worthy of your money will make it onto the release stage as it will be over-hyped by the media machine, (as it presently is with some offerings for Train Simulator.)
As always, someone has to make the purchase and discover the offering is not up to a standard, and then publish a review or comment for the rest of us so that we can be a little more discerning.
Secondly, much will depend on 3rd party Developers desiring to publish on this new 64bit platform with their Jets,given that the money they can make might be less than they currently make in P3D or FSX, and that we the users,have already paid for in the present FSX or P3D versions.