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X-Plane has been around so long it is kind of unreal - I remember buying a copy in ~2000 and it was already 5+ years old then. Pretty amazing longevity.

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I guess there's a lot to be said for having a good community of users who love the product and want to help contribute to it to make it better. Active creators rather than passive consumers.

Sort of off-topic but I realized the other day that the transition from active contributors to passive consumers is when online gaming went off the rails for me. When people managed the online servers there was always an admin around to kick bad actors and to set the tone for that particular server. When you found a good one you saved it because you knew you would always get quality time there.

Matchmaking killed that.

I don’t think game publishers realized they were essentially firing a free workforce that was making their online play great. I think private servers is one of the reasons Minecraft has such staying power.

I think you can apply this same principle to so many areas of hobbies. As soon as you get more involved and be more of a creator than just sitting there and letting everyone else do things for you, you get so much more out of the experience.

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