Lieste, Blacklight,
I see the price tag of SBP like this:
It costs around 90 Euros (125 dollars), at current exchange rate.
A new release by let'S say Codemaster or Atarai or EA or UBI, costs 49,95 Euros, means: 50 Euros in the shop (Germany).
SBP does not even cost twice the price of an ordinary mainstream game release. However, the probability that it will reside on your HD several times longer than just twice as long as any ordinary for example action game, is very, very high.
So who is the winner here: the guy buying two games for the price of two and leaving them behind sooner or later, or the guy buying one sim for the price of two games, and staying with it for years to come?
BTW, the licence for 10 classroom seats with the military version of SBP, costed
18000 dollars three years ago. But the differences of the military and PE version are only marginal, as far as eSim revealed.
However, cabin-simulators for the military, with which SBP competes by it's aggressive pricing, cost several milions, plus hundreds of thousands per year for maintenance, travelling of training units that rotate in and out, etc, and then the trainee has gotten one or two hours in it, and maybe never again in his career. With SBP, there is the option that he will get several hours per week, and more in private.
As I see it, nobody is paying too much with SBP, neither the military, nor the private customer.
The guy buying Falcon-4 and a Cougar HOTAS for it - invests much more money!