The way I see it is flight simulators have been around since the beginnings of the PC. In fact, they predate the PC. I remember playing them on a Commodore 64.

 

The real hayday of the flight simulator was probably 20 years ago, when we had things like Red Baron, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and so on. I still have a lot of flight simulators from that era, and Microsoft Flight Simulator was the boring option at that time (why fly a Cessna, when you can fly an F-16?)

 

Of course, computer technology has taken a giant leap or two since then.

 

I see no reason to believe that flight simulators are, or should be, a dying genre. I think there is a market out there, but that Microsoft is too big and bloated to capture it.

 

But if Microsoft does not do it, someone else will. In fact, since the elephant has left the room, another developer may step in to fill the vacuum. X-Plane has already been working on it for a while. If one of these simulators is successful, you can pretty much expect Microsoft to buy them out, just like they did with the original Flight Simulator.

 

Or not. Microsoft is not the same nimble company that it was decades ago. Bill Gates got rich selling IBM and operating system he did not have. I have a hard time imagining the Microsoft of today being so ballsy. So the problem here may be with Microsoft itself. It seems to have become a dinosaur which is on the verge of becoming extinct.

I am glad that ms left the flight simulation space and I hope it is for good. I have no reason to believe that they will ever come back. I am, however, looking forward to the development of flight simulation software from a company or companoes that are more aligned to the community that it should serve.

 

Can I ask what you use as a flightsim currently?

Cheers DB

 

Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk 2

I don't get it, I really don't.

 

If Laminar lost the pending lawsuit, was driven into bankruptcy and went out of business, would it be all right to wander into that forum to opine that the Plausible world never worked and I am glad its gone?

 

Should Prepare3d ever become unavailable for legal reasons, could I wander over there to say "Good riddance" it was a bad idea?

 

Why do we do these things?

 

Even worse is the knowledge that many of the things we hold up as being part of the "Golden age" of simming would likely be roundly rejected as "Games" and be generally ignored (in this community) just like modern "games" such as War Thunder and Wings of Prey are now if they were to be released at this point.

 

Yet these "games" are the ones getting the development money, the technical expertise and the financial success to fund their various sequels. We continue to reject the reasons for that, and just keep on batting for more "Real" Sims" with more "Realism" (read systems minutia) then mumble darkly about "Dumbed down" entertainment and "Console kids" when more people play those "Games" rather than coming to join us in our shrinking technical cul-de-sac.

 

Those type of "games" that drew many of us to this hobby originally in the first place, once upon a time.

I agree fully HiFlyer. You always get to the root of the matter so elegantly, well said. I certainly would never even think of going into another forum and being critical. I can only suppose that "they" must feel really threatened in some way.

What I find curious is that with all the things we are trying to post in this forum that have to do with the the interesting and fun aspects of Flight, this subject keeps coming up. Are we so bored with ourselves that we can't think of anything else to discuss except the "demise" of Flight and how wonderful it would have been had it kept going, and how great FSX is and XPlane, and all the other "games" out there are in comparison?

 

Is life so tough that all we can see are the negatives?

 

I'm not that bored, and I don't think things are that tough, and I know of several in this forum that aren't either.

 

I respectfully request that we get away from all this. It doesn't matter a hill of beans what could, should, might, have been. We have what we have and for the time being that's all folks.

 

Let's enjoy what we have and focus on the brighter aspects of the sim, please.