Will Flight Hurt FSX Addon Vendors?

[Christopher Low 5,324]

Christopher, what do you mean by no addon developers are interested in creating stuff

Alain,The word "if" at the start of my first sentence is extremely important! Maybe there are plenty of addon developers that are interested in working with Microsoft on the Flight project, but what if there aren't? How many will be prepared to sign over the rights to all of the IP that they create, and lose 30% as an added bonus? The latter is easy to understand. The former most certainly isn't. Edited January 24, 2012 by Christopher Low

[simmerhead 885]

MS could just hire individuals as freelance devs. As I understand most of the new aircraft in FSX wasn't created by MS, so why would they have to be in FLIGHT. I'm sure that those FSX developers signed away all rights to those aircraft to MS.

[n4gix 4,947]

In fact, according to popular rumor, Father Bill originally wanted the S-Class version, but had to settle from the smaller C-Class version instead

Thanks for the chuckle, Bryan. I needed that. In actual fact though, I'm still driving a 1995 Mercury Grand Marquis LRS that my late father left to me in his will. :(

[alainneedle1 97]

MS could just hire individuals as freelance devs. As I understand most of the new aircraft in FSX wasn't created by MS, so why would they have to be in FLIGHT. I'm sure that those FSX developers signed away all rights to those aircraft to MS.

That's what I was trying to get at, if the big houses are not interested I'm sure some good developers may be interested about developing for Flight under MS's rules and get paid for it, no IP needed.

Thanks for the chuckle, Bryan. I needed that. In actual fact though, I'm still driving a 1995 Mercury Grand Marquis LRS that my late father left to me in his will. :(

Haha I put 200,000 miles on one of them, from 1991 to 2006, they are good cars.

[alainneedle1 97]

Alain,The word "if" at the start of my first sentence is extremely important! Maybe there are plenty of addon developers that are interested in working with Microsoft on the Flight project, but what if there aren't? How many will be prepared to sign over the rights to all of the IP that they create, and lose 30% as an added bonus? The latter is easy to understand. The former most certainly isn't.

Sorry Christopher, I miss quoted you, my bad.

[Christopher Low 5,324]

No problem, Alain.

[Gibbage 199]

Sorry. I havent been to the AVSim forum in a while. Been busy, and didnt want to bother with the "I hate Flight" club going on over here, but wanted to chime in on this interesting topic as a 3rd party add-on maker. Am I ###### Flight has no public 3rd party SDK? Hell yes. I want in on what can be a nice cash cow. The #1 biggest problem with FSX add-on's is marketing and having an in-game store would bring my products to much more people then any banner I could put on any web page. Also doing this limits the Flight store to just what MS can produce. Henry Ford said it best when he said "I would rather have 1% of 100 men’s effort then 100% of my own". Windows Phone seems to understand that very well and is very active in trying to acquire dev's to have a nice full app store. My biggest fear for Flight is an empty store on launch.Do I think it will hurt FSX add-on sales? No. I think it could improve FSX sales in at least the short term. Why is that? Well quite simply put, if people want more then what Flight has to offer, they will need to look at FSX or XP11. I think Flights easy entry will bring a lot of new blood into Flight Simming, and thats a win for us all. I see Flight as a great opportunity to welcome new users and a new generation into simming, and hopefully they will kick off the training wheels in time and look for a more full experience in something like FSX or XP10. Either MS can provide that in DLC, or I can with add-on's in FSX and XP.

Edited January 26, 2012 by MVGibbage

[pstrub 996]

My biggest fear for Flight is an empty store on launch.

That's also MS's biggest fear... They have to make money from Flight, so they have to sell content, so they have to come up with a full store at launch. Hopefully it'll be stuffed with content to bring back most of FSX's functionality right from the beginning, not only with gold coins!

[Guest]

I think Flights easy entry will bring a lot of new blood into Flight Simming

And that will be the main problem. MS Flight is easy to use and install and it runs very well without any problems. When someone thinks 'Nice, lets try FSX' he or she will be put off by the bad outdated graphics (out of the box!) and the awfull performance (without tweaks). Within 10 minutes they will be back to MS Flight...

[newthog 0]

And that will be the main problem. MS Flight is easy to use and install and it runs very well without any problems. When someone thinks 'Nice, lets try FSX' he or she will be put off by the bad outdated graphics (out of the box!) and the awfull performance (without tweaks). Within 10 minutes they will be back to MS Flight...

I respectfully disagree - I think if someone "gets the bug", and sees what other flight simulation software is capable of, then it will be worth their effort to give it a try. And, if they're stubborn like me, play with it enough to make it work. I also feel the greater capability of today's computers, compared to when FSX came out, will make it a bit easier for the "noobie" to transition. Again, just my opinion.And I would like to thank all of the posters above who weren't "hellfire and brimstone" about MS Flight - let's give it a chance, see how it flies...

[torium 207]

My biggest fear for Flight is an empty store on launch.

That's also MS's biggest fear... They have to make money from Flight, so they have to sell content, so they have to come up with a full store at launch.

...... and the answer is:

Okay, sticking my oar back in for a moment, what do you suppose the 50+ folks there have been doing for the past few years? None of us can possibly guess what they might already have prepped and ready for DLC on or shortly after release of Flight.Both pragmatically and logically they have to have some stock on their shelves, otherwise it'd be like opening a new Wal-Mart with only empty shelves for the customers to browse!

And that will be the main problem. MS Flight is easy to use and install and it runs very well without any problems. When someone thinks 'Nice, lets try FSX' he or she will be put off by the bad outdated graphics (out of the box!) and the awfull performance (without tweaks). Within 10 minutes they will be back to MS Flight...

:(

[pstrub 996]

:(

Great summary!Well, before we receive any new information, I suppose all that can be said has already been said...:(

[Gibbage 199]

What im hoping for is that some of the MILLIONS of people who purchased FSX and dropped it will come back after Flight. Every time flight simming is in the news, there is a surg of new traffic from people who flew FSX or similar sims but put them down for various reasons. Big aviation news or simming news always sparks there interest back up. There was a MASSIVE surg in traffic when MS announced MS Flight to begin with, and that has benifited dev's all over the market. Some of the hard core simmers that have dropped FSX will come back, may not like what Flight has to offer, and install FSX again and look to see whats new on the market. MS sold millions of copy's of FSX but right now, only thousands of people still fly it.

[Johnny Thunder 0]

I read the whole topic and was unsurpised when it was mentioned that the new developers of flight got as much input for from 3ed party developers as they could before they complealty shut them off.

It is hurting vendors already....who's not buying addons until they have a definite answer about what Flight will be,.(please don't start the crap about Flight beta been all it is).If you were a 3PD right now will you say that Flight is the future.....naaaa you would not, do you remember when Orbx started pushing Prepar3D and Aerosoft started pushing XP-10......they did that because Flight is crap or because they can't sell addons for it (so far)....So, if you take JV statement here, http://forum.avsim.n...out-of-the-bag/ , read what I've highlighted in red and tell me that they did all that for a coin game...come on guys stop that nonsense with Flight been a coin game only....JV is not that stupid.Now read the rest of his post and tell me why he's pushing Prepar3D....can it be because Flight is a coin game and not worth their sceneries or because they can't make money selling their addons (in-game app store).....so their sceneries were to be made for a coin game....HELLO!!!So Flight is only a coin game??Quote: We've had Flight alpha code running in-house for well over a year; about 25 of our team installed a few builds. We've been talking to MS for over two years about Flight.I have to apologise to this whole forum because I sent Alain Needle a PM about a year ago since he was pestering me so much. And I let him know a little too much info. Oops, you guys have suffered for that lapse, sorry.Long story short, we spent a lot of time working with MS on white papers and looked at the code, gave them copies of all our products, told them how to do it right. They even used screenshots of our 1S2 Darrington in their mission dialog boxes, so they must have installed our scenery into Flight at some point, LOL!About March 2010 everything went quiet despite promises of new builds. Later in 2010 we were told to go away, no SDK will be shipped.Thanks MS, for all the fish.I've been a good NDA citizen and kept my lip zipped as best I can, although I saw there were some leaks last year from other disgruntled devs.Bottom line for us is that a closed environment with an in-game app store does not appeal to us since we cannot generate income from such a proprietary arrangement. I doubt that a belated SDK will arrive quickly enough for us to hold any interest now. The studio IMHO should not have stopped talking to third party developers but a decision at VP level must have been made to internalize the project.As for Orbx FSX will remain our core platform for at least 5-10 years and we will run Prepar3D as a parallel platform. We're porting all our stuff to P3D over the coming months. P3D V2.0 looks crazy cool, although I am under NDA with LM. We will release about 30+ products for FSX/P3D this year alone, including about 5-6 new regions including some in Europe. We're doubling our regions team and investing in FSX/P3D R&D as quickly as we can. We see no reason why anyone would walk away from 5 years of FSX addons investment to a new simulator. The future from our perspective is very bright. : end of quote.

I just wanna say, you people know this is Microsoft right? As in the company that tries to manoplize every market in its domain? And when it finds out it's not making money in a market where someone else is making money that they control, well- their record should speech of itself.Why do you think Microsoft flight is going to be free? It's because their market stratagy is going to be to make money off of the downloadable content. And if you think that is somehow going to benafit 3ed party developers, I think you are going to find yourself sadly mistaken. Why would microsoft contract with big name 3ed party developers who demand a fare share when they can contract with teenagers in 3ed world countries to make the same content for 1/5 the price and sell it on their market place and make 10 times more money then 3ed party developers because they control the market? The history of microsoft should tell you what this is all about, microsoft flight is going to try and take away what money 3ed party developers are making. Why? Because Microsoft found out it wasn't making money off of the market that 3ed party developers have taped into.Granted, that has no baring on Microsoft Flight's succses, but in response to the Topic, I would say: Yes, microsoft flight is most deffintly going to hurt 3ed party developers. I think that is what it's designed to do, friend.The sad truth is, Microsoft is probably going to make bank off of Microsoft Flight, even with expensive made in china DLC airplanes with horrible flight models that only live up to the expectations seen in FSX default aircraft. Because they are going to sell you their junk for the same price as 3ed party developers, but unlike 3ed party developers, their market place will be the game itself, meaning everyone is going to see it right when they start the game up. Things like "New F-35C $23.99" will be the first thing people see when they start up MS Flight, and that will genarate far more sales then 3ed party developers could ever dream of making. On top of that, Microsoft Flight is going to end up on the Xbox 360, I just know it: and their it will make 3 to 4 times as much cash as FSX ever did, such is the nature of the gaming industry. With such a huge succsess on consoles, microsoft will try and get as far away as it can from the PC simer crowd, catering to their market of mindless sheep that will give them money for a 737 that files nothing like the real thing, but they won't know that nor will the new genaration of "console flight sim minions" even care they just spent 20 bucks for something that dosen't even fly right.Oh well, FSX and X-plane 10 are still around. Edited January 27, 2012 by Johnny Thunder

[sibtiger 0]

New developers? Only Orbx is quoted here.