First and foremost, a warm welcome to our legacy OldProp Solutions customers. You've been on this journey with us for many years, and we greatly appreciate your loyalty.
This is the first periodical email that you'll receive from Parallel 42 to bring you up to speed on current projects and more. We're excited to have this avenue of informal communication with you!
OK, let's get started!
📢 Shout Outs
This Shout-Out is not for one person but for an entire community of Flow PRO users that are going absolutely WILD with custom scripts, skins & more. When we built Flow, we only hoped that something like this would happen, but seeing the developer types take the platform and create custom solutions for fellow users wanting power tools is just incredible.
Please keep it going; YOU ARE THE FUTURE OF FLOW!!!
Looking for Flow Pro Scripts? There's an archive at: https://flightsim.to/c/user-content/flow-pro-widgets
Looking for a Scripting Community? Join our Discord at: https://discord.gg/Cu7b3fBwpF
🏆 Achievements
Usually, this section would be brief, as it would describe only our most recent achievement(s), but the right thing to do is to highlight our success over the past year.
Exactly one year ago today, I sat in this same //42 Office in Bolivia, working on the release of FreedomFox. Campout wasn't even a thought; give me a nice hotel any day! Flow!? The only flow I cared about at that time was how smooth our product page had to be to convince people to trust us with our first aircraft.
Unlike in early 2022, today we develop products in parallel, have an entire team of scenery designers and growing 3D Depot, and have planted top-tier products in every. single. category.
FreedomFox is TOP rated; Campout enabled a massive community of backcountry pilots to open their imaginations to the entire world, and we provided premium campsites as Scenes. We also created Flow, which quickly became an indispensable tool for simmers and power users. The Skypark moved ahead behind the scenes with massive core breakthrus, including real-world routes and passenger operations.
And as a personal goal when I was on the panel of "The Future of At-Home Flight Simulation" hosted by Evan Reiter of the Flight Sim Association. I shared my journey and excitement over potentially identifying new talent via sites like Flightsim.to and dreamt of changing people's lives.
Well, it happened, and today I'm happy to say that there is even a Parallel 42 team member in my home country of Bolivia. Opportunities like ours make a significant difference in a 3rd world country.
You can watch the complete FSA stream at the link below:
Watch Now
🎙️ Hype
Flow Pro was released just before the holiday break, on December 19th. Releasing that close to the end of the year has many pros and cons; lucky we came out on the right side of that scale!
That late in the game, it's basically impossible to get noticed...and then we witnessed the following Q8Pilot stream. He's not part of our Simfluencer program, just a customer showing off a new product to his fantastic community of viewers.
"Addon of the year...Flow Pro by Parallel 42 receives the Q8Pilot Seal of Approval and the Platinum Plaque, a final score of 10/10." - Q8Pilot
You can watch the complete Q8Pilot stream at the link below:
Watch Now
🙏 Asks
We're looking for fresh talent to work on a "Flow Widget Team" led by Technical Director Keven Menard. This contract position would require creating a small sample project first and could open opportunities on other product lines. The ideal candidate would share a passion for easing pain points by creating tools and have a hangar full of 3rd party aircraft. Workload could be considered low to medium, with a healthy amount of fun between tasks.
Required knowledge includes mastering Javascript and being comfortable in the sim variable ecosystem. Bonus points for UI experience.
Send qualifications to: ping@parallel42.com
🖥 Products
The Skypark went to the front of the line after the release of Flow! SkyOS v3 is the core "OS" that the tablet runs, and it's getting a complete overhaul. This update is a long and tedious process involving reinventing how the Skypad is used. There haven't been many public updates, but there has been significant progress over the past few months. The Campout team is hard at work producing the 3D objects for a winter pack. We're excited about this first themed content update, and yes, it'll be FREE! There are also some four-legged companions in development...;-) 42HB Hogsback Ranch passed its final check today and will now go into release staging, screenshots, product page, etc. This scene is very unique as it's a private property with a strip, hangar, and helipad. It won't be long now! Flow Pro has some awesome new upcoming features for developer types, including external editor sync, drone speed controls, and text fields for widget creations.
🎯 Strategy
The market split brought on by MSFS2020 pushed //42 into a storm with our sails fully deployed. We've made moves to reduce our exposure to the dangers of shifting winds, like dreaming of camera APIs, and went below deck to focus. That said, we've realized that some products that were once what we were known for may never exist on this new platform. In the past year, we've tested each addon category with a great product built to our standards, collecting metrics on each will help outline our path forward.
But, let's talk about Prepar3D. We've been capturing data on sim usage for quite some time. Needless to say, it's a fact that active user numbers are going in 1 direction...DOWN. Sales of some P3D products are single digits per month, with others at 0. Legacy OldProp account migrations are roughly 1-2/mo, with most users saying they are returning to simming after MANY years away.
There's nothing fresh going on in the Prepar3D camp. We continue to support our P3D portfolio, but we expect a shift in what's available for purchase in the coming months.
🏋 Challenges
We understand there's a lot our customers want from our portfolio in MSFS2020. We can't make strong statements while the SDK and Microsoft Flight Simulator Leadership team continue to shift in what they offer third-party developers.
ChasePlane…MSobo delivered a closed camera system nowhere near prior offerings; as it stands today, we can't tap into it to make it great.
If you'd like to see ChasePlane in MSFS, Please drop a thumbs up in this thread:
https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/idea/232/camera-api.html
We have also provided MSobo engineers with a confidential document outlining exactly what would need to exist/change for ChasePlane to come to MSFS. This document was requested and provided in January of last year.
To date, we’ve not heard anything back.
📈 Stonks
We've seen a substantial uptick in pilots on The Skypark. This data shows us we're on a solid path with that product, and that there IS a need for it in the community.
Although the keyboard cowboys that yelled at us for not developing a study level 777 instead will forever claim that flight simulation shouldn't be fun…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
👋 Closing Thoughts…
Thanks for taking the time to read this dispatch, I promise future ones will be shorter!
If you have feedback or thoughts, please click the button below to drop your thoughts in our #dispatch-feedback channel at the official //42 Discord. Think of it like a suggestion box.
