My apologies, I haven't looked too closely at the store pages for some of the more recent games. Even so I don't think user reviews will have much effect.

 

Laminar have reached just about everyone they can in the small flight simming community, Steam would give them the chance to reach an awful lot more.

 

 

 

I really can't understand why this is a "huge risk" and how the "vicious circle" will spread? What exactly will happen to X-Plane or Laminar if XP10 appears on Steam? Some people will buy it, a lot of people won't. Go and check out the Steam forums for the likes of Total War Rome 2 and X-Rebirth - these games have been very poorly received yet they sold by the bucketload on Steam, so much so that Creative Assembly are just about to release the first expansion for Rome 2.

 

I think you are making a gross over simplification of things here. Please take a look at what's available on Steam - DCS World and all the modules are available, as is the likes of IL-2 1946, IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, Aerofly FS, Rail Simulator 2014, Euro Truck Simulator to name a few simulations.

 

Cast your net a bit wider and there is the likes of the Total War series, Paradox titles like Europa Universalis, Victoria, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, the Silent Hunter series, the Anno series, Sonalysts' titles like 688(I) Hunter Killer, Sub Command and Dangerous Waters, Sid Meier's Civilization series... I'm just scratching the surface of literally hundreds, if not thousands of games that could not be any further from "full colors and flashing bright lights; fast and furious weapons / cars / asteroids / planets / etc" and are every bit as cerebral and intellectually challenging as anything you might want to do in a flight simulator.

 

Nobody say that it could not sell copies; and that is not the issue.

The issue is that steam users are used to mostly flashy games rather than simulators; also do not forget; xplane is an eternal game in progress; and this will not be understood by many that in return will start to bash it.

 

that is why it is a risk; once bad reviews start to appear on steam they will spread on many other sites including bad videos showing on youtube etc etc.

If you fly xplane 10 you know that; just to give an example many areas do not even have autogen; or any life at all; what will happen when a steam users fly over New York and see next to nothing ?  === big bash and mourn on steam forum; next here is the video show up on Utube.

 

Xplane need more cosmetic work; before showing its face on a place like steam.

"issue", "risk", "bash"...

 

:wink: Have you also been scared like this when a mobile version of X-Plane was released on the Apple Store and on the Google Play Store ?

This sounds great, I've always thought that X Plane would benefit from being more easily accessible to wider audience through Steam. 

 

 

 

The issue is that steam users are used to mostly flashy games rather than simulators

DCS sells through Steam just fine too and a train simulator series does that also. I see no reason why X Plane couldn't do the same. 

Among the millions of steam users there are also people interested in simulations. And people with potential interest in simulations.

Several simulations have already been mentioned. There are also Rise of Flight and Take-down helicopters on steam.

Some of these simulations have been offered at 50% or 75% discounts during the last Black-Friday-Sale.

 

I think it will be interesting to see how the X-Plane system will work with the steam system.

I'll admit, I did purchase MS Flight from Steam when they ran a sale on the base software and some DLC packs. Only a few weeks later they cancelled the whole thing. I also find it crazy that sales were similar to that of FS X (someone said that here). Was there actually any article on this anywhere? It's just crazy to me that you have a company like Microsoft who is in the entertainment biz and doesn't wish to continue on the Flight Sim franchise due to low (but good) yielding revenues, yet Lockheed takes on P3D and makes what appears to be an honest effort to interact with the community. I would think P3D is pennies (speaking of the non-professional market) on the books to Lockheed compared to what they do for "real" money. 

 

All this said, I don't really recall reviews being around for Flight on the Steam page at the time. Was the feedback pretty welcoming, or was it really that bad?

I'll admit, I did purchase MS Flight from Steam when they ran a sale on the base software and some DLC packs. Only a few weeks later they cancelled the whole thing. I also find it crazy that sales were similar to that of FS X (someone said that here). Was there actually any article on this anywhere? It's just crazy to me that you have a company like Microsoft who is in the entertainment biz and doesn't wish to continue on the Flight Sim franchise due to low (but good) yielding revenues, yet Lockheed takes on P3D and makes what appears to be an honest effort to interact with the community. I would think P3D is pennies (speaking of the non-professional market) on the books to Lockheed compared to what they do for "real" money. 

 

All this said, I don't really recall reviews being around for Flight on the Steam page at the time. Was the feedback pretty welcoming, or was it really that bad?

Actually it was quite welcoming. The issue was (as it was here and everyplace else) that disgruntled simmers who were expecting FS11, continually came onto the Steam forums (there was more than one for FLIGHT) to tell everyone what a piece of crap FLIGHT was, and how we all really needed to get a "real" sim, etc.

 

The Facebook forum got the same treatment.

 

As I mentioned in another thread, people even came into online sessions and would just sit on the ground and harangue people for using FLIGHT until players learned to read the signs and insta-boot such people. And YouTube videos got the same heckling. It was a mess.

 

Nonetheless there was some evidence in another thread (The man who killed FSX) that despite giving away the first half for free, and dramatically lower prices for individual pieces of DLC than for comparable pieces in the FSX marketspace, FLIGHT was apparently doing about as well as FSX had been doing at that point in its release. If it had continued, it could be argued the numbers might well have been about the same.

 

That had to be due almost solely to the huge exposure it was given on steam. Too bad Microsoft showed all of the marketing sense and communications skills of a Cross-eyed hyena.

 

Too bad for everyone. Now, thanks to some small efforts, Flight may have some minuscule hopes of another chance, but its going to be a close call, and will certainly require more good faith than was shown before, by many in the community.

 

Certainly with all FLIGHT had pushing against it, if it could still do what it did, X-plane should have a lot of wind in its sails. At least at first.

 I also find it crazy that sales were similar to that of FS X (someone said that here). Was there actually any article on this anywhere? It's just crazy to me that you have a company like Microsoft who is in the entertainment biz and doesn't wish to continue on the Flight Sim franchise due to low (but good) yielding revenues

Well, I wouldn't call it crazy or unexpected. It was simply a victim of a reorganization of the whole department. Suddenly the X-Box management was in control of the whole project. So they replaced the team leader and gave him a new objective: Lower the costs and get 3 million customers by the end of the year. Totally impossible but they simply needed a reason to close this project to reallocate their resources into their own projects.

 

Nothing unusual in big companies., Sometimes  other departments in the same company are a bigger threat than their direct competitors.

I think it's a good idea. Steam is actually a great platform for distributing simulations, and it's already being used for some sims such as train sims.

 

Steam Workshop is a good way to distribute free add-ons, where as commercial addons can be made available as DLC via the Steam store. This will make it easier to manage add-ons than with the current system of manually copying files to the X-Plane folder. The only issue is that some publishers may want to distribute their content through their own storefronts, which may cause problems with the Steam version of the sim.

 

I don't think the download size is going to be a problem or that you'll have to pay for individual tiles. Steam is very capable of handling the huge amounts of bandwidth usage resulting when popular titles are released. Even though X-Plane itself with global scenery is a larger download, the total number of downloads will be much lower than for the most popular titles.

It's a good idea:

More exposure generally means more sales, which hopefully will...

• Fund another staff developer to get things moving faster. (The tortoise and the hare concept is a noble one to consider, but you can only be so slow...)
• Entice some more 3rd party developers with a larger user base.

It's a bad idea:

X-Plane is not an "introductory" flight sim... It's not designed as such, doesn't seem to be targeted as such, and doesn't really work as such...

• You thought the "RTFM" moments here and on other forums were bad now?! Folks on forums with low tolerance for newbie questions will be beside themselves.
• You thought the complaints about (scenery, ATC, weather, UI, sensitivity, performance, etc.etc.) were bad now?!
• Too much exposure in the wrong target market could set up a reputational issue that could be challenging to recover from.

It's a GREAT idea:

I'm dreaming of course, but...

• If (if if if) they can leverage the Steam network's bandwidth to be a vehicle to provide frequent (quarterly or semi-annual at worst) updates to the base DSF/OSM scenery. I'd gladly deal with the negatives if this was one of the benefits we could reap from it.

It's a bad idea:

X-Plane is not an "introductory" flight sim... It's not designed as such, doesn't seem to be targeted as such, and doesn't really work as such...

 

And that's the thing. can they, or even better do they want to make themselves approachable to other types of people?

 

Can they adjust and respond to the varied needs/desires of a very different market and customer base in a timely manner.....?

 

Tune in tomorrow.........

well there seams to be some good news.

someone from steam contacted austin asking him if the xplane on steam account was actually from LR. here is his answer

Just got this email assuaging any fears!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Austin Meyer

6:47 PM (3 minutes ago)

to me
marty is with me, and we are evaluating steam for distro, yes
you can post this on the forum so nobody is wondering about validity
of course, even if we get the green light, there is no guarantee that we will move forwards, since we do not know if steam can handle a 70-gig download
 

austin

 

so lets hope it does get green lit and steam would host the game