See? I think what is necessary for simulation gaming company (not including those crappy German "simulations" that get chucked out every few months)
is to have a realistic picture of how big the community is and adjust content (=development time involved) and pricing. Most hard core simulation gamers are willing to pay to more since they reckon that they will be much more involved with their favourite simulation than with your average 6-hour-singleplayer+crappy-multiplayer mainstream game.
And all these succesfull sims I've mentioned do it that way. I'd also include War in the East which sells for 80$ I think.
They also limit their sims content and sell extra content. Battlefront for instance sell their games at relatively high prices which also don't get much lower over time and now go more and more into selling extra content packages at also relatively high prices.
777 has taken a different approach with their Free2Play model where you pay pretty much for extra planes or maps or weapons. I can't say I like this much, but as long as it works and keeps the company alive and able to produce more high quality flight sims I'm totally fine with it.
Now with a new Silent Hunter (or maybe a revived version of SHV) it could be just like that. A submarine simulation going from 1939 to 1945 featuring every single (lets say German) boat and every theatre around the globe is probably unrealistic. But a well functioning TypVII simulation for which you can buy extra stuff like TypeII or TypeIX boats or more remote theatres or more "NPC" ships or planes could maybe work.
I at least would definately pay again for re-release of Silent Hunter 5 if it actually did all that the original promised (and was a bit more realistic in mission terms).
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