I didn't mean third party addons were devoid of confusion (although there have never been more opportunities for examining extremely frank and sometimes even ruthless customer reviews, along with the plaudits). What I meant was that Howard was citing "confusion" as his logical reason for not opening Flight to other developers, and that plainly was a less than truthful real reason.

 

There is a large difference between dumbing down a product because the perception is that people are thick (which is what Howard implies), and offering opportunities to use a product in many dimensions, which I think FSX does very well. You can fire up FSX and be flying just as quickly as you could in Flight, but there were opportunities to learn more if you chose to (FSX's excellent help files and knowledge centre). 

 

Flight clearly did not "get that right", and if you think that initial enthusiasm was anything more than a desire or hope that it might succeed despite the corporate BS, I think you are mistaken but you are entitled to that view of course. 

 

I don't think developers "snarl" at you to read the manual, but it is a statistical fact that just a few minutes reading a guide does stave off frustration and misunderstanding. If anything the "snarling" is the other way around, ie: "Why does this not work as it should" and the answer is often "because you did not take a couple of minutes to investigate how it works".

 

I do agree with you that as far as possible core software should be hand holding, but most of it is if you can just take a while to read a few paragraphs. You can't expect a complex piece of software to play like it's an instant platform game!

 

I've never liked the phrase "Dumbing down"  :ph34r:

 

There are a whole host of unspoken assumptions in the phrase that can often be condescending. As for flight, it was never allowed to grow, and was pretty much savaged in its cradle. (Plus Microsoft kinda Sux) I have pointed out before that Aerofly FS, which in many ways is similarly limited (in fact more limited than flight) has been allowed to grow and develop unmolested in a way that Flight never was. People attacked (pretty savagely!) it for not being what they hoped for and not willing to give it time to grow. Not necessarily either Mr Howards or flights fault.

 

I agree with Mr Howard in theory if not in how he did it, that third parties would have likely stuck to what they knew, flooding the market with sophisticated addons that could have quickly replicated the wild west atmosphere of the current one, perhaps ultimately becoming just as disorganized and confusing. Asking for a year or two to set a more organized path and maybe build a broader, more diverse base than the current one was not that horrible a request, and again, I point out that Aerofly has gladly been given that time with little complaint.

 

Hey, they are on Steam, cant get too much broader than that!

 

I would also point out that the platform was very evidently still unfinished, missing important parts that developers would have needed anyway, so again, waiting was not all that outrageous. I have always suspected that it was pushed out the door too soon, probably to meet some deadline or just the usual corporate stupidity.

 

For historical facts, I would only say that there are many studies that show the average (barring those I mentioned before with a high innate interest) consumer gives up on software after only about 5 minutes of confusion. And I hope we can agree that some simulation software out there offers a learning curve that exceeds that by orders of magnitude.  :unsure:

 

FSX offered a simple gateway as well as room for growth straight out of the box. And it prospered. No simulation I am aware of that offered unbridled complexity straight away has ever done even marginally as well. I would have been cautious too If I was Mr Howard. But I would also have communicated with the community more. Not sure if that's his fault or just the usual Microsoft closed-mouthed secret squirrel nonsense.

 

To be fair, every question related to MSFS has been at least asked once before. Using one of the various search engines to find a solution is neither hard nor all too tedious. It's also much quicker than posting and waiting for a reply.

 

If you stick with vanilla FSX, you also won't need much intimate knowledge to enjoy it. And as you've pointed out, the trouble only starts with third party add-ons.

So yes, the content-locked Flight was perfect to bring new meat into the genre and the step up to FSX is doable as long as you keep away from add-ons.

 

True but the new user probably doesn't know or care and sometimes a question is also a way of introducing oneself and starting a dialog. It can't really be that big an issue and is easily corrected by providing an answer and then pointing out politely! that searching the forum might have also provided a solution. I know more than a few times I have seen newbies wander onto various forums, only to encounter somebody in a bad mood who doesn't wanna hear it anymore. Said newb may then promptly disappear, either totally or into lurk-mode never to be heard from again (And maybe stopping to give a finger before they go)

 

Its unnecessary. Don't like the post? Move on!! Disagree? State your reasoning (politely!)

 

That's gotta be at least as easy as looking up stuff.  :(

There was nothing wrong with "Flight" being what it was, if Joshua Howard had left it at that. What irritates is the pseudo marketing philosophy which is nothing more than a corporate script, about his "vision" and his "strategy". It's all nonsense. What the bean counters were hoping to do was to accelerate demand on a previously steady, but by now slow selling product, and to do this he was indeed dumbing down. Dumbing down in this context does not mean making something simple for simple people. It means reducing depth and breadth in order to seduce those HE CONSIDERED had poor attention spans. His failure was that in fact he underestimated his customers, and that is palpably so otherwise Flight would still be around and kicking.

 

You can't really make a flight simulator for poor attention spans. The two are mutually incompatible. You might as well write a book about history and for marketing reasons remove any words that have more than two syllables. Third party addons are in the main not much more demanding of core flying skills than default aspects, but such complexity as exists is about optimising FSX to do what it was never intended to cope with, but that is a result of ever increasing demands to make it do magic while at the same time making it all "easy". Again the two are not always compatible.

 

At some point you have to ask the user to spend at least a few minutes studying something in order to gain from it. It really is not that hard, and looking at the way particularly young people are quite capable of absorbing extremely sophisticated devices and other software, it is not really a matter of difficulty but of motivation.

 

I say again that whatever the goals of MS Flight or any other similar software, the corporate-obsessed rubbish and marketing gobbledegook by which it was promoted was at least in some part its demise. The so-called business model of a free core piece of software followed by payware content can only succeed if in the first place the core software is convincing, and then allows a reasonably free market to add to it, or failing that, a quick follow up of decent material by those that produced it. Neither was forthcoming.

 

The remaining factor is a certain fickleness of the captive customer base for these kinds of products, and that now is evident in FSX itself. Developers are under constant pressure to produce something new rather than something that lasts, or that is absorbing and satisfying over time. Flight was never going to provide either.

There was nothing wrong with "Flight" being what it was, if Joshua Howard had left it at that. What irritates is the pseudo marketing philosophy which is nothing more than a corporate script, about his "vision" and his "strategy". It's all nonsense. What the bean counters were hoping to do was to accelerate demand on a previously steady, but by now slow selling product, and to do this he was indeed dumbing down. Dumbing down in this context does not mean making something simple for simple people. It means reducing depth and breadth in order to seduce those HE CONSIDERED had poor attention spans. His failure was that in fact he underestimated his customers, and that is palpably so otherwise Flight would still be around and kicking.

 

There are some suppositions about Mr Howards intentions and mindset that I can neither prove, disprove or comfortably speculate on......   :unsure:  I do believe though that Flight isn't supported anymore for a number of reasons, not all connected to a sort of self-serving mythology that's arisen to the effect that there are no casual simmers, and therefore by not catering pretty exclusively to the existing community the product obviously failed. (or something to that effect)

 

You can't really make a flight simulator for poor attention spans. The two are mutually incompatible. You might as well write a book about history and for marketing reasons remove any words that have more than two syllables.

 

I agree, but that's not really what I was saying. Rather I'd say it's very possible to create a flight simulator that appeals to divergent Interests. Microsoft gave a mission statement to that effect at the "Welcome to flight Simulator" video that starts when you boot up FSX for the first time, but it seems as though as the years have passed (and the desire for complexity has grown) its a statement of broad appeal that may have been forgotten by some who have moved far past the basics, and sometimes seem to have little patience for catering to beginners. I have likened it before to having hopped into a helicopter and pulled up the rope ladder behind you, leaving latecomers stranded on the ground.

 

The better (and proven) approach, which I suspect was flights intention, is to start modestly and add complexity slowly while catering as much as possible to multiple interests. (Isn't that what the community did with FSX, albeit at least partially as a historical accident?) War thunder used this approach, starting with very simple flight models and then adding more and more sophisticated modes while not losing their initial audience. As of July of this year, War Thunder has three million Players, more than a billion units destroyed, over 600,000,000 sorties flown and over 30,000,000 hours flown. While its unlikely a purely civilian sim could ever reach those types of numbers, I consider it a failure of vision and a great and probably irretrievable loss that so few were willing to allow Flight to grow, and in the end, that included Microsoft itself.

 

I say again that whatever the goals of MS Flight or any other similar software, the corporate-obsessed rubbish and marketing gobbledegook by which it was promoted was at least in some part its demise. The so-called business model of a free core piece of software followed by payware content can only succeed if in the first place the core software is convincing, and then allows a reasonably free market to add to it, or failing that, a quick follow up of decent material by those that produced it. Neither was forthcoming.

 

I agree. But Microsoft is Microsoft, and Mr Howard was an officer of the company. If the order from on high is spouting gobbledegook, then unless you are very very strong-willed, you spout it with a smile, or be replaced by somebody else who will. The worst I will accuse Mr Howard of without any other evidence is wanting to keep his job! This puts him squarely in the ranks of the majority of middle management nowadays, and hardly makes him a villain. maybe a used car salesman, but not necessarily a villain. :lol: As for a reasonably free market, It was my understanding that an SDK was considered a priority, and that there was every intent to eventually provide one. Again, time ran out, and Microsoft proved to have other priorities. Like the millions of easier ways to make money that were available to it, without having people screaming at them.

 

Developers are under constant pressure to produce something new rather than something that lasts, or that is absorbing and satisfying over time. Flight was never going to provide either

 

The end of that was something we will probably never know for certain. At least not until the non-disclosure agreements end!

I suppose we can ruminate and speculate all day long about Mr. Howard. I met the guy, so I have somewhat of a different perspective. But, that aside, here are the two most important facts relevant to this discussion...

 

• FACT 1: From late 2006 until the closure of ACES in early 2009, FSX brought in over $100 million dollars in revenue to MS.
• FACT 2: From the launch of FLIGHT until its closure some 3 or 4 months later in 2012, it brought in less than $10 million in revenue to MS.

It doesn't take a lot of management 101 to realize that FLIGHT suffered some tremendous expectations placed on it by MS senior management. When it didn't meet those expectations almost immediately, it was doomed. Howard inherited a sinking ship before the ship was even launched. But, his inflexible attitude toward the existing community and blind adherence to the mantra of closed delivery and 3rd party contractors that had no previous experience (i.e., developers in Thailand that didn't know a flight sim from EXCEL), did not offer any promise of turning the disaster of FLIGHT around.

 

EDIT: And, the number above for sales of FSX should answer another question; how many flight simmers are there around the world? Or, maybe better put, how many people were given the "opportunity" to be flight simmers? You know, beyond taking the 172 off and crashing into a number of trees and then putting it away for the first person shooters...

 

Depending on your stab at wholesale purchase price by the likes of Best Buy, Walmart, and the like, you could estimate that the total units sold of FSX was somewhere between 350,000 and 550,000 units. We currently have over 117,000 members on AVSIM. You can do the math.

Of course, you can also add that when FSX was released, nothing on earth (it seemed) could run it well. A lot of people played with it and gave up and thereafter used it pretty much as a system benchmark tool if that, while assuming it was dead, especially when Aces was closed. Add to that, that the type of monster rigs that people here will happily purchase for the ability to use FSX acceptably are far from what most people have on their desks.

 

It was quite a surprise a while later when I accidentally found out that there was a flourishing third party market. I was hooked again, but I had the cash, the rig and the innate interest, having always been fascinated by flight. I think a lot of more casual people still have a keen interest in flying, but not quite the tube-liner, dials and panels Sids and Stars type of flying that seems to drive the community now, and tends to leave the masses (and their money) behind.

 

Think of the average attempt to convince family members to give it a try and contrast it with the stories of the kids getting deeply into flight

 

Microsoft, through Mr Howard did it wrong in the end, but I still (as usual) advocate for the middle ground. It could have worked in other hands.

 

Maybe Aerofly will do better.

 

 

Depending on your stab at wholesale purchase price by the likes of Best Buy, Walmart, and the like, you could estimate that the total units sold of FSX was somewhere between 350,000 and 550,000 units. We currently have over 117,000 members on AVSIM. You can do the math.

 

Tom. thank you for sharing these numbers!. Now I see a ball-park figure for the size of the community! I wonder how many of the 350-550 thousand FSX Licenced users are active. maybe some 30%- 50%  north of the AVSIM membership? say 150-180K. In that case the active number of users would be about 35% to 45% of the total who at one time bought FSX. ( Who knows..) 

Depending on your stab at wholesale purchase price by the likes of Best Buy, Walmart, and the like, you could estimate that the total units sold of FSX was somewhere between 350,000 and 550,000 units. We currently have over 117,000 members on AVSIM. You can do the math.

Your numbers seem too low. In 2007 FSX sold 280.000+ from the major retailers in the US alone. Given that FSX was released in October 2006, right before X-Mas, I'm sure quite a few fans of the franchise had bought their copy before 2007. Then came Acceleration, and Gold which has sold pretty well. The UK, Germany, France and South America has also been major markets for the FS series.

In fact, NPD Group is said to have stated that by dec. 2008 a million copies of FSX had been sold in the US alone!

 

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/confirmed-microsoft-flight-sim-studio-closing/1100-6203585/

I know several people who have FSX on their computers and two are pilots. They putter around in GA planes like the ones they have real experience with and fly to places they have really been or have an interest in......

And have never ever purchased an addon. Not to mention that like most people, their computers suck, and can barely push FSX anyway. (And at such a low level that it makes me wince)

Mention Avsim to them and they have no clue, nor real interest apparently, since despite repeated reminders they never come here. They're part of the great, forgotten mass of people who still use the sim but to whom the sort of focused interest shown on dedicated sites is a bit over the top.

The type who would blink in perplexity at someone having a cow over FSX being called a game. (Well, actually that's how I react as well)  :lol: 

Lots of them out there, I believe, still using it occasionally, or even regularly. But who will probably never ever be here.

(And would probably love flight since it's both graphically beautiful and their machines could actually run it)

Many of you are summing up the real root cause of death for the FlightSim franchise: a very broken Microsoft.

 

It is too bad as MSFS remains the best civilian flight simulator.

In fact, NPD Group is said to have stated that by dec. 2008 a million copies of FSX had been sold in the US alone!

 

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/confirmed-microsoft-flight-sim-studio-closing/1100-6203585/

 

I will trust my sources over 3rd party conjecture.

 

 

Microsoft, through Mr Howard did it wrong in the end, but I still (as usual) advocate for the middle ground. It could have worked in other hands.



Maybe Aerofly will do better.

Once again Devon, you are correct. I could not have said it any better and will not try. I also hold out hope for Aerofly FS.

 

Steve

Knowing some of the aircraft models that have been recently acquired by Aerofly for inclusion in the future, I too hold out some hope for future development.

 

No, I cannot say which models or from whom they were acquired, before anyone asks.,. :ph34r:

I will trust my sources over 3rd party conjecture.

None of us will ever get the exact number in writing, but the NPD numbers were good enough for Phil Taylor to quote on his personal weblog. FSX was rated in the top 10 of PC game sales in 2007, and I don't see how much better such a niche title could realistically have done it. FS2004 never reached the top ten.

 

If you have the correct number from the accountants at MS there is no arguing of course. It would be dissapointing numbers indeed. I heard close to 2 million worldwide sales, including Accelleration. It was in conversation with an MS insider, but I never got a second source to confirm it.

 

On the surface of things FSX seemed like a decent success, but MS decided to focus on Xbox over the PC as a gaming platform. As a beancounter myself I would not be surprised if all MS software had to meet a fixed ROI level to survive, and niche products, although profitable, might be considered not profitable enough.

On the surface of things FSX seemed like a decent success, but MS decided to focus on Xbox over the PC as a gaming platform. As a beancounter myself I would not be surprised if all MS software had to meet a fixed ROI level to survive, and niche products, although profitable, might be considered not profitable enough.

 

Especially the way Microsoft does things, which is to sic massive teams on a project and "construction of the death star" type resources (compared to what anyone else can pull off)

 

All those people needed to be paid, and all those resources used needed to be recouped, and to do that, a profit level that would make many other companies ecstatic was probably not even a blip on Microsofts radar. The end credits for the people and companies who worked on flight goes on for page after page after page (after page) and I cant even imagine the resources that went into FSX!

 

If you were Microsoft, would you go after a market as small as this one, and make maybe 100 million dollars (sans development and marketing/packaging/distribution and etc) over the course of several years, or would you focus on something like Grand theft Auto V that can get you a billion dollars, literally within a week?

 

Honestly, I was always astonished (as well as happy) that Flight was ever green-lighted at all. Somebody took a really really big chance, both on flight simulation and on us, and I don't think they will ever do that again. Especially considering how some people behaved. We looked a possible gift horse in the mouth and talked smack about its mama.  :lol: