Fuerteventura 2017: the all-time bestseller its own developer no longer lists

For about twenty-four hours on 24 March 2020, with most of Europe shut indoors, simMarket gave this airport away. The AVSIM bargain thread went up that evening. By the following night somebody was already asking why it had a price again and being told, briskly, that you have to check in every day to catch the deals. Two days later a customer called Igor left a five-star review on the product page thanking MK Studios for "an excellent gift to users in 'Stay at home' situation worldwide".

That is roughly the shape of this product's public life. Released 22 September 2017, patched twice inside its first year, briefly free at the worst moment in recent memory, and then very quiet indeed. It is still ranked number 15 on simMarket's all-time bestseller list — above nearly everything the store has ever sold — and it still costs €15.00.

The part that took longest to establish is this. MK Studios' own website no longer lists it. Their scenery catalogue has exactly one Fuerteventura page, for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, carrying two buttons that point at Orbx and simMarket. The FSX/P3D product has no page there, no changelog, no support entry, nothing. simMarket still sells it every day. On the developer's own shop window it does not exist.

So the question is not really whether the scenery is good. The record on that has been close to unanimous since 2017: thirteen ratings on simMarket, twelve of them five stars and one four, an arithmetic average of 4.92. The question is whether a frozen, delisted, nine-year-old airport is still worth €15.00 when its own MSFS successor is €16.99 at the same store, when the upgrade from one to the other costs €10.00, and when Fuerteventura itself has changed less in nine years than the product's name invites you to fear.

We read 27 sources for this review: both simMarket listings and the developer's own pages, four AVSIM threads, the MSFS forum bug report against the successor, the trade coverage from simFlight, FSElite, Threshold and FSNews, three store listings for the MSFS version, five videos, and the real-world record for GCFV. Reddit is refused by every tool available in our research environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing here — which matters more than usual for a product this old, because Reddit is where the "is this still worth buying in 2026" question normally gets asked and answered.

What you are actually buying

One product, one price, one store. There is no MK Studios shop to check it against — the studio sells through resellers only — and, as established above, they no longer link to the P3D version from anywhere on their site.

What	Simulators	Where	Price, checked 20 August 2026
FUERTEVENTURA 2017 FSX P3D	FSX, FSX:SE, P3D v3, P3D v4	simMarket	€15.00
FUERTEVENTURA MSFS (the successor)	MSFS 2020	simMarket	€16.99
— upgrade price if you own the 2017 P3D version		simMarket	€10.00
GCFV Fuerteventura Airport	MSFS 2020	Orbx Direct	A$27.99
GCFV Fuerteventura Airport	MSFS 2020	Contrail	US$20.25

A caution on those figures. simMarket's terms state that displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a browsing session with no country resolved means 0%. The €15.00 and the €16.99 are therefore like-for-like against each other, but neither is like-for-like against the Australian-dollar and US-dollar figures from Orbx and Contrail. Do not read this review as saying one store is cheaper than another. Within simMarket, the comparison that matters is clean: the nine-year-old P3D version is €1.99 less than the modern MSFS one.

In the box: 1.59 GB, covering the airport and the whole of Fuerteventura island. Photoreal terrain with custom mesh, 2048×2048 ground textures, SODE jetways including double jetways, dynamic lighting under P3D v4, rendered night lighting with shadows, and a scattering of custom landmarks and VFR objects around the island. The requirements line stops at "FSX, Lockheed Martin Prepar3D V3/V4". That is not a typo and it is not out of date — it is the whole story.

On the "2017" in the name

It denotes both things at once, and the second is the one buyers actually ask about. The product came out in 2017, and the ground layout it models is the 2017 layout. We know MK Studios themselves treat that as a limitation, because the MSFS successor's feature list advertises "up to date ground layout (2021)" as a selling point — a sentence that only makes sense if the 2017 one is not.

In practice the gap is smaller than it sounds. Fuerteventura's last structural change was the terminal expansion completed in 2010, which took capacity to 8.2 million passengers a year against roughly 5.6 million actually handled. Aena's next investment round at GCFV — €153.2 million — is scheduled for 2027–2031 and is aimed at security screening technology and electromechanical plant rather than concrete. A scenery named for a year has aged unusually well here, for the unglamorous reason that the airport stood still too.

What the community consistently praises

The night lighting, more than anything else. It is the single most repeated observation across independent sources, and the praise is specific rather than generic. One simMarket customer in November 2017 singled out the airport lighting and the island street lighting; another in February 2018 called it superb alongside the frame rate; the developer's own bullet claims it is "based on real pilot's point of view", and for once the marketing is doing less work than the product. On a night approach into 01 the island reads as an inhabited place rather than an airfield in a void, and that is the thing the scenery does best.

Performance. Independently reported and remarkably consistent for a photoreal island: easy on VAS and frame rate in P3D v4 (February 2018), "nice and fast scenery" in January 2018, and no elevation problems. Modern MK Studios sceneries are heavier; this one was built when 4 GB of RAM was the stated minimum, and it shows in a good way.

That it is an island, not an airport. The photoreal coverage and custom mesh extend across all of Fuerteventura, which is why the product keeps appearing in Canaries hopping and VFR contexts rather than just airliner arrivals. A customer in October 2018 who had actually been there wrote about retracing his real trip at low level in a helicopter, and picked out a modelled car accident on the outskirts of Puerto del Rosario as evidence of how much care went in.

Elevation and ground accuracy at the airport itself. GCFV had a reputation for elevation problems in older sceneries. Customers in January 2018 specifically noted that this one has none.

Where it sits in the catalogue. On AVSIM in April 2020, a user listing MK Studios' Canary Islands work put it plainly: GCRR and GCFV are the oldest, "so they look less perfect than Tenerife South and North, but i think all of them are worth the payment." Nobody in the record disputes that reading, and it is still the fairest summary of the product six years later.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The simulator ceiling. Still open, and now permanent in all but name. P3D v5 shipped in April 2020; MK Studios ran a conversion programme for it that covered Palma de Mallorca, Keflavik, Tenerife, Dublin and Lisbon. Fuerteventura was not on the list. On AVSIM on 19 May 2020 a user asked directly whether an update for Lanzarote and Fuerteventura for P3D v5 was coming. The thread moved on without answering. On 13 January 2022 the studio announced on Facebook that a Fuerteventura V2 was inbound alongside Porto, widely expected to be P3D v4 and v5 — the AVSIM thread that followed spent its energy guessing at the price. No P3D V2 ever appeared. The MSFS version arrived on 12 August 2021 and that was the direction the studio took. Nine years on, the store listing still reads P3D v3/v4, and P3D v6 users are three generations past what this installs into.

The AFCAD. Still open, and inherited by the successor. A customer on 25 November 2017 documented it precisely: no cargo definitions on the relevant stands, no GA stands defined at 54–57 and 57–60, and he built his own ADE file to fix it. He gave four stars instead of five for exactly that, which is the one non-five-star rating on the listing. This is not an isolated slip in one old product: the MSFS successor carries a structurally similar fault, an incorrectly defined runway 01 procedure that leaves AI traffic taxiing on and then timing out, reported on the official MSFS forums in March 2024 and still present in the payware version as of October 2025. The airport geometry is right in both. The tables that tell the simulator how to use it are the weak spot.

The autogen around the airport. Still open. The same November 2017 customer: the autogen buildings are not Canarian, and the hotels are "just big houses with gabled roofs" where the real coastline is bungalow and resort. It is a fair hit, and it is the one place where the island coverage stops flattering the product. A January 2018 customer wanted the option to swap in a third-party Canary Islands mesh and texture set instead; nothing of the kind was ever added.

Static ground life. Still open, by design. There are vehicles and equipment on the apron, but they are props. When a customer complained on AVSIM in April 2020 that a different MK Studios airport was "like a ghost town", the studio's support reply was direct: "We don't have vehicle animations in the airport for performance reasons." That was the house policy of that era and Fuerteventura follows it. Buyers running GSX will not care — there is a community GSX profile on flightsim.to — but it is a real difference from a 2026 airport.

Reinstall leftovers. Mitigated. One customer in January 2018 hit severe elevation display problems in FSX:SE that turned out to be registry entries left behind by a previous uninstall of the same product, not the scenery itself. He resolved it with a registry cleaner and noted in the same review that MK Studios had offered to help before he did. Worth knowing if you are reinstalling onto a machine that has had this scenery before.

Performance and stability

This is the section where a legacy scenery earns its keep, and this one does. Nobody in nine years of public record reports a crash, an out-of-memory failure or a stutter attributable to GCFV. The consistent independent report is the opposite: light on VAS, light on frames, and untroubled by the elevation glitches that dogged earlier Fuerteventura sceneries. The stated minimum spec — a 3 GHz dual core, 4 GB RAM, 1 GB of video memory — is now so far below any machine running P3D that headroom is effectively unlimited.

The two patches both landed early. Version 1.02 on 17 October 2017 added windmills, changed the VOR model, reconverted the AFCAD, made the models compatible with P3D v4.1 and fixed an autogen problem; installers were updated and pushed to simMarket customers the following morning. A 1.1 appeared during P3D v4.2. After that, nothing. Nine years without a patch is normally an indictment; here it is closer to a statement that the thing was finished, since the open complaints from 2017 are the same open complaints today and none of them is a stability issue.

On support: the record is mixed but leans positive. One user in April 2020 got a ticket answered inside 24 hours and a patch that fixed his problem; another the same month could not complete registration to raise a ticket at all; a third in February 2022 reported a stand-labelling bug on a different MK Studios airport, had it confirmed within a week and a fix promised for the following one. Note that all of that is support for products the studio still lists. Nobody in our sources has tested what happens when you raise a ticket for a product the developer's website no longer acknowledges.

Who should buy it

The P3D v4 simmer who flies European holiday routes. Buy it. This is the case the product was built for and it still answers it well: a busy, sunny, single-runway destination at the end of a two-to-four hour narrowbody leg, with an island underneath worth descending over. €15.00 is not a bargain, but the night lighting alone is better than a lot of what has been sold since.

The P3D v5 or v6 simmer. Do not buy it. The listing says v3/v4 and there is no evidence in nine years of record that anybody at MK Studios ever revisited that. Reports of the scenery working in later versions are not in the public record, the developer has never claimed it, and you would be gambling €15.00 on an unsupported product from a studio that has delisted it. This is the profile that should not buy.

The FSX or FSX:SE holdout. Buy it, with one eye open. FSX support was not there at launch — simFlight noted in October 2017 that an FSX version was "still in preparation" — but it arrived, and a customer installed it successfully on FSX:SE in January 2018. Just budget for the reinstall-registry trap described above.

Anyone who already owns it and has moved to MSFS. Take the €10.00 simMarket upgrade rather than paying €16.99, but go in knowing the successor is not flawless either: its runway 01 AI problem has been open since March 2024.

Anyone flying MSFS 2020 or 2024 who does not own the old one. Skip this listing entirely and buy the MSFS version. It is the current, supported, 2021-layout product, and at €16.99 the two-euro saving on the legacy version buys you nothing you can use.

The budget flier who only wants the island. Consider waiting, or looking elsewhere. This scenery has been discounted repeatedly and was free for a day in March 2020, so €15.00 is not a floor. And there is a free photoreal Fuerteventura island package for FSX and P3D v1–v5 that covers the terrain with autogen and night textures, if the airport itself is not the point for you.

Where it stands today

MK Studios are in the strongest shape of their existence, which is exactly why this product looks the way it does. Founded in Warsaw and describing themselves as established in 2013 — simMarket's copy of their biography says 2008, a discrepancy neither has bothered to reconcile — they now run a catalogue of nearly thirty MSFS airports, released Key West in February 2026 and Porto in April 2026, revealed Fort Lauderdale and Miami in May, and have Tenerife South and Vagar queued for after 17 August 2026. On AVSIM in May 2026 a long-standing member wrote that they "really upped their game the last two years" and are "now part of the elite group". The studio also sells professional ground-handling and airport training simulators, which is where the serious money now is.

None of that momentum points backwards at a P3D v4 scenery. There is one Prepar3D product left in the first page of their simMarket catalogue and Fuerteventura is not it. The honest reading is that the 2017 GCFV is not abandoned in the sense of broken and ignored — it is complete, stable and doing exactly what it did in 2017 — but it is finished, in the sense that nothing further will happen to it. The V2 announced in January 2022 is not coming. P3D v5 support is not coming.

What tips the score down from where the store ratings sit is the price, and it is a genuine tension in the record rather than a swipe. Twelve five-star reviews say this is worth the money; the same store sells you the newer, supported, better-laid-out MSFS version for €1.99 more, and sold this one for nothing on 24 March 2020. Its own all-time-bestseller rank has to be read with that day in mind. A product that has been free once and discounted often is not a €15.00 product, whatever the tag says, and the buyer holding a P3D v4 install and a spare fifteen euros should watch for a sale rather than pay the sticker.