Robert Randazzo took to the PMDG forums to reflect on the release campaign of their Boeing 777 rendition for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This rendition marks PMDG’s 37th product release in flight simulation.
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The Future Plans for the PMDG 777
Firstly, Robert explained that the development team have identified areas to improve on the rendition. Some of these issues were already raised during the testing phase while others were swiftly raised through valuable customer feedback. Robert stated that the development team is already working on improving some of these areas (such as engine sounds) and customers can thus expect imminent updates to follow.
Long-Term Product Support
Regarding the long-term future of the 777 range, the CEO vowed that the renditions will keep evolving. He stated that the developer regards the ‘product release phase’ as the beginning of the product’s life cycle, meaning that the developer will remain committed to improving the aircraft. Consequently, just like with the PMDG 737 range (which received around 1,200 fixes over the past two years), customers can expect the 777 family to receive many new features and fixes in the coming years.
Other Variants Release
Robert also stated that flight-simmers could expect the release of the 777-200ER and 777-F variants to follow, although no release date nor any pricing information regarding these aircraft was disclosed. The 777-300ER variant was released first by PMDG, as the developer perceived it as the most popular variant among the customer base.
Hiccups Faced During Release
In his second statement, Robert provided an overview of the logistical issues faced by the group during the release campaign. He explained that within minutes of the 777 being released on the website, one of the scaling systems used to provide resources during high demand failed, causing a brief outage in the order processing system.
Although the system was only down for three minutes, 6,000 customers nonetheless managed to purchase the aircraft within the outage time frame. Due to the failure, however, these customers could not instantly access their product and caused a large order backlog. This resulted in some waiting up to four hours to receive their product key.
A similar incident occurred during the release campaign of their 737 rendition for MSFS, but its effects were much more severe due to the outage of scaling systems lasting significantly longer.
Reasons for Outage
Robert believes the scaling system failed due to the number of actual sales and demand massively outnumbering the theoretical sales rate initially predicted by PMDG by several multiples. In other words, the 777 was a victim of its success.
According to Robert, this issue could have been avoided if all those involved in the testing process could have anticipated the high demand. Nonetheless, the PMDG team will meet with the vendors to try and prevent this problem from re-occurring.
Despite this slight hiccup, the CEO commended the rapid and collective actions taken by the team to fix the problem. Robert also commended the robustness of the main systems, which despite the outage, managed to resolve the backlog on its own and resume normal operations.
Purchase Information
If interested, you can purchase PMDG’s Boeing 777-300ER rendition on PMDG’s website for $77.73 (or 72.62 EUR).
