Don't fall for the scam that is Flight Simulator Plus.
Flight Simulator Plus is just ProFlightSimulator in a new dress - identical to the old dress, except that the tags have been cut out of the collar and new tags sewn in.
And it's still a SCAM.
The scammers are learning, though: the webpage http://www.flightsimulatorplus.org isn't three miles long like its predecessors, full of breathless Ron-Popeil-worthy prose. It's much shorter, and includes a few photos and videos.
(Ah, but the original three-mile-long page is still there, along with sock puppet "Huge Miller." ("Huge"? What kind of name is that?) You can see it by clicking on the "Discount" link on the FSP main page. It's fun reading. Just don't take any of it seriously.)
I haven't watched the videos. But the photos? Six of them say they're copyrighted by FSP:
- One is a photo of a real Boeing 747, taking off into a real sunset.
- One is a photo of a real sunset under the wing of a real airliner, taken from about row 34, back in the cheap seats.
- One is a photo of three real F-18s, taken from the deck of a real aircraft carrier.
- One is either a screen shot of a WWII fighter simulation game, not FSP, or the picture from the box the WWII fighter sim game came in.
- Two are views of runways, one on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They're clearly taken from Google Maps, Google Earth, or Mapquest, and not from any flight simulator.
While the photo taken from the cheap seats could be a legitimate photo owned by the purveyors of FSP, I think that FSP ripped off all six photos from somewhere else, and their copyright notice is bogus.
The other photos are all screenshots from FlightGear, X Plane, or MS Flight Simulator X, and have been previously posted on the Web. If you do an image search for "FlightGear," you will find every one of them - and more. The FSP guys just ripped them off.
The program itself is a rip-off. FSP is a blatant copy of the free (and really, really good) flight simulator, FlightGear. Independent research has shown that they took all the FlightGear source code, and a lot of the copyrighted add-ons, edited them to try to hide the original authorship, repackaged the lot, and are selling it as their own work.
And they will rip you off, too. People who have bought it and then tried to return it under the warranty policy, have told their tales of woe here on Zyzmog Galactic HQ, the FlightGear forums, and elsewhere.
("They" remain carefully hidden, though. This version of the scam has no identifying information on the website at all. If that doesn't raise a red flag for you, the buyer, then you deserve to get scammed. NEVER buy anything online from a seller who isn't willing to reveal his or her true identity and contact information.)
Don't reward the scammers. Read everything that Zyzmog Galactic HQ has to say about this scam. Then go over to the FlightGear website, and download and enjoy The Real Thing. Or, if you can't stand to get something this good for free, and you're itching to spend real money, then buy XPlane or Microsoft Flight Simulator X instead. Both are very good, commercial flight simulators, and worth every penny. If you insist on buying FSP, then we'll be reading your regrets, here or on the FlightGear forums, in a little while.
But Flight Simulator Plus is a scam. Get it?
Postscript: You will find a lot of pages on the Web, insisting that FSP is not a scam. Go ahead and read a few of them. You will discover that they're all written by sock puppets, and most of them are poorly written. You will also find a lot of bogus "reviews" of FSP. They're all written by the same person (or persons), and posted under different names and using different URLs. For a scammer, URLs are cheap and disposable.
Postscript 2: I'm tickled that this article and its sequel are getting so many hits. I'm rather amused that so many of the hits come from Australia and New Zealand, whence the scam originates.
Showing posts with label indie games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indie games. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2012
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Want to make a million bucks? Make a video game!
Two interesting articles appeared this month in two different publications. One was about the eventual decline of the PC, and the other was about the glowing future of 3D video games. These two articles are related, although the authors did not intend it that way.
The first was actually an entry in the "A Smarter Planet Blog" on August 10, 2011, entitled IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era. This article was written by Mark Dean, Chief Technology officer of IBM Middle East and Africa, who was one of the 12 original PC designers 30 years ago (released to the public on August 12, 1981) and a driving force in IBM's PC division until it was sold to Lenovo in 2005.
Dean says:
For another example (and a good segue into the second article), I was part of the start-up of two computer game companies in the 2003-2004 era. All of our development work was PC-based. All of the tools were PC-based. This made sense, because the target platforms for our games were overwhelmingly PCs. (Mac and Linux were Johnny-come-latelys in the gaming world.) If we were still developing games today, the world would be a lot different. Our development work could be done as easily on a Mac or Linux box as on a PC, and the target platforms would not be overwhelmingly PCs. In the intervening years, consoles have made an incredible resurgence, with the Microsoft XBox family, the Nintendo Wii, and the Sony PlayStation family. In a dramatic shift, more high-end games are played on consoles today than on PCs.
But the market is in rapid flux, and the consoles are now seeing their lunch money stolen by smartphones, iPods, tablets, and the completely ethereal and device-independent Internet. Okay, so the Internet existed more than 8 years ago - even Web browsers existed more than 8 years ago - but most users did not have a high-speed connection to the Internet. Now that has all changed. Even the aforementioned iPods have high-speed processors and high-bandwidth connections to the Internet, which make playing online games a cinch.
How big is the game industry? Well, it's grown immensely since I first stuck my toe in it. In the June/July issue of Computer Graphics World (see p. 26 of the print edition), Kenneth Wong cited the following figures:
Look at those numbers again. They contain two hidden statistics, which Wong bypassed because they were irrelevant to the thrust of his article. But they're worth noting. First, the $10.6 billion spent on console games alone in 2010 was more than the total spent on all console, portable and PC games ($10.5 billion) a year before. Second, that third piece of the pie which Wong lumped together as "the rest," was a not-insignificant 38 percent of game sales revenues, or $9.1 billion.
It's easy to look at the video and computer game industry and say that the pond is full, that there's no more room for the little fishies, what with big names like EA Games and Vivendi Universal swimming around. The truth is that there's still a lot of room for the little fishies, the indie developers. While much of the innovation goes on in the big companies, and up the road at Pixar and Lucasfilm, the indies are holding their own. Once in a while, one of them strikes gold (Angry Birds, anyone?). The gaming industry is still a good place to make a start.
Two companies are worth mentioning here, and I know that my readers can suggest others.
First: Nvidia. According to Wong, Nvidia has a $149 product called 3D Vision which, when installed on your PC (hey! I guess they're not dead!), allows you to play many of your favorite 2D titles in 3D. A list of the 2D games that work with 3D Vision is available at http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-games.html . There's a lot more to 3D Vision than just a 2D-to-3D retrofit: Nvidia is serious about their 3D offerings .
Second: GarageGames. This is the ultimate indie gamer resource, and the last refuge of the indie gamer. GarageGames, through their Torque family of game engines (game-creation software, basically) and their user community, has done more to promote indie gamers, on more platforms, than any other company out there.
The first was actually an entry in the "A Smarter Planet Blog" on August 10, 2011, entitled IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era. This article was written by Mark Dean, Chief Technology officer of IBM Middle East and Africa, who was one of the 12 original PC designers 30 years ago (released to the public on August 12, 1981) and a driving force in IBM's PC division until it was sold to Lenovo in 2005.
Dean says:
It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.
I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.
PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.It's an interesting concept, and a concept that gains currency when one looks around and sees the profusion of smartphones and tablets. So many of the tasks that used to require PCs (including laptops and netbooks) have abandoned that dependency. For example, it's now the custom, when one reaches the summit of one of Colorado's fourteeners (mountains higher than 14,000 feet), to pull out one's smartphone, take a self-portrait on the summit, and post it instantly on Facebook. That used to require a digital camera, a mini-USB cable, and a PC, and it couldn't be done until the climber came down the mountain and went home.
For another example (and a good segue into the second article), I was part of the start-up of two computer game companies in the 2003-2004 era. All of our development work was PC-based. All of the tools were PC-based. This made sense, because the target platforms for our games were overwhelmingly PCs. (Mac and Linux were Johnny-come-latelys in the gaming world.) If we were still developing games today, the world would be a lot different. Our development work could be done as easily on a Mac or Linux box as on a PC, and the target platforms would not be overwhelmingly PCs. In the intervening years, consoles have made an incredible resurgence, with the Microsoft XBox family, the Nintendo Wii, and the Sony PlayStation family. In a dramatic shift, more high-end games are played on consoles today than on PCs.
But the market is in rapid flux, and the consoles are now seeing their lunch money stolen by smartphones, iPods, tablets, and the completely ethereal and device-independent Internet. Okay, so the Internet existed more than 8 years ago - even Web browsers existed more than 8 years ago - but most users did not have a high-speed connection to the Internet. Now that has all changed. Even the aforementioned iPods have high-speed processors and high-bandwidth connections to the Internet, which make playing online games a cinch.
How big is the game industry? Well, it's grown immensely since I first stuck my toe in it. In the June/July issue of Computer Graphics World (see p. 26 of the print edition), Kenneth Wong cited the following figures:
... The total console, portable, and PC game software industry generated $10.5 billion in 2009. Of that, PC game software accounted only for $538 million. ... Total revenues spent on games in the US reached $24 billion in 2010. PC/Mac game downloads and retail box sales accounted for approximately 19 percent of that ($4.6 billion). By contrast, console games accounted for close to 43 percent ($10.6 billion). The rest was distributed among casual game portals, massively multiplayer games, social networks, and mobile devices.
Look at those numbers again. They contain two hidden statistics, which Wong bypassed because they were irrelevant to the thrust of his article. But they're worth noting. First, the $10.6 billion spent on console games alone in 2010 was more than the total spent on all console, portable and PC games ($10.5 billion) a year before. Second, that third piece of the pie which Wong lumped together as "the rest," was a not-insignificant 38 percent of game sales revenues, or $9.1 billion.
It's easy to look at the video and computer game industry and say that the pond is full, that there's no more room for the little fishies, what with big names like EA Games and Vivendi Universal swimming around. The truth is that there's still a lot of room for the little fishies, the indie developers. While much of the innovation goes on in the big companies, and up the road at Pixar and Lucasfilm, the indies are holding their own. Once in a while, one of them strikes gold (Angry Birds, anyone?). The gaming industry is still a good place to make a start.
Two companies are worth mentioning here, and I know that my readers can suggest others.
First: Nvidia. According to Wong, Nvidia has a $149 product called 3D Vision which, when installed on your PC (hey! I guess they're not dead!), allows you to play many of your favorite 2D titles in 3D. A list of the 2D games that work with 3D Vision is available at http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-games.html . There's a lot more to 3D Vision than just a 2D-to-3D retrofit: Nvidia is serious about their 3D offerings .
Second: GarageGames. This is the ultimate indie gamer resource, and the last refuge of the indie gamer. GarageGames, through their Torque family of game engines (game-creation software, basically) and their user community, has done more to promote indie gamers, on more platforms, than any other company out there.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
ProFlightSimulator: something just doesn't smell right
I saw an ad on the side of my FB page today for a new flight simulator game called ProFlightSimulator. I clicked on the link and read about it, a new product just released (today!) by what looks like a one-man company in Australia.
At first, I thought "more power to him." I still like to believe that indie game developers can make it big in a world dominated by EA, Vivendi, and their ilk.
However, there's just something about PFS that makes me more than a little suspicious.
When you click on the link in FB, it takes you to (how's this for free advertising? You're welcome, Dan.) http://www.proflightsimulator.com/index2.html, an incredibly long-winded advertisement for PFS: page after endless page of screenshots and hype about it. Lots of hype. It's like watching one of those Veg-o-matic infomercials on TV. It has all the sales tricks, like "Used by the pros!" and "But wait! There's more!" and "Now how much would you pay?" and "... all for the low, low price of ..." and "But you have to ACT NOW, or you'll forfeit this opportunity!"
Then, when you get to the bottom, you find out that you're getting $530 worth of material, including a full-sized book, for $49.99. Do you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true?
Yeah. So then you start wondering about system performance and hardware/software requirements. The FAQ on the PFS webpages lists some very modest system requirements, but for performance like what is advertised, that doesn't seem like enough. The FAQ doesn't say anything about performance. I've developed computer games, and I've played a lot of different flight sims, first-person shooters, role-playing adventures and other game genres that really push the hardware, and I know what it takes to make something like this look good - and play well.
The Jane's flight simulators, for one example, are visually exquisite, and masterpieces of execution, as long as you install them on the recommended minimum hardware and not the acceptable minimum hardware. On the acceptable minimum hardware, they are slow and choppy and tearfully frustrating. This is something you really, really want to know before you buy - even with a 60-day warranty.
I never buy anything anymore without looking at the online reviews first. I pull up my favorite search engine and search for "proflightsimulator review." Surprise, surprise: I find a lot of them out there, and they're all dated November 15, and they're all written (if they have a byline) by the same person. This is a variant of the "blogging for dollars" practice I wrote about in June 2009.
None of the reviews are real, objective reviews. They're just shills. They all have the same, Billy Mays-ish breathless tone of someone reading directly from the marketing literature. They pretend to be objective by listing a couple of negative points of the software, but even these negatives are spun: when the review says "There is quite a lot of data to be downloaded. The main game itself is already 300 megabytes," and suggests that you order the 4 DVDs, the average user thinks, "Wow! I get over 300 MB of stuff! And enough extra stuff to fit on 4 DVDs! What a deal!"
There is an alternative to PFS and all other commercial flight sims: it's a very capable, absolutely free and public-domain, downloadable package called FlightGear. FlightGear is a lot of fun, and a simulator that I've played with, on and off, for years. If you start reading up on FG, either on its own webpage or on Wikipedia, you'll begin to notice a lot of similarities between FG and PFS.
Uh-oh.
A lot of similarities. The list of available aircraft for PFS is a subset of those available on the FG website. Both lists include such off-the-wall flying objects as Santa's sleigh and a Willys Jeep. I don't think that's a coincidence.
And then you see this picture in the Wikipedia article on FG:
This same picture appeared in the advertising for PFS.
Uh-oh times two.
Then you go back and click the "Screenshots" link on the PFS webpage, and a lot of those screenshots appear to have been ripped directly from the FlightGear pages over the years. Anybody who's played FG for more than a day will recognize the yellow helicopter with the medical symbol on the side.
Uh-oh times three.
No wonder PFS is so generous with their licensing. Their webpage says that you can buy one copy and install it on as many computers as you like. And that you get "100% free updates/upgrades for life." That's because you can install FlightGear on as many computers as you like, and FlightGear gives you 100% free updates/upgrades for life. These guys are just selling FlightGear.
Like I said at the beginning, I'm all for indie developers going up against the big boys and winning - Marble Blast, for one notable example. (You can buy Marble Blast here, or you can download it for your iPod/iPhone/iPad from the App Store.) But I'm not too keen on entrepreneurs taking free and open source software, wrapping it up in a package and selling it as their own work.
Nice try. You almost got me.
At first, I thought "more power to him." I still like to believe that indie game developers can make it big in a world dominated by EA, Vivendi, and their ilk.
However, there's just something about PFS that makes me more than a little suspicious.
When you click on the link in FB, it takes you to (how's this for free advertising? You're welcome, Dan.) http://www.proflightsimulator.com/index2.html, an incredibly long-winded advertisement for PFS: page after endless page of screenshots and hype about it. Lots of hype. It's like watching one of those Veg-o-matic infomercials on TV. It has all the sales tricks, like "Used by the pros!" and "But wait! There's more!" and "Now how much would you pay?" and "... all for the low, low price of ..." and "But you have to ACT NOW, or you'll forfeit this opportunity!"
Then, when you get to the bottom, you find out that you're getting $530 worth of material, including a full-sized book, for $49.99. Do you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true?
Yeah. So then you start wondering about system performance and hardware/software requirements. The FAQ on the PFS webpages lists some very modest system requirements, but for performance like what is advertised, that doesn't seem like enough. The FAQ doesn't say anything about performance. I've developed computer games, and I've played a lot of different flight sims, first-person shooters, role-playing adventures and other game genres that really push the hardware, and I know what it takes to make something like this look good - and play well.
The Jane's flight simulators, for one example, are visually exquisite, and masterpieces of execution, as long as you install them on the recommended minimum hardware and not the acceptable minimum hardware. On the acceptable minimum hardware, they are slow and choppy and tearfully frustrating. This is something you really, really want to know before you buy - even with a 60-day warranty.
I never buy anything anymore without looking at the online reviews first. I pull up my favorite search engine and search for "proflightsimulator review." Surprise, surprise: I find a lot of them out there, and they're all dated November 15, and they're all written (if they have a byline) by the same person. This is a variant of the "blogging for dollars" practice I wrote about in June 2009.
None of the reviews are real, objective reviews. They're just shills. They all have the same, Billy Mays-ish breathless tone of someone reading directly from the marketing literature. They pretend to be objective by listing a couple of negative points of the software, but even these negatives are spun: when the review says "There is quite a lot of data to be downloaded. The main game itself is already 300 megabytes," and suggests that you order the 4 DVDs, the average user thinks, "Wow! I get over 300 MB of stuff! And enough extra stuff to fit on 4 DVDs! What a deal!"
There is an alternative to PFS and all other commercial flight sims: it's a very capable, absolutely free and public-domain, downloadable package called FlightGear. FlightGear is a lot of fun, and a simulator that I've played with, on and off, for years. If you start reading up on FG, either on its own webpage or on Wikipedia, you'll begin to notice a lot of similarities between FG and PFS.
Uh-oh.
A lot of similarities. The list of available aircraft for PFS is a subset of those available on the FG website. Both lists include such off-the-wall flying objects as Santa's sleigh and a Willys Jeep. I don't think that's a coincidence.
And then you see this picture in the Wikipedia article on FG:
This same picture appeared in the advertising for PFS.
Uh-oh times two.
Then you go back and click the "Screenshots" link on the PFS webpage, and a lot of those screenshots appear to have been ripped directly from the FlightGear pages over the years. Anybody who's played FG for more than a day will recognize the yellow helicopter with the medical symbol on the side.
Uh-oh times three.
No wonder PFS is so generous with their licensing. Their webpage says that you can buy one copy and install it on as many computers as you like. And that you get "100% free updates/upgrades for life." That's because you can install FlightGear on as many computers as you like, and FlightGear gives you 100% free updates/upgrades for life. These guys are just selling FlightGear.
Like I said at the beginning, I'm all for indie developers going up against the big boys and winning - Marble Blast, for one notable example. (You can buy Marble Blast here, or you can download it for your iPod/iPhone/iPad from the App Store.) But I'm not too keen on entrepreneurs taking free and open source software, wrapping it up in a package and selling it as their own work.
Nice try. You almost got me.
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