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Posted Today, 10:53 AM
Hello all,
For a few years now I have been posting product roadmaps a few times per year, mainly to provide insight into our product plans for the next year or two. The main thinking behind this was to inform our customers of future plans and also to create anticipation.
However the downside of such posts is that expectations are created as to when announced products will be released, and symptomatic of that are increasingly demanding requests for updates. This leads to a tension between you the customer and us the Orbx team, something that is counterproductive on both sides.
To avoid this situation, from this point moving forward I will no longer be providing roadmaps for future product plans.
This is what you should use as a guide from now on:
Orbx will not provide release dates for any new product or patch which is not in the final stages of beta testing. You will only find out about new products when they have entered beta testing and the first batch of screenshots are released by the team. We will no longer provide sneak peak preview screenshots of any products or technology not yet in beta
We will not respond nor answer any customers posts asking for updates on releases, even for patches or service packs. As a service to your fellow community members, feel free to refer such posts to this pinned topic.
The team will be asked to not comment, reply to, or respond to any questions about release timeframes.
With regard to existing products the current practice remains and can be summarised as:
Orbx will continually improve our products and release bug fixes, patches, service packs when appropriate. This is particularly true of products in the FTX Global series where the whole basis of selling them to you is continual updates and improvements. Orbx will use its own discretion about patches and SPs to its products, there is no onus to do so but you can use our history over the last eight years to see that we always provide continual improvements.
Orbx will not provide release dates for patches and service packs. We will introduce a new FTX Central app in which you can choose to be informed of any new patches for your installed products, automatically, then download at your leisure
We will always provide 24/7 tech support on these forums for free, for all products.
With regards to the immediate future I can share these plans:
We are continuing to port all remaining products over to P3D2.x - this won't happen overnight because in some cases developers have left the Orbx team, contractors are no longer available and developers have other personal issues to deal with including working on brand new projects concurrent to the ports. I will promise though all products will move across and you will see many new updates released over the coming months as triple-installers. We want everyone to have the chance to embrace P3D2.x
We aim to release two FTX full-fat regions a year, but this varies according to the size and workload of the region. We aim to release a new FTX airport each month, but this again varies based on developer availability and their own work/life balances.
We aim to release an openLC region every 6-9 months but please do not extrapolate that and come up with your own timeframes for the next OLC region. The FTX Global product series is an immensely ambitious programme that will take years to come to fruition, but your patience will be rewarded at the end when you have the OLC level of detail covering the entire planet.
Sim engine and point release upgrades
With regards to Prepar3D Version 3.0 we will be charging a nominal upgrade fee for any Orbx products ported to it, depending on the complexities of the P3D3.x engine and work required. Since V3.0 is very far away I wanted to go on record and give you a heads up that our policy moving forward is to charge a nominal fee for upgrades to new sim platforms. The same applies for any 'point' release of existing products, i.e. like the charge for YMML when it went from 1.x to 2.x
I know this announcement won't please many of you but Orbx as a business is always revising itself, checking what works and what doesn't and there is an enormous amount of work going on behind the scenes that you aren't aware of to keep the business ticking over day to day. This means we refine and change processes, marketing, customer messaging and how we communicate. Any business that never adapts and changes to respond to market forces will stagnate and eventually fail. We don't plan for that to happen to Orbx.
May I take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your support, your custom, your loyalty and the great sense of community that YOU create and foster on these forums. Thank you!
