I've seen the announcements and thread about the sale of FSX to Dove Tail Games and their connection to Steam. However, even after visiting their website, I'm not sure I understand what this means to me as an owner of FSX. Does it mean future versions will only be played online via Steam or does it mean we will download future versions to our hard drives from Steam? 

Honestly, it means nothing at all to current FSX licensees. There will be no "further versions" of FSX. Period.

First of all, Steam is an online gaming platform.  For those of us who also enjoy Train Sim, this has been the way it works for a couple years at least.  You buy a license and the content downloads to your PC.   Works pretty well in my opinion.    TS doesnt require all the video tweaks etc, of FSX, so we will see how well it works there.

 

I probably will not use this method since I have it all already installed.  however, I dont currently use XPlane and it is also going the way of Steam.  I MAY try Xplane this way, since I have no current investment in it.

geez. I thought that was what happen when water changes from a liquid to a gas?

(Disclaimer I am a big Steam fan and in the Technology industry so for me change is the ever constant and part of my working and daily life)

 

Its a semi cloud based gaming system. You log into your account after downloading and installing the client and all your steam games are there, you can log into your account anywhere and download the games to play anywhere, so long as you only log onto one machine at a time. It keeps all your games up to date, includes friends lists and communities so you know when your buddies are on line playing and what they are playing making any on line play super easy to setup if your into it. It also tracks your game hours and others cool little things such as regular awesome sales that will more often than not introduce you to lots of cool games you might never of thought would be any good or your kind of thing, you can use all this stuff or not its up to you, you just log in by/download your existing library as needed and click play.

 

Some people have had trouble with it in the past but most of that is in the past now (The service has been running for donkey's years) and to be honest Ive yet to find a system that doesn't have its haters. It is however the way the industry (Tech industry as a whole) is going so if you want to stay current its best to get on board and at least get an understanding of how cloud based delivery services work. The cloud is here and its not going to go away.

 

Best anaolgy, think of a hotmail or old Yahoo email account. You access them anywhere on any device so long as its connected. You look at the your emails after logging in and then log out done. Now imagine that only as well as messages add your games library, there to play anytime you log in.

 

http://store.steampowered.com/

My fantasy is being able to download a sim, and all my purchased content, then have it all install and update itself while I'm out watching a movie. Flight-sims would catch up (a little) with the rest of the world, and the cruel, weekend-long re-installs of the type we've had up to now with FSX would be a distant (Wow-I-can't-believe-we-used-to-go-through-all-that) memory.

 

Like tape drives

 

Orbx spoke of a similar system years ago for their DLC (got my hopes up!) but it never happened.