LFMN Nice Côte d'Azur: the cheapest Nice in MSFS is the only up-to-date one

Nice Côte d'Azur cut the ribbon on its new Terminal 2 pier on 13 April 2026 — 23,058 square metres, six extra boarding gates, thirty-six new check-in desks, Prince Albert II in attendance. Eighty-six days later a small French developer with a reputation for doing the bare minimum handsomely put that pier in Microsoft Flight Simulator and charged €9.90 for it. Nobody else has. JustSim, which has sold a payware Nice since 2021 and whose €17.40 becomes €20.88 once VAT is added, stopped updating its MSFS build in June 2025 — ten months before the pier opened.

That is the whole argument about this add-on, and it cuts both ways. France VFR got there first because France VFR builds fast and light — 350 MB down, 730 MB installed, against JustSim's 2.71 GB. It builds fast and light partly because it does not rebuild what Microsoft already built. The store page says so out loud, in capitals: this scenery keeps some of Asobo's World Update 4 buildings, and you must leave the default Nice airport switched on or the thing will not look right.

For one buyer that is a sensible division of labour and a bargain. For another it is a developer selling you Microsoft's work back. Both readings appeared in the same forum thread within six hours of each other on 13 July 2026, from two people who had each looked carefully.

The complicating fact is that when someone finally bought both and put them side by side, France VFR's airside won. Not narrowly. The ground textures, the sun-bleached markings, the amount of ground equipment, the general air of a real airport that has been rained on — all of it went to the €9.90 product.

We read seventeen sources for this: the developer's own shop and forum, four store listings, three MSFS forum threads including a full written review, a French-language forum, two press posts, the competing JustSim listings and reviews, and the airport's own press release for the terminal extension.

What you are actually buying

One purchase, both simulators. There is no separate 2024 SKU and no upgrade fee — the same package installs into MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024, which is worth stating because the incumbent does not work that way.

Where	Price	Notes
VFR Network (France VFR's own shop)	€9.90	Incl. 20% VAT. Released 8 July 2026
simMarket	€8.25	The same price ex-VAT. Not a sale — see below
Orbx Direct	€8.29	Requires Orbx Central
Aerosoft	$9.99
Just Flight	$11.99
JustSim NG (MSFS 2020)	€17.40	Ex-VAT. €20.88 incl. 20%
JustSim (MSFS 2024)	€17.40	Ex-VAT. €20.88 incl. 20%. €5.00 upgrade if you own the MSFS 2020 NG

On the €8.25. That number looks like a flash sale for an international airport, and it is not one. France VFR's own shop lists €9.90 including 20% French VAT; €9.90 ÷ 1.20 = €8.25 exactly. simMarket is showing the net figure, and its listing carries none of the discount furniture — no percentage badge, no thirty-day price low — that it prints beside genuinely reduced items. €8.25 is the standing price, not a window.

In the box: custom photo-realistic buildings for the terminals and the ramp, reworked ground textures and markings, reworked vegetation on and around the platform, night lighting, and the French SIA chart set (VAC, IAC, APT, ARR/DEP) as PDFs. Version 1.01 landed on 9 July, one day after release, described only as minor corrections. A free GSX Pro profile followed on 25 July, and it is more interesting than a free profile usually is — France VFR wrote a custom Python extension that sorts Nice's parking positions into groups by type, which is a genuine usability gain at an airport with twenty-two jetway stands scattered across two terminals.

What is not in the box: terminal interiors worth the name, a modelled road tunnel, custom replacements for the photogrammetry landside, animated ramp traffic, or the working airport tram. JustSim has all of those.

What the community consistently praises

The ground. Every source that actually flew it says the same thing in slightly different words. JakTrax78's written review on the official MSFS forums (15 July 2026) put the ground surfaces at around 99% against real satellite imagery and singled out the sun-bleaching — Nice's markings are faded by the Mediterranean sun, and they are faded here. A poster on France VFR's own forum picked out the wear patterns on the taxiways. In the head-to-head screenshots posted by LukG8843 on 14 July, JakTrax78's read was blunt: France VFR's version "definitely looks better: more GSE, more natural looking ground/building textures".

The terminal extension, second. LukG8843 established on 14 July 2026 that only France VFR currently offers the new pier, and checked JustSim's changelog to confirm it is not there. He owns both. He still ended the thread saying the France VFR version stays his first choice for Nice "if only because of the terminal extension".

The weight, third. That same France VFR forum thread has a customer noting the scenery is roughly eight to nine times lighter than the competition while holding its quality. The numbers back him: 350 MB against 2.71 GB. Nice is a demanding place — coastal photogrammetry, dense Riviera urban sprawl, terrain rising hard behind the field — and a scenery that adds a few hundred megabytes rather than three gigabytes to that is doing the buyer a favour.

The heliport area was called out on the developer's forum as very accurate, which matters more at Nice than at most airports: LFMN runs one of Europe's busiest scheduled helicopter operations, shuttling to Monaco all day.

And the price. £8, wrote JakTrax78 on 14 July, is a bargain considering what you get — noting that even on sale JustSim's is a good £3 more.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The retained Asobo buildings. Still open, and by design. The store page warns that the scenery keeps some default World Update 4 structures and that you must leave Microsoft's handcrafted Nice enabled. In practice that means the Terminal 2 rotunda interior and the northside radar tower are Asobo's. atcogl, on 13 July 2026, would not buy for that reason alone: he could not get past the fact that they had used some default buildings from the handcrafted version. Others in the same thread found it barely noticeable in flight. It is not a bug and it will not be patched — it is the design that makes the price possible. Decide how you feel about it before you pay.

Terminal interiors. Still open. Only T2's main rotunda has an interior at all, and JakTrax78 called it rudimentary. Terminal 1 has none. This is the clearest place where €9.90 shows. It is also, in fairness, a shortfall JustSim shares: FSNews' review of the JustSim NG version (18 February 2024) flagged exactly the same gap — full interiors in T2, nothing in T1 — so the gulf between the two products here is narrower than the price gap suggests.

Night lighting inside the buildings. Still open, and the weakest area of the product. Exterior and apron lighting is solid but unremarkable. The terminals are the problem: JakTrax78 found T1 with practically no interior illumination whatsoever, and T2 leaning on repetitive 2D texture overlays rather than modelled light. Approach at dusk into Nice is one of the great sights in European simming and the buildings are the part that lets it down.

Areas left as flat imagery. Still open. A road tunnel and a storage zone were left as default satellite texture rather than modelled. JustSim models the tunnel. Small, but it is the sort of thing you notice on the taxi out.

No animated ramp traffic, no tram. JustSim has both. France VFR's ground equipment is plentiful and well placed but largely made of default assets, with custom airstairs, Gendarmerie vehicles, coaches and passenger buses added on top. Animated figures are present.

The record itself is thin, and that is a finding. By 19 August 2026 there is no independent video review of this scenery anywhere on YouTube — the only France VFR LFMN video is the developer's own trailer, sitting on 73 views. Across every store that sells it, the aggregate on FS Addon Compare is 4.4 out of 5 from seven ratings. simMarket's own listing still says "Review it now": zero customer reviews, six weeks after release. One thorough forum review and one good side-by-side comparison are carrying almost the entire public assessment of this product.

Performance and stability

Nothing in the record suggests a performance problem, and the file size argues strongly against one. JakTrax78 reported frame rates slightly worse than France VFR's own Bastia scenery but still comfortable, and a single stutter he thought was probably coincidental. LukG8843 noted the MSFS 2024 build appears better optimised for LOD than the 2020 one, which tracks with how 2024 handles streamed scenery generally.

Two caveats on that. First, nobody in the public record has stress-tested it — a summer Saturday at Nice with full AI traffic, a study-level airliner and the coastal photogrammetry loading is a different proposition from a quiet look around, and no source describes doing that. Second, the scenery is layered over Asobo's handcrafted airport rather than replacing it, which is unusual, and no one has reported on what happens if a third-party product or a future World Update disturbs that base layer. Neither is a mark against the scenery. Both are gaps we could not fill.

Version 1.01 arrived the day after release for minor corrections and nothing has been needed since. For a two-runway international airport shipped into two simulators, one hotfix in six weeks is a good sign.

Who should buy it

If you fly airliners into Nice and want the airport as it is today, buy it. The Terminal 2 extension is real, it is where aircraft actually park now, and this is the only MSFS scenery that has it. That alone settles it at this price.

If you fly GA or helicopters along the Côte d'Azur, buy it. The heliport is accurate, the platform detail is good, it costs almost nothing, and it drops into France VFR's wider VFR France range without a fight.

If you already own JustSim's Nice and are happy with it, do not buy this. You would be paying €9.90 for better ground textures, more ground equipment and one new pier, and giving up terminal interiors, animated ramp traffic, the tram and the modelled tunnel. That is a lateral move. Wait and see whether JustSim adds the extension.

If you want a flagship handcrafted airport — Inibuilds, MK-Studios, Aerosoft-tier — do not buy this, and do not buy JustSim's either. Nice does not have one yet. Save the money for whoever builds it.

If the retained Asobo buildings bother you on principle, do not buy it. It will not change. There is no future patch that removes them, because removing them is the opposite of what this product is.

Where it stands today

Six weeks after release, France VFR's Nice sits in an odd position: it is clearly the better airport of the two payware options for most of the flying people actually do, and it is clearly the less complete product. It wins outdoors, where you spend your time, and loses indoors, where you mostly do not. It is half the price. It is a tenth the download. It is the only one that matches the terminal you would taxi to if you flew there tomorrow.

Against that: it leans openly on Microsoft's work, its night lighting stops at the terminal windows, and the community has barely looked at it. Seven store ratings and one forum review is not a verdict, it is a first impression from a very small room. Our 4.0 is a reading of a thin but consistent record, not of a settled one, and we would revisit it if a serious video review or a hundred store ratings ever arrive.

The thing worth watching is JustSim. Its Nice has not been updated since June 2025 and its changelog shows no sign of the April 2026 extension — though the studio itself is plainly still working: it shipped a rebuilt Düsseldorf for MSFS 2024 on 20 August 2026. Nice simply is not next. If it patches the new pier in, the calculation changes and the case for France VFR narrows to price and performance. If it does not, a €9.90 scenery will keep quietly out-representing a €17.40 one at one of Europe's most flown-to airports, and that is a strange and rather cheering state of affairs.