Microsoft Halts MS Flight

[lthendrix 25]

good onya mate since it is already tomorrow where your at .. Have a good weekend

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

Hey Matt how ya been ,Thats a scary statistic. I for one dread a world where everyone is walking the streets, head down, caressing their fondle slabs like brainless app and facebook enslaved zombies.

 

Give it another 20 years, seems like we're already a quarter of the way there.

 

I've actually had people run into me on the sidewalk because they were head down iPhoning, iPadding, iTouching, or sliding there fingers around some type of tablet. Kind of makes the movie Idiocracy seem not entirely impossible.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I tried out Flight and it just wasn't for me. After years of being spoiled by MSFS releases that had worldwide airport and scenery coverage, the thought of having to pay piecemeal for scenery and a stable of aircraft didn't work with me. Also, I have FSX and FS9 tuned very well, Flight didn't offer anything outstandingly different in terms of scenery or smoothness.

 

That said, there's a number of regular members here who enjoyed Flight and supported it. I feel for them, because in spite of their support Microsoft let Flight go. What a let down.... To have hopes raised of a long term interest in Flight, only to have their hopes dashed after six months. I hope these members continue to participate in our community although if I were in their shoes, I might have gone silent out of frustration.

 

Regards,

 

John

[sadnane 0]

Since ESP's shutdown it became clear that Microsoft were no longer interested in the FS franchise as we knew it for about 25 years now. With Flight they tried to lock the doors against add-ons developers so they'll be able to control that secondary market the way they feel, but things don't work that way (or at least didn't work that way).

 

Now with Microsoft out of the picture, I would really know if they will hold the Flight SDK even though there'll be no further development. If it's the case then what's the point? and how could the laid-off teams just stay without doing anything in the foreseeable future? it really bums me out how Microsoft have ruined a successful franchise because of their carelessness towards so many loyal fans. Huge corporations work for profits indeed, but at least I hope they'll release Flight SDK and pass the relay baton to other independent developers who really care about their costumers and most of all, are doing it with passion and dedication.

[Bob Scott 7,750]

I'm shocked...SHOCKED I tell you, to hear that this whole Flight thing didn't pan out. :shok:

 

Proof positive that you can lead a horse to a waste treatment plant, but you can't make him drink...

[HiFlyer 9,374]

Hey Matt how ya been ,Thats a scary statistic. I for one dread a world where everyone is walking the streets, head down, caressing their fondle slabs like brainless app and facebook enslaved zombies.

 

This is not all that surprising. The move in consumer use from PC's to smaller multipurpose devices has been the norm AFAIK in Japan for years, and it seems that we are now trending the same way. In various financial and business press, the alarm has been sounding for repeatedly, with japan as the often used canary in the coal mine.

[sadnane 0]

Proof positive that you can lead a horse to a waste treatment plant, but you can't make him drink...

 

Quite true! I guess that they decided to give up the FS franchise since ESP shutdown but someone had the idea to try the Flight concept for "fast profits". It seems that they had nothing to lose, whether it's gonna work or they'll throw it away anyway. Trying to create a fictitious target market that does not exist is pure suicide.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

EA Games did the same thing to my beloved Sim City.....I don't like it when they try and re-invent the wheel. Sim City 4 was released in 2003 and now the next release will be 2013 (ten years later). The other titles in between have been collosal failures as they tried different things.

[TheFamilyMan 281]

Here's my Flight interpolation (all conjecture):

 

MS decided a few years ago to release yet another FS, so they assembled a team worthy of such a project. This team worked very hard to design and develop the best MSFS yet. Once focused on their end goal, they gave management their plans for the next MSFS and management flipped out, probably due to cost and schedule. So management came up with "plan b" which was to immediately scavenge the base engine and cobble it together into a "contemporary MS framework" (as in Age of Empires III, a demo with paid DLC) that could be marketed right away, and thus this became Flight. Along with this came management's inverted Field of Dreams promise to the development team: if they come, you will build it. And unfortunately, the masses didn't come and we know what happened.

 

What's next? A mess...the team is scattered...it is a HUGE undertaking (read expensive) for a new team to pickup up other developers' software and make a go at it, something that I doubt MS will ever do given its current management. Am I bummed out?..yes. Face it, even though FSX gets the job done well, it shows its age all too clearly and it'll never get that much better. Whether P3D v2 really matters remains to be seen.