transadelaide wrote:Tankski wrote:That does seem to be a bit extortionate and unrealistic in terms the way RSC could work as a business, I do not work for them either but I see the logical way of doing things is that while they do DLC releases, they slowly run the core upgrades in parallel, not doing them when there's downtime from DLC, although DLC is a major source of income for the company who, as most if not all companies do, need to make a profit, it is not the only form of income.
I think you're on the money with this 'parallel development' theory. The people working on the program would definitely not be the same people working on new content. You have programmers doing programming and artists making models, any call of 'all hands on deck' for a single project would cause chaos.
With the Acela being done by a third party, I suspect it is simply a decision made that they thought this other guy would do a better job or the same job more economically. I suspect that this kind of outsourcing for at least components of projects happens a lot more than we think, but it is up to RS.com whether they feel they want to make that information public.
I don' think the Acela being done by a 3rd party has anything to do with cost or economics, but more down to fact the person/people doing the Acela have more on hand plans, information, pictures and other source information than RS.com can get. They have made a number of times requests for information from the userbase for the US based locomotives due to this and also made mention of the fact just how hard it is for them to get US stuff compared to UK stock, I know people have made complaint on how much UK stock has been released but unfortunately it is easier to get ahold of the UK based stuff. This is not to say they purposely neglect other places, far from it and that has shown by the ramp up of other places getting content.
I also would consider the fact that with RS.com being a relatively small team they have to prioritize revenue so they can dump money into development costs at a later point, hence why there has been a constant release of DLC content to keep a steady income coming in to fund improvement projects aswell as all the associated costs with getting permissions for plans for locomotives and rolling stock aswell as other related sources for routes.
I would also consider the fact we don't see a whole slew of updates month by month because of past experiences with existing patches causing a considerable amount of things to break, if you are say to focus on one large core update, then you can minimise the impact, since for the most part the core update should allow for a overall better chance of bugs not breaking as much. But, with that being said patches will always break things so its inevitable.
In a way, Railworks is abit like windows, the DLC is like the constant window updates you get, some add features and new stuff, then you get a service pack for windows, which is like a core update with lots of fixes and improvements, takes time to do these but in the end run its normally better.
