Your compairing the price to games and a flight simulator is not a game its a tool. Look at the price of other software that doesnt sell millions of copies like a hit game does or charge a monthly fee to play like most of the big online games now do. I am a software engineer and we make simulations so I understand how much work something like this would take. Some of the software packages we use at work are > $3000.00 a copy. I bought my simulator over the winter for something to do while being stuck inside. I didn't even have any intention of getting back into flying rc for real, just got sick of flying from the tower view on ms flight sim lol. Needless to say the sim got me hooked again and since I have bought a dedicated vehicle to haul my planes and have spent more money on models and gear then I would care to think about. I have an insane amount of hours on the sim since January of this year when I bought it. If I figured out the price per hour on the sim it would prolly be in the cents and it was by far the best investment I have made in this hobby.