Hello, first, I would like to apologize in advance for my English, but as you may have understood, I’m French. I bought Train Simulator in 2014 and back in the days I thought it was an amazing game, I was amazed by the gameplay, the possibilities, and the quality of the graphics but that was in 2014. Unfortunately, time has passed, and I can’t tell you I feel the same way anymore. Here I’m not even going to talk about the fact that I feel like you must pay a subscription just to enjoy the game ($10,373 to get all addons) but just about the fact that it feels like (euphemism) you are neglecting the French community. I understand that most of the trains and routes are English, it’s your base country, I also can’t deny that Germany is the biggest railway network in Europe nor the fact that the US has the biggest one, but don’t forget that France has the second biggest one (9th globally). In addition, according to a 2017 article, France is country with the most amount of railway passengers in Europe and 5th in the world (according to 2019 data), surpassing Germany and the US, i.e., your main locations. I don’t know anything about the sales number in each country, but it becomes clear to me, when you factor all these facts, that France is most likely to have A LOT of train enthusiasts, so I don’t understand why there are only 4 French add-ons (even though one is also half German, and the other has literally been deleted). I’ve made my research and some people were talking about having license problems with the SNCF… However, after further research, I saw an article talking about Dovetail Games signing a licensing deal with SNCF, but it seems like it was in early April fool’s joke. I hope I didn’t appear too offensive, but I think it clearly illustrates the frustration felt by a lot of Train Simulator players all over the world. I hope my message will make a change.
Your English is perfect, and certainly better than my French. I've spent nowhere near that. You are implying that you need to buy literally everything to enjoy the game. I've spent nowhere near that and enjoy the game. That 10K number gets thrown about a great deal and it is what you would need to spend to get every payware route available. It's probably more than that now, but you'd only ever buy routes and trains you are interested in... not everything. There are far more than that. Are you only talking about routes from DTG?
DTG does have a license with SNCF as they recently introduced the route to Strasbourg from Germany. Developing any new routes has been difficult with Covid restrictions There is a lot of Free and Payware Assets/Routes available for French railways https://www.simexpress.fr/ has good models of SNCF Electric locos and the CC72000 is under development They also have Corail coaches This website has Freeware items available for the game https://ajrailsim.pierreg.org/ And there are two other websites where French speaking enthusiasts can find routes, assets and trains to download https://www.railsim-fr.com/ https://www.rwcentral.com/ You need to register to access the downloads which are Free. Peter
