Well, flight simulators are very alive, just lok at DCS, BMS, XP, RoF, IL COD, FSX... its alive like never before!

While I do not perceive it to be as alive, and it truly is just my perception, like it was in what I call the " glory" days, the days of walking into the computer store and finding a while section of boxed product devoted to flight simming, it is certainly still a fairly active group of offerings. Of course more and more are being offered these days in the form of digital downloads, dlc, mmo, etc., which I am sure partly explains why those shelves are not stocked like they used to be. I so loved the days of Andy Hollis and the Skunkworks team with the excellent Janes simulators, the great anticipation of the next release of Falcon, the sometime huge manuals that accompanied the boxed product - the boxes being fairly large just to accomodate the documentation. Many night spent in bed with the table lamp on reading up and studying those same manuals. Man oh man, those were the days indeed.But you certainly are correct, the flight sim franchise is still very much alive and there are many choices out there today available to us. Look at what the Russians are doing, I mean they are eating it up.I currently have on my pc installed, and I am at least somewhat active with:FlightFSXDCS Black SharkIL2 1946I also just purchased, in this past week, both of which were digital downloads:IL2 Cliffs of DoverBatttle of Britain 2 by A2AI used to have EECH installed with all the mods, when I did this new pc build couple years ago, I just did not take the time to reinstall - but I most likely will here soon.When P51 sim by DCS gets released, I will be all over that one!And just a sidenote: All of the above, with the EXCEPTION of Flight, include native Track IR support out of the box... these developers view it as I and many others do, another peripheral like a joystick that they need to support...Long live the world of flight simming!

If they continue to focus more on the game aspects of Flight to woo the gaming crowd, the competition is going to cream them. Flight cannot compete as a game, but it can compete as a flightsim . . . the sooner they realize that, the soon Flight will stand a chance of succeeding.

I agree. Also from the numbers you posted I am convinced that the basic idea of the Flight operation, that is to attract "millions" of new casual users, will be a failure.Here in the forum, and in similar places frequented by people interested in flight simulation, we can discuss about the different types of aircraft, the subtleties of AP and ATC, and so on.But, outside these circles, what do you think a "casual gamer" will prefer, between a slow (and I mean slow) Icon peacefully flying over the Hawaii and a F-18 jet that can destroy half world in BF3 or similar?Maybe differently by you, I think that Flight as a brand is at this point too much related to the "game" philosophy, I have better hopes in a revival of the original franchise, with a real FSXI.A.

Does anyone have any better ideas on how to grow the flight simulator market? These casual gamers already have BF3 or similar and it's not increasing our numbers. How would you make a game to replace FSX that would satisfy both all the hard core simmers AND attract the casual users? FSX wasn't doing it by itself.Flight has plenty of hard core elements, but probably not the ones a lot of people here want. Casual users are almost tricked into using them. It seems to be working, too. Comments from casual users in multiplayer indicate that they like the idea of flying rather than driving or shooting stuff. Just keep in mind that for every one of us hard core simmers, there are 1000+ casual users. Let's get them into something that will eventually lead them to a program like FS11. If Flight fails, you won't see another flight sim out of Microsoft for at least 5 years PLUS whatever time it takes to develop it... if ever. But JH already said it's exceeding their expectations, and their expectations couldn't have been less than "break even." In other words, Flight is already succeeding.Every one of us was disappointed that we weren't getting FS11. I figured out early on that wasn't going to happen. But I was willing to try Flight, and I'm really enjoying it. Flight is fun again, like it was back in the earliest days, something that FSX wasn't giving me. And I don't even like Hawaii!Note: the Stearman is only a very few knots faster than the Icon. And the Icon doesn't feel slow during a Gold Rush. Actually, it's about as fast as a Cessna 150, and flies in a similar manner.Give it time. This is not a box product that will have one or two patches then be done; you saw what that did to FSX. This is a living program that will be updated for as long as people buy it. Hook

Give it time. This is not a box product that will have one or two patches then be done; you saw what that did to FSX. This is a living program that will be updated for as long as people buy it.

Most excellent point.

_{...But simmers aren’t our only customers now, and for a product with as ambitious a mission as Flight’s, we have to make sometimes difficult tradeoffs between the various customers types all the time.... the unwillingness of the simmer audience to accept that Flight was intended to appeal to whole new audiences prompted the team to focus on areas where our engagement with our players is more productive...we will be managing the content production... pay attention to real user behavior, and not be inappropriately led by the vocal negative minority who post on forums and Facebook.... deeper simmer functionality is not at the top of our list... we are not in a position to enable that kind of external support...Long-haul flight is not one of the scenarios that we believe is interesting for the bulk of our audience....If returning to Flight Simulator makes sense again sometime in the future, I am confident that Microsoft would not ignore that possibility, but it’s not something that is being actively considered today.}

_{These are the statements that jump out at me. I see an awful lot of "not"s in these responses.And although there was a claim to a "sophisticated simulation", that is what I do not consider FLIGHT. A sophisticated "game" perhaps.}

The sound in FLIGHT is top notch. You hear the sound difference if you open a door, lower your flaps and one time a person was chasing me and crashed into the ocean below and behind me with a "Splash." I almost felt the need to look behind my chair.

110% agreed, the Maule sounds as good as it does in real life, look up videos of it, they even got the prop pitch and revving sounds right, the flight deck detials are also top notch and like I said earlier pretty darn close to carenado, thats saying something. Im sure if Carenado had a new permanent sale price of 15 USD per aircraft, people would be buying 2-4 per month until they had everything they wanted. Only 2 things make Carenado's FSX planes better than MS Flight planes..1. additional 3d bump mapping details (this is why Carenado kicks serious a$$, their fine attention to everything minute in detail)2. fully functional flight decks 100% replicated, this is something that Flight needs to work on, is that its missing auto pilot systems and auxilary systems that "noobs" dont have to mess with to fly, everyone can get what they want out of flight within reason.Addendum: Thanks to everyone answering my posts and the comments, I enjoyed them, I only hope Microsoft's Flight team did the same, I want them to make a good game that I can have fun flying in without being on vatsim (I like vatsim but sometimes it can be irritating) and having to follow exact procedures just like I have to do in flight school. There really is a wide market for Flight, after trying it for a few hours I started to see that, here is something interesting that I saw on multiplayer.The Bad side of Flight: Barren wasteland, lack of "decent" aircraft (decent = aircraft like twin turboprops that can move a couple hunderd NM without ypu pulling your hair out because of slow speed and no AP controls) and you get lots of "trolls", by trolls I am referring to people who come in, hear me acting like there is an ATC (interestingly I have gotten a few freinds on Flight that are ATC's on vatsim and they act as live ATC in Flight) and they spam voice or text chat with crap, sadly no way to block communications unless you are the host, which then you can kick them, on top of that people like to run into you whne doing a mission to screw it up on landings and takeoffs (probably bored and think its funny). One last thing preturbs me, its 2012, why DX9 native, why not support DX9/10/11 like some games have, Tesselation in a Flight game for scenery would be astonishing, as well as aircraft models taking advantage of it, its not a game breaker as Flight is pretty, but its something I would like to sit down with the dev's and ask, why not?The Good side of Flight: Audio is crisp (seems to lack proper surround sound support sadly), visuals are good for default, autogen is FAN-DAMN-TASTIC, most autogen I have seen in a flight game and its spot on like using GE Pro or GEX very well done there by MS, gauges are top notch work, shadows are excellent. Multiplayer with other freinds that fly like you do and there are plenty of people on flight to make new friends with (I have made 10 in the last 5 days averaging 2 per day) is great however it is still buggy and MS knows this, it will get patched. Here is the most interesting thing I have found out in Flight..... out of those 10 friends I have made, 8 of them never played flight sim before, when they heard me using SID/STARS approaches and departures, changing NAV freqs and comms freqs, and how well I was taking off, flying, and landing, they friend requested me and now fly around on charter flights and cargo flights with me to LEARN, and guess what THEY LOVE IT. As a simmer it really is an honor in its self to teach others to fly and fly properly, 3 of those 8 are now planning to buy either FS2004, FSX, or X-Plane 10!Other neat notes: some proimising things found in the CFG file are AI, additional autogen, and additional settings not yet present in the code, there still is a chance that I will look more "polished". There are also major Cargo and Passenger awards in your carerr page like Transport 2 MILLION passengers, this means that either its gonna take me a literal 100 years at the current rate to get this or they will add in at least density regional airliners! Same is said for transporting TONS and TONS of cargo, also awards for flying up to 50,000 feet MSL and 80,000 feet MSL.

There are also major Cargo and Passenger awards in your career page like Transport 2 MILLION passengers, this means that either its gonna take me a literal 100 years at the current rate to get this or they will add in at least density regional airliners!

Gives a whole new meaning to "Century of Flight." :DDX9 so it will run on older XP machines.Hook

Gives a whole new meaning to "Century of Flight." :DDX9 so it will run on older XP machines.Hook

funny thing, I was thinking the same when writing that :PI understood why DX9, but games like Bad Company 2 supported DX9, DX10 and DX11, perhaps microsoft can add in at least DX10 support later?

Give it time. This is not a box product that will have one or two patches then be done; you saw what that did to FSX. This is a living program that will be updated for as long as people buy it.

The problem is that, based on the answers that Joshua Howard gave, the current goal appears to be to make Flight a better game, not a better flightsim.With FSX, most of the goals of the addons were to make FSX a better flightsim.Flight has a great deal of potential and it could become a great flightsim . . . if the developer wanted it to. But that is never going to happen as long as they are more interested in wooing gamers than simmers.

The problem is that, based on the answers that Joshua Howard gave, the current goal appears to be to make Flight a better game, not a better flightsim.With FSX, most of the goals of the addons were to make FSX a better flightsim.Flight has a great deal of potential and it could become a great flightsim . . . if the developer wanted it to. But that is never going to happen as long as they are more interested in wooing gamers than simmers.

I think that this game has potential and with proper constructive criticism and feed back, both parties (casual and simmer) can get what they want, unless you want to fly from PANC to KATL or something along those long lines.

The problem is that, based on the answers that Joshua Howard gave, the current goal appears to be to make Flight a better game, not a better flightsim.

The current goal is to grow the flight simulation genre. If you are waiting for FS11, you'll still be waiting for another 7 or 8 years. I suspect Flight will have a lot of the things you want before that time.That's why I said "give it TIME." The program isn't even a month old yet. What you see isn't all of what you'll get. That's one of the good things about the new distribution model. Sure, this is an early version, mostly to test the waters and see if it's viable. It's a "proof of concept" to the Microsoft upper managment. It will be more. Not next week, but certainly by next year.Hook

My comments are based on this section of the interview:

JH: When we consider the broad feedback we are getting, it’s fair to say that much deeper simmer functionality is not at the top of our list, but I also don’t think of things in such a binary way. We do get requests from simmers for things like ATC, TrackIR, or making the whole world available, and where we can we are adjusting our future roadmap to accommodate these kinds of things. However, our data reinforces that Flight already has a much wider audience profile than past products in the franchise, and those people are asking for us to improve the product in a variety of other ways (many of which are about improving the quality of the game, like adding leaderboards, multiplayer missions, or new challenge types). The art, as we see it, is to find places where we can invest in some significant area of the product that increases its appeal to as many people as possible.

I'm not interested in investing in the game of Flight. I will invest in the simulator, but not until they decide to actually improve the quality of the simulation, not just the quality of the game. If Flight doesn't succeed as a game, then what happens? Do they just abandon it? Or do they then try to make it appeal to the flight simmers? No one knows. At this point (for me) it seems to make more sense to invest in FSX (as in buying 3rd party addons), or to invest in X-Plane 10.

Good interview.But from the answers, Flight is not meant for hard core simmiers like me and that they at the moment are not going to bother with me or my needs. They are not going to improve on FSX. pretty much.The Q I have is, would they ever stop supporting FSX or hurt my product (flight sim products like FSX and FS9 but not Flight) in anyway if not make any improvements to it. Not sure if anyone has asked this question and what the answer to that is.MannyI too started small ..... I started with combat sim. That IMO, is a good start for beginners.. and then I moved on to FS9

My kudos to you. 19032 downloads is a lot !But the number of 40,000 was referring to the size of the flight sim payware addon market. I should have made that more clear when I quoted.Oviously, that number does not include:

• software pirates
• people who use only freeware
• people who use only a stock FSX without addons
• people who bought the sim but no longer use it

Those are probably cumulative sales over the entire period 1982-1999. The best selling version of Flight Simulator was the first version with 4.7million copies sold, if the book of records is correct:http://www.guinnessw...ion-video-game/To get an insight about what happened later, after FS2002, please read these two posts from another rsepected member of the flight sim community whose judgement I trust:http://forum.avsim.n...52#entry2115052http://forum.avsim.n...86#entry2114286@allI'm going to bed now. Please do not set this forum on fire while I'm away...Have a good night/morning/day everyone!

I have to agree with your numbers, I believe that the FS comunity is far larger than 40000. Myself for instance, I have to nephews 12 and 14 years old, both of them avid simmers, but when it comes to buy add ons, or download freeware, it is me and my account who does that for them, so they are not reflected in the 40000 scope ( indeed they did buy the FSX )I think that the biggest problem was that FSX was so though in you PC that most of us decided not to run it or buy it until patches or less expensive PC were able to manage that software. In most cases that never happen, it was not until now that we finally are able to have descent frame rates on FSX. When FS9 came into the market, it was also true that full settings were difficult to acomplish, but never that hard than FSX. That I think discouraged many many simmers to buy the product, and that's why FSX was not a Bestseller, instead of looking at the reasons behind this failure, MS decided based on numbers ( money) to close the project.My two cents

Does anyone have any better ideas on how to grow the flight simulator market? These casual gamers already have BF3 or similar and it's not increasing our numbers.How would you make a game to replace FSX that would satisfy both all the hard core simmers AND attract the casual users? FSX wasn't doing it by itself.

This is a typical strategy-marketing question. Let me make an example, to clarify some points. Suppose you are a publisher notorious for offering the best book on the market about Quantum Mechanics. At some point you decide to increase the selling volume not only a bit, but by several orders of magnitude. The probable end of the adventure will be that you will not reach the numbers of Harry Potter, and your previous customers would try to use you, instead of the cat, as the subject of the famous Schroendinger experiment.To directly answer your question, I think that some alternative possibilities were to work on the base of the FSX content and improve some areas:- Better graphics updated to the present standard (not two generation DX behind)- More missions (I liked them a lot), and more clearly presented to the casual users, without having to browse in the big and confusing menus- Different advertising, showing that really (not as in Flight), both the simmers and the normal players could enjoy the game- Finally, if they wanted to gain also from DLC, open an internal market, but letting the external developers free to sell their products without too many restrictions, considering them and the produced addons important assets for the "ecosystem".

If Flight fails, you won't see another flight sim out of Microsoft for at least 5 years PLUS whatever time it takes to develop it... if ever.

This is an argument frequently repeated, but I am not sure about its validity. For that reason I recently posted the thread about Simcity, because there the discussions were similar, but now EA decided to develop a new episode of the series. Actually I am very curious about the results (probably next year), because I think they could give some insights also for MS and the flight simulation question.A.