Good afternoon!
Before starting the Wing42 venture, I felt it was prudent to conduct some market research in order to get an estimate of the market size and expected sales figures for flightsim add-ons. This is an important step for anyone who wants to sell any product, since you can use the numbers in the cost-analysis to find a sales price that makes the business sustainable.
Well… turns out it is really difficult to find some indicative numbers, other than very broad figures like total number of FSXSE sales (around 600,000). Coming up with a robust business model on this basis is hard. This, of course, is of no concern for companies who are established in the market for a long period of time, but it’s an important factor for any newcomer.
In the spirit of transparency and openness I want to let you know how the Wing42 Vega is doing so far. It’s a good timing too, since it’s been exactely one month after the initial release of the Early-Access version 0.03. Here’s the sales figures for the previous 30 days:
We sold a total of 129 licenses of the Vega so far and I can tell you that I am more than pleased with this result. Especially provided that I spent exactly 0 Euros on any marketing or advertisement so far! These 129 sales come solely from spreading the word through forums, friends and social media. That’s Guerilla-Marketing!
This seems the perfect time to give thanks to everyone who took part in this endeavor. First, I want to give a huge shout-out to two people who helped me tremendously during this time:
The first is Edson from The Sky Lounge who was the first to feature the Vega on his podcast. He also took the time to perform a full flight in the Vega on the Sky Lounge twitch channel, which was a very special event for me. Thank you my friend!
The second to name is Shane, also known as Aus Flight Simmer. He had a first look at the Vega on his youtube channel, gave the product his thumbs up and is solely responsible for the second bump in the sales figure. Shane, thank you so much for your kind words for our product, it means the world to me!
I also want to thank the small team of testers that helped shaping the Early-Access version of this add-on. It to their credit that there were next to NO issues whatsoever! Thanks guys, you are great!
Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of our customers and supporters. I know that „Early-Access“ has a bit of a stigma in the flightsim world, due to some bad experiences in the past. Despite that, you gave me your trust and I am grateful for it. I honestly believe that Early-Access is a great way to develop an outstanding product and looking at the amazing conversations that take place in our forum confirm this. I learned more about the Vega through the interaction with customers via email and in the forum in this past month, than in the one year of development before and I hope that I can incorporate all the things we figured out together in this product, piece by piece.
Moving forward, the update for version 0.04 is coming along nicely and will be ready by the end of July or beginning of August at the latest. Please note that the purchasing price for the Vega will increase by 5 Euros with the release of the update. So if you want to get a bargain, buy it before the next release to benefit from the low introductory price.