Would you accept Microsoft Flight to be subscription based?

[MickH 3]

Yeah but Blizzard makes multiplayers games.... not flight sims.

There is technically no difference though really, who's to say Flight Sims can't be multiplayer games, don't both FS9 and FSX have some multiplayer functionality? all you need to do is take it one or two steps further.

[Guest veeray]

Blizzard has enough headaches trying to deal with cheaters, and matching players appropriately to skill level and they are effectively a turnbased/realtime strategy games. How much fun is it going to be when somebody comes online and just decides he doesn't want to play flight sim , but crash airplane derby instead. Also I'm not interested in a world without real liveries...something Microsoft wouldn't touch since it deals with a host of trademark issues not covered under fair use.

[FlyingsCool 3]

First, I don't think it would work for MS to make the whole product subscription based, and that would probably be too much to develop at this point. But....What about making the multiplayer portion subscription based? Something like XBox live. MS owns or contracts out ROBUST servers that allow hundreds or thousands to fly together at once. We all know the issues involved in using the current servers. So you have to subscribe to play FS in multiplayer mode on their servers. Maybe allow an option so users can create their own servers so people don't have to subscribe. Or maybe something in between, people can register with MS and receive proceeds from the subscription pool based on the numbers of people who access their server from the subscription pool. Setting up a good server is not cheap.They could extend that further by allowing users to download and share planes from a marketplace, with the developers getting a royalty each time a plane is downloaded, used, or accessed. That is the most frustrating aspect of multiplayer today, how can you get everyone to synch up their planes so you don't end up with a Piper Cub flying around at mach speeds. They could do something like have you pay the marketplace $1 or $2 each time you sit in a plane cockpit, $0.05 or $0.10 cents each to "see" planes that others are flying, and an option to pay $20 or more to download that plane to your computer to be able to access it offline or use it any time you like, or modify it with repaints.Would you pay $2.50 a session to fly with 50 different planes, and see the accurate planes and paints without effort on your part? I imagine it's not often that users would actually see more than 10 different planes in any given multiplayer session.There could be a bubble of say .5 mi or .25 mi around your plane, and if another plane enters that bubble you get charged once $0.05 cents to see the correct plane and paint (if it's not from the default stable). The developer gets $0.03 or so, and MS gets the remainder. It could be structured to either cache the planes you see so you don't get charged again if you see that plane in another session later, or it could be a per session charge.With income like that, developers would very likely stampede to develop planes.And it could be an option, you could turn off the ability to download other users' planes, and have FS work like it does today.Perhaps it could support freeware planes, too, where MS just charges you some nominal amount to pay for the support needed. Like $0.02 cents/ plane or repaint. I would pay something like that if I didn't have to worry about managing the library of planes I see.MS would make available code to be put in as copyright and add it to the marketplace, free for freeware planes, and developers pay a fee or something to get a payware code. Something like that.I would hate it if multiplayer would be subscription based, but I would DEFINITELY consider supporting a marketplace of addon planes so everyone could have access to the same planes when flying in multiplayer, as long as it remained somehow affordable. Not easy to do, I imagine, but, to me, this is the worst aspect of multiplayer - the integration and sharing of addon planes.Of course, then the question becomes how do you manage the marketplace, but I imagine that something along the Android marketplace would work, where users would add comments to the planes they download.

[Noel 4,561]

Well here is a question that was on my mind many years now.What if... Microsoft would release MS Flight or something else in the future that is subscription based?Well, you could say subscribe, for what?Let's say that MS would supply you with updated data all the time, regarding New buildings,new planes,airport info (official and correct) , NAVAIDS, Routes, Charts (accurate and updated as in real life), Real traffic if not flying on line.Real accurate weather.NAV CYCLES for FMS (FMS in it's planes)On line service as VATSIM or IVAO (including clients for radars and in 3D towers , simulating ATC environment)A decent voice chat system.Even support for virtual airlines (ranked or not).A realistic economy system.Would you pay for that and how much per month?If and only if...What else would you expect in a paid service?I would love to hear your comments.Nick

As mentioned in another post in this forum, we would have to really, IMO, see a quantum jump in quality to justify a subscription-based service. What we have currently is really, really nice, when optimized w/ the best addons and decent hardware. It works! So, to justify jumping ship you'd have to improve on something that is already very complete. I do believe it is theoretically possible to generate a quantum improvement, I just seriously doubt this will happen. They could attract a signficant market perhaps of folks who want something alot better than FSX out of the box, with ongoing product support & so forth, via a service. Not everyone is willing to hassle with learning how to make FSX really really nice, so there could be a market there. But for enthusiasts such as you find in these forums, I don't think we will see the sort of improvement to justify abandoning a very complete, mature, useful and enjoyble product as it stands now when properly tricked out.Noel

[Chock 17,769]

The thing is, all pay as you play game models work on essentially the same principle, which is, they continually roll out broadly popular new content so that large numbers of customers keep paying to play. That's relatively easy to do for something like WoW, since they just knock up a new dungeon somewhere, stick a few badass trolls in it and hey presto, the thrilling new raiding content is born. Throw in a few new magic weapons with some newly varied stats on them so players can arse about with their character builds and try them out, and you've cracked it, the players keep coming.However, even that doesn't tell the whole story: The WoW populace of subscribers is a 'rolling' one, in that old players get bored, unsubscribe, new players try it out, then get bored, unsubscribe, some old players come back for a while, resubscribe etc. Of those, some people stay a long time, but within that community of players, one of the chief things which keeps them there, is the friendships they make whilst playing online, since to some extent, the game itself hardly matters, so long as the community of friends can have fun sharing the experience in a group, which often makes it a bit like a chat room with a bit of a game going on whilst they chat. WoW, whether you like that kind of thing or not, is a very polished product which knows exactly what it wants to achieve, and the many games which have attempted to emulate that subscription model ably demonstrate that it ain't as easy to do as I've made it sound; just look at all the crashed and burned attempts such as Vanguard etc. So that is great for the players of WoW, but it hardly sounds like a model for a flight sim to work around, as it simply isn't a social experience in the same way as WoW is. The only PC-based sims which approach that social aspect are the FPS shooters such as Arma, Modern Warfare etc, with their multiplayer outings.Aside from the severe lack of a social core for a flight sim that doesn't feature team-based combat, thrill to the updated navigational beacons and the realistically-sloped runways! isn't exactly a great marketing slogan to throw at gamers, so it's not going to attract vast numbers of single players either, and MS know it. Just look at how Aerosoft's experimental community airfield product has fallen on its arse. It was a brave attempt to take things in a new direction community-wise, but it seems that's just not what civil flight sims are about.Which means if MS did a realistic subscription-based product at all (even one forgoing the social aspect and relying on being super realistic and up to date), the price of subscription would have to be very high to make it financially viable, and charging high fees to keep a small user base ticking over is just not going to happen, as that really would mean getting into the aviation business with things like FAA and CAA approval etc, etc. So the only other alternative for a subscriber-based flight sim, is to make something like Crimson Skies as an online RPG, god forbid. If you look at the box-office travesty that was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which isn't actually that bad a film in fairness, and was essentially the same concept as Crimson Skies thrown at a mass consumer market, it is enough to tell us that in spite of us loving them, Joe blow doesn't really give a crap about aeroplanes, because Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow made about 58 million bucks in total, but it cost about 70 million to produce it. So as far as the marketing suits are concerned, 'aeroplane stuff makes a loss' is all they will see.I can think of one instance where a sim marketed as a game is (in souped up form) also marketed as a professional simulator with the attendant requisite professional features. And that is VStep's Ship Simulator. The game version costs about 23 quid, whereas Nautis (which is the professional version of Ship Simulator intended for training sea captains), is about 4,000 quid. That tells you the kind of money you have to charge for something with a raft (if you'll pardon the pun) of professional features.I guess another fair comparison would by I-Racing, which is subscription based and pretty realistic. But as realistic as it is, the more accessible arcadish racing sims make far more money in much less time than I-Racing ever will. In short, there are just a lot easier way to make money than that.Al