Auran could have done a lot better getting it on to shelves frankly, the release of Trainz outside the US and Aus has been an utter disaster in my opinion and that alone will hurt Trainz in a big way.
Fly! suffered similar problems - Microsoft are just plain better at marketing and getting it in to the hands and minds of the people than anyone else. Fly! was fantastic (I have both 1 and 2) but it wasn't pushed anywhere near as hard as Flight Sim was, given that Flight Sim already had massive momentum behind it anyway. Trainz is getting even less push, I have yet to see any mention of Trainz anywhere in the press and yet MSTS shows up fairly regularly.
THAT I think is the main reason that MSTS is more popular.
Most people don't know about getting it direct from Auran, most people don't know who Auran is, most people probably don't know what Trainz is either. If you aren't in the online community, or you aren't fairly active in the online community, the chances are good that you don't know much about Trainz (may come as a surprise that a lot of the potential users to such programs don't actually search the web looking for them).
So all in all, i'm very disappointed in the effort put forth to shout about their work, after all the effort put in to it in the first place - and if you don't give it about as much airtime as MSTS gets, it's always going to look like the toy little brother product, whether it's as good or a billion times better in reality.
Rant Over
Matt.
