Now saving for OrbX sceneries will be much more painful...

 

Cheap or expensive, good or bad. Is this really everything?

 

I believe it comes to the fun-factor. The more fun you have, the less concerned you are with the financial side. But if the fun-factor is low, then every penny is going to be painful.

Microsoft licenced ESP code. It retained the FSX code.

 

I agree that no one would wish to licence Flight - given its apparent commercial failure..

 

And if Microsoft cant make it in the civilian market, who else is going to try?

 

Some people are saying go back to FSX, but its a pretty hard sell after experiencing Flight. I cant see jumping back happily into the world of struggling to get the latest big airport from XYZ to run acceptably while chasing down duplicate files and avidly reading forums for the latest miracle fix. Doing as much tweaking as flying was old several years ago. and will feel even older now. I think we put up with it because there is no alternative, but for me, the fun was already fading towards the zero point.

 

Flight reminded me of the simple fun of being in the air without keeping the intricacies of BGLs and Ini. files and tweaks and..... I could just fly! Now we return to the status quo, and I always thought the status quo led to conservatism, insularity and decline. Just a very long and slow decline, in this case.

 

I still think so.

I said yesterday in a post that aviation sims would never be a mass market item, and I think that MS finally realized this, although they should have known it from FSX. I think the flight sim community was angry over MS dropping FS development, and took it out on Flight. How many posts on this forum were from people that wanted Flight to be just like FS, and constantly compared the two, with Flight always coming up on the short end. I had been admonished many times for sticking up for Flight, since I knew that if this kept up, Flight was eventually doomed. Go to Xplane, or back to FSX, or P3D which is FSX really, not going to happen.

 

In the last couple of weeks, I got interested in Railroad sims, and am having a blast with it. Frame rates in the 60's, great scenery, all kinds of AI, and really makes you work to run it properly. It's a niche market too, but the forums seem to me to have a more positive attitude towards the products that they are focused on. Haven't read one post on the several forums I visited where people are complaining about the price of an add on, or how the company is screwing them with their development. Again, as I said yesterday this whining and complaining that has gone on with this forum, has really gotten old for me, and I bet for others that liked Flight. MS probably heard it to and figured that this was useless, trying to get something going that was so negatively received by so many. As to the people that think that MS will resurrect FS, you will be sadly disappointed I am afraid. After this reception they got with Flight, I think they are out of the FS business forever, and so now it's a one man show with X-plane, and that is a sorry alternative in my opinion. Try telling the X-plane chief that you don't like his pricing or designs or ATC, or aircraft, and see how far that gets you....

 

Well it's been fun, but this outcome was no surprise to me... Today I am ordering a $200 controller for my Trainz Railroad Sim, and hope to have alot of fun with that. http://www.raildriver.com/

I had that with all the planes I was using. I never bought VC-less airplane. Moreover I was speaking about a scenery, not about airplanes. It feels a bit like you really wanted to have a target ;)

Perhaps this post was the canary in the coal mine?

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/380096-microsoft-reports-first-loss-as-public-company-in-26-years/

 

 

To me, it's weird how Microsoft has just killed these projects (FSX and Flight) without selling the source code or releasing it. Most companies sell dead assets but they choose to hold them tightly. Why? What's the purpose? One thing that both Flight and FSX did was keep people on the Windows platform (I always bought the latest version of Windows with the latest version of MSFS myself.) But, if you're sitting on a mountain of code and you want to have good PR and you don't care about making money in FS any more and you want to keep people on your core product, why not release the code (or sell it to someone). It's a win-win as far as I can tell. Good PR, keep people on your OS, the sim community gets an engine that continues to improve.

 

(And I am aware of P3D...but am unsure about whether the software was licensed for further development.)

iTHINK, WE SHOULD MAKE THE WHOLE COMUNITY GETTING THEIR MONEY BACK !!

Well for me, experiencing this forum and Flight together, went hand in hand. I am glad to hear at least this forum, as long as people post in here, will be around. And I will continue to enjoy what I do have with Flight. I have other flight sims I can enjoy to, in fact have a couple of hard core combat sims with steep learning curves I will finally start to get into.

And while I still have my FSX, although I haven't fired it up since getting Flight, at some point I can go back and start enjoying it again as well.

 

I am deeply saddened by this news, but it certainly does not spell the end of flight simming for me.

Prepared an X-plane are too expensive for me, so I am going back to FSX. I am not looking forward to do that, but I am glad that I have that possibility.

Other then that what you seem to be missing is that some people really enjoyed Flight - that is why they feel like leaving. and frankly I am not seeing any product that would give me what Flight did - though that is not the end of the world, obviously :)

 

 

iTHINK, WE SHOULD MAKE THE WHOLE COMUNITY GETTING THEIR MONEY BACK !!

 

This is exactly what I was speaking about.

Prepared an X-plane are too expensive for me, so I am going back to FSX. I am not looking forward to do that, but I am glad that I have that possibility.

Other then that what you seem to be missing is that some people really enjoyed Flight - that is why they feel like leaving. and frankly I am not seeing any product that would give me what Flight did - though that is not the end of the world, obviously :)

 

I think there were alot of people that enjoyed Flight, and there were many people that were unhappy about that fact , and took every opportunity to state so.

Guys, Microsoft just posted its first loss as a public company in 26 years.

 

The global economy is on life support presently and it's short term prognosis is bleak at best.

 

This was fully a financial decision and nothing more.

iTHINK, WE SHOULD MAKE THE WHOLE COMUNITY GETTING THEIR MONEY BACK !!

 

Caveat Emptor. If your Latin isn't flash... Google. No one held a gun to anyone's head to make them buy Flight DLC.

I think it was inevitable. MS tried to manipulate an already established market. That of the base platform FSX and the addon market around it. The funny thing is that they tried to achieve that with an inferior product. What in the world persuaded them, that they could compete with all the hundred's of people who create amazing products for enhancing, and sometimes completely changing the user experience? Flight simulation is not to be taken lightly, and this is now proven.

 

EDITED FOR FONT SIZE. PLEASE KEEP AT DEFAULT FOR NORMAL POSTING. MOD.

 

You have people creating amazing products for an old product that never worked that well, and was discontinued.

Personally, I'm really bummed to hear this. I haven't really touched flight for a while, but it was exciting to think about what it could have become, and I was willing to support it if quality content was made available. Unfortunately, the content was rather too little, and too infrequent to hold my interest, even though I did buy the full Hawaii and Alaksa packs. To be honest, I don't really think there's a "casual" sim market, people either like this sort of thing or they don't, so I never really got why they thought dialing down the complexity was a good idea. Anyway, best wishes to the Flight team, I hope they're able to find something else quickly.

I wonder if FSX has outsold Flight since Flight was released. I know that I played the free Flight for a while and then decided to pick up FSX before buying into Flight (which I did later during the Steam sale). Seeing comments here and on other forums, I know others have made the same choice. Maybe Microsoft was looking at a huge jump in sales of the old FSX and asking themselves why they are developing a new product when they could just keep pressing and shipping new copies of the the old game at a marginal cost. They also sell the old game for digital download on the Live Marketplace.