That is something I don't understand. FS is an american product, but by far the best addon-designers come from outside the states? Even FlyTampa is half-german.
If you look some years back, it was even more euro-centric than it is now. At least, today we have some devs coming from the US or other parts of the world, like Brazil and Australia. But when the first FS commercial product started to appear, about 1993/94 in the FS 4 era ( Yes, we were there, working with the "original" LAGO, the good one, before it was sold by their owners ), there were no developers outside Europe.
So I can really understand Umberto, saying that there is a much bigger market in the States than in Europe.
It's not so simple. It's not that there's a "much" bigger market in the States. There is, instead, a more open market to exploit, because there's less competition and we see more potential for growth there.
And, the US is a much more streamlined market: there's only one language, there's more uniformity between users spending habits, there are less problems buying online, almost everybody has a Credit Card, and it's easier to reach users and let them know about our products, because they tend to be concentrated on a few major websites, instead of the thousands sites (all in different languages of course), we have in Europe.
Europe IS complex. Each country is different, different languages are a barrier to make advertising and to support users, and even the very use of the PC as a gaming platform is not the same across Europe, because there's a big difference between, for example, Germany (and the other german-speaking countries), were the PC is still quite strong, and other countries like Italy or Spain, were the PC is relatively strong but plagued with extreme piracy rates, and consoles are keep taking over market share away from the PC every year.
That's why you see most of the flight sim developement revolving around european developers and, specifically, lots of products appealing to german-speaking countries. Zurich, by the way, is still our best selling scenery so far, for example. But we don't see much space for growth there, because the major airports in that area are well covered by Aerosoft so, it wouldn't make much sense going against them, also considering we do business with them at several levels.
