That's the part that has a lot of devs, namely PMDG concerned if you read their topic on Avsim about it. Of course they DTG said that 3rd party developers can sell their products from their own store as long as its available from their store as well
I'm not too worried about this. The key sentence that everybody seems to be referring to, is this one, posted by DTG on the Avsim forum.
"In order to market as an official FSW add-on, you will be able to sell your add-ons on your own store as long as it is made available on the Dovetail channels as well."
I believe the most important part of the sentence is the "In order to market as an official FSW add-on", which I read to be some kind of DTG-sanctioned add-on, possibly advertised/published either on Steam, or as a DLC from within the sim user interface.
Nowhere it says this will be the ONLY way to market an add-on. DTG Train Simulator has both "official" and "unofficial" add-ons with their own installer, the product is not "locked" to 1st or 2nd party only products.
Now, I might be wrong, of course, and they might just do the same mistake Microsoft made with MS Flight, which happened to them as well with Flight School, so FSW will go the way of the Dodo just like all previous civilians flight sims that tried to lock-out independent 3rd party development but, really, why should they do this ? They have far worse to lose then we do, if the products fails. We'll always have P3D, and even X-Plane, both (soon) 64 bit...
Now, assuming they will allow free 3rd party development, the only thing that's really needed for us, is to have the Simconnect API, or a reasonable/similar replacement. With all these new platforms coming out, I think people will finally realize the advantage of our approach to software development, which will really payoff in the next months, when the two major sim platforms will be updated.
Consider how GSX it's made, for example:
It's an external program, written in Python language, with a custom interpreter (Couatl) we wrote ourselves, which doesn't interface directly with the sim and not even with Simconnect. As far as GSX code goes, it might just run on any simulator, because it's doing only Python calls we designed.
It's Couatl.exe which translates the Python commands made by GSX and then interfaces with the sim using Simconnect, but it might just as well interface with another API, provided it's at least conceptually similar. To GSX itself, it won't make any difference, even if Simconnect were to be replaced by a different API, GSX will still work the same. It doesn't interface with the sim in any way, not even for audio, since it uses its own sound engine.
The Addon Manager, it's the only .DLL that needs to be converted to 64 bit (already done...), but it's now only used as an user interface to the product registration, and it does a *few* things that Simconnect doesn't do but, assuming an eventual different API will offer the same capabilities, we might just update to use it and, again, it won't make any difference to GSX, which will continue to work running its own Python code, totally unaware that it might run under an entirely new sim.
