Reports just coming in here indicate massive job cuts at Microsoft but particularly at the ACES studio. Can anyone confirm this and if true what does this mean for the flight sim community?Gerry

Please lets not consume precious bandwidth of this forum by engaging in useless speculations.

Please lets not consume precious bandwidth of this forum by engaging in useless speculations.

Agree - here in Berlin it takes up to 2 minutes until any page of this forum will appear . . .all other internet pages build up in milliseconds

Agree - here in Berlin it takes up to 2 minutes until any page of this forum will appear . . .all other internet pages build up in milliseconds

Same here in Pontevedra - Spain. Things going Sloooooooooooooooow.

Same here in Pontevedra - Spain. Things going Sloooooooooooooooow.

And the forum is semi slow over here in the Far East (and we got the world's fastest internet here).Rumors of the demise of ACES appear to be true.At this point, I guess we'd all better learn to love FSX/FS9 as they're maybe all we got for quite some time.Maybe. But who knows. The game can change pretty fast.

The forum slow down issue has been taken care of. We are still learning this system, and we discovered a a site that was linked into to provide some unnecessary data was offline, slowing our system down. Anyway, things are back to normal.

as long as pmdg is still making airplanes in the future I'll still be using fsx

The reports appear to be true, but it shouldn't really mean that much for PMDG - we've switched development platforms before and if we have to again in the future, we will. Hopefully MS is not ending the franchise, that would be a shame, but if they do it's likely someone will pick up the slack and make a new sim once the economy improves. Maybe it'll be us hehe, we've joked about making our own sim platform before.

If the franchise has stalled for a significant period (years) looks like we may all end up in FSX after all :(

As of today it would appear that Aces has Died, Microsoft took an axe to them.....http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-er...flight-sim.htmlhttp://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21981"I can confirm everyone except 6 people got RIFed. The 6 are to perform an orderly shutdown and service existing contracts ( likely ESP ). There were something like 100 people in the studio across FS,TS,ESP, and Core.People got 1 of 2 emails from HR:1) your last day is Jan 23 ( 24 hrs notice ) and your badge and email will stop working at 7:00 pm on the 23rd.2) you have 60 days to find a job, your badge and email will work until Mar. 23. If you find a job great, if not that is your last day."Basically, Train sim and Flight simulator are likely Dead untill Further notice that some other Developer is being hired by microsoft to make the platforms...

PMDG for Xplane?

Very interesting but I seriously doubt Microsoft will discontinue their biggest seller for the last 10+ years.A lot has been said about how FS uses processor power primarily while other 3D applications use primarily GPU power. I'm guessing MS will contract a developer that can specialise in that field to develop FS further. Just take a look at Crysis and what they have achieved. Everyone told Crytek they would fail and Far Cry was a massive seller for them.However, on the flip side, if FSX is the end of the line, I'm sure someone will develop something to take the FS community for a bit of a longer ride.PMDG has my vote to take over the reigns.Goran

The reports appear to be true, but it shouldn't really mean that much for PMDG - we've switched development platforms before and if we have to again in the future, we will. Hopefully MS is not ending the franchise, that would be a shame, but if they do it's likely someone will pick up the slack and make a new sim once the economy improves. Maybe it'll be us hehe, we've joked about making our own sim platform before.

I really think you guys should stop joking about it and do it. I recall the comment "there'd be a Fly 3" when Fly 2 packed it in.Gang up with the other 3rd party guys and make a common open source platform.

Could it be that MS is positioning itself to grab a slice of the non-PC gaming market (eg X-box, Playstation, Wii) now that there seems to be a larger market for that instead of PC-based games in combination with the financial crisis?