@Osmeen:
why didn’t these costs prevent the BMS team from developing F4? because as it is, the BMS update is entirely a new sim (some called it Falcon5).
The costs are not preventive, per-se, especially not when you are talking about people who may have access to one or two of the applications required. I have access to an IDE and Photoshop already, but I still need a copy of a decent modeling program. I can spread the 600$ cost of a decent piece of software out over two years to fit it into my budget…which explains the three-four week Falcon timeline for rolling out updates. See?
At some point you have all the tools and the costs become moot but spinning up a whole team from scratch costs money up front - the BMS Team (as I loosely understand the history) had all already been doing some degree of modding to this game or others before they came together to build BMS, meaning they were already equipped and now it’s primarily a timing issue with them rolling out new updates.