When you look at the live marketplace scenario and the parts of the world released at seperate times scheme, it seems they had a plan, a strategy for marketing Flight, yet the sporatic and lackluster release of DLC says otherwise, not to mention shutting it down so early. The Josh Howard statements that the existing community wasn't it's target market was also a big mistake and one that could have easily been fixed by providing other aircraft and scenery areas to keep that part of the market content while pandering to their percieved market. I also imagine that if they had offered cockpits with the warbirds and opened up the Pacific theatre island areas as a DLC, they would have also captured another small part of the market. If they had just tried to capture all the different markets at once, rather than focus on one specifc, untested one, who knows what might have happened.

 

I agree, and I sometimes think that the initial guidelines for the FLIGHT project may have been different from the fate it eventualy ended with. I find that Joshua's posture in is unfamous interview negatively contributed to kill or at least reinforce the negative opinions from prospective users, the so called hardcore simmers.

 

The decision to release the cokpitless aircraft, while it didn't affect me that much, was also rather controversial, and the project leaders should have promptly corrected the error. Not only did they ignore it, but they also failled at identifying possible alternatives like a Pacific Theatre for the fighters, or at least an announcement that such a DLC would be eventualy released...

 

I really wish they had released a nice heli before shutting down, would have went a long way with me enjoying it for a lot longer.

 

That's something I really wanted to have, but at the same time was affraid of because unless they really did some thorough revision of the rotary wing code inherited from previous versions of the MS Simulator, the helicopter might as well be a font of further criticism....

MS has lost a lot of reputation in the past years because of its bad management and silly decisions, not because of user complains.

 

I personally think they hit a home run with Windows 7. I have not really done any checking into Windows 8, but if they stray to far from the success of 7 that would not be good.

 

I think a larger part of the problem, is PC sales are really lagging, due to the popularity of tablets now, namely iPad. I believe there will always be a market for the PC enthusiast, but it will shrink as time marches on.

Complaints do not matter at all if software keeps selling well, and on the other hand if it sells too badly no matter how good feedback they get they will still stop the project.

 

As Flight didn't sell enough and MS was going to close that game studio anyway it made perfect sense to stop development for Flight... Of course this is just what I believe myself.

 

Most of the complaints about Flight were inside FS forums anyway and thus didn't affect most of Flights potential customers.

 

I think many potensial customers are in these forums anyway, and when 9 out of 10 feedbacks are negative (some of them more or less pure harassment) it doesn't hjelp sales. So lots of complaints in a way can reduce sales I think.

 

MS have probably had their say in this, but I hope they at least consider seiling it or maling the SDK available. Anything else would be such a vaste ( yes, guess Im just a tiny bit emotional about this whole thing :)