A little bit of bittersweet news coming from WF Scenery Studio today. The first is that Shanghai Pudong International is nearing release. After 8 months of development, the airport is in the final stages of development with the aircraft now being packaged and prepared for release. However, following an extended period of WF Scenery Studio products being pirated and sold by unauthorised parties, the team at WF Scenery Studio are suspending the development of any future developments after Shanghai is released.
Posted on a Chinese website called Sinofsx, the development team said that “it has not been easy along the way.” During the past 4 years, the team has grown to be able to bring a variety of products to the market. However, it hasn’t been without its challenges. They said that “[we] often see the works we made transmission[ed], pirated [or] converted to X-Plane for sale.” Whilst piracy within the flight simulation market has been around for a long time, this particular team has had enough. The last straw happened when “a member of [the WF Scenery Studio] group saw Pudong [available for] pre-sale on Xianyu.” This was not an authorised reseller and as a result, this member of the team decided to quit.
With the team unhappy with how rampant the piracy of their products has been, they have decided to stop the development of future airport products. They went onto say this decision means we won’t see the likes of Tianjin, Changsha and Chongqing developed. Whilst this decision sounds decisive, there is some hope as it simply depends on how the team feels in the future. That said, they made it clear that WF Scenery Studio will continue to exist to support existing products and also update airports such as Beijing Capital Airport and Shanghai Hongqiao.
As mentioned at the start, Shanghai Pudong is close to a release and will continue to be brought to market in spite of the piracy that has turned WF Scenery Studio off from future developments. If we hear any further news, we’ll be sure to let you know.
In the meantime, check out a range of previews for the upcoming release of Shanghai Pudong Airport.
Update 29th March 2021: The developer has since taken to Facebook to say that Microsoft Flight Simulator development “maybe” next. As we initially said in our original article, updates for previous airport will continue.
Note that the quote was translated from Chinese to English using Google Translate so there may be some discrepancies in the exact translation.