Technology

Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.

Gonna take strong issue with that sentiment.

People are people. Some people buy the three season passes for the annual CoD game. Some people buy every single stardew-like. Some people have a monthly subscription to WoW or war thunder or whatever. And some people buy one or two planes for DCS per year. It boils down to spending money on entertainment.

What confuses people is that they look at the Steam page for DCS and lose their god damned minds. Which "makes sense" when you are used to games that have conditioned you that you need EVERYTHING or else you will miss out on everything and be a loser and Josh Duhamael will think less of you. But a given plane in DCS is so high fidelity that it basically is an entire game in and of itself. Same with the super complex train DLCs for those games. You aren't buying every single plane. You are buying an FA18 because you want to spend an hour or two learning the startup procedure and another couple hours training yourself on the electronics so that you can then spend a few more hours on...

As for hardware setups? I am a scrub so I "just" have a HOTAS with pedals (separate stick and coupled throttle+pedals. Probably 250 USD total including the mods I made to the throttle) and a chinesium sled so that I don't have to mount and unmount them from my desk (like 30 USD and half a can of WD40). Yeah, that was more than a questionable purchase (and let's not talk about the sticks I iterated on to get to this setup...) but it is a once a generation, if not once a lifetime, purchase. And sure, others go a LOT farther (because they are the cool kids who go on a roadtrip to get a real scrapped cockpit).

But a quick google says that a call of duty skin is 20 USD. And people buy those every year because activision have keyed in on "people don't want live games. they want to buy the same shit every year and lose features every fall". Others will buy big supporter packs for their live game of choice and so forth. It, again, boils down to spending money on entertainment.