Any possibility of someone else taking over the consumer rights to the ESP platform and code?

[Murmur 3,941]

1 hour ago, FlyBaby said:

I did not notice how popular the Steam version is....selling at $25....with over 8K very positive reviews and $4K in dlc.

I think this is a good cash cow for now.

It's interesting to note that, analyzing the data from Steamdb, even during the last 6 months FSX:SE continued to sell more than X-Plane 11, AeroflyFS 2 and Flight Sim World combined: about 74.000 (FSX:SE) vs 44.800 (XP11), 6.300 (AFS2), 5.800 (FSW).

From my rough estimates, FSX:SE was continuing to produce about 4-5 times the revenues of FSW.

 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

According to the latest info from DTG they have no intension of removing FSX:SE from steam, this makes sense as there are still some developers releasing addons FSX compatible, and the in use numbers are good and that does not include the boxed version and is likely still the most used flight sim platform, if look at the PC market high end PC`s make up a very small %  most are mid to low specs, hence the fact that old games on steam do well they can run them.  

[chelmo 42]

10 hours ago, rjfry said:

According to the latest info from DTG they have no intension of removing FSX:SE from steam, this makes sense as there are still some developers releasing addons FSX compatible, and the in use numbers are good and that does not include the boxed version and is likely still the most used flight sim platform, if look at the PC market high end PC`s make up a very small %  most are mid to low specs, hence the fact that old games on steam do well they can run them.  

Why would they even consider removing it from Steam when it's subject to a separate licence? I would imagine they pay for the FSX Steam licence on a pay-as-you-go basis based on the number of units sold so I can see no good reason why that shouldn't continue.

[harrry 322]

Not quite sure if Steam will remove it.  Customers have paid.  they will remove it from sale to new customers though.  As ar as I can tell in similar circumstances they have only removed one game from peoples libraries.

[188AHC 2,138]

It has been clearly stated on Steam that any DTG purchase you have made and which is in your library will remain there. 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

And some developers may make there products FSW compatible, like DD has just updated Seattle Airports which are FSW compatible but not hosted on steam.

[Phantoms 800]

On 4/23/2018 at 9:05 PM, Boomer said:

Maybe PMDG will buy it at a heavy discount and finally do right by it.  Good riddence to FSW and DTG in our community.

You mean like charge an outrageous amount for it? If PMDG did by it, they can keep it as far as I'm concerned,.

[Wobbie 938]

Once again, in my humble opinion, it is quite elitist to think that everybody wants a PMDG plane/sim.

Not everyone wants to fly by the numbers. There are actually some who want to simply get into the hobby & fly/'play' with simple GA stuff. A 'fancy' sim is just going to scare new guys away.

We need to get back to basics if we want to attract new people, with a scalable sim.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Wobbie said:

Once again, in my humble opinion, it is quite elitist to think that everybody wants a PMDG plane/sim.

Not everyone wants to fly by the numbers.

Well, there can be more reasons for not buying PMDG planes... I do like to fly by the numbers every now and then but still I don't use PMDG for that for various personal reasons. 

[torium 207]

FSW is not completely dead - yet. 🐣

Chris Ellis (BlueSky) is a true enthusiast who supports the FSW community and writes, quote: "I'm extremely sad. 
I develop for three of the major sims in the market place and FSW had such a great future ahead of it. 
The PBR was better than all of the other sims at this present time and our Spit cockpit really showed that off. The out-of-the-box content in FSW surpassed the others as well, without the need for further add-ons.
We'll still keep developing for it, maybe freeware, maybe payware, we'll see.
It's sad when something likes this happens to my hobby turned into a profession."

"The way I see it is that the more that the community can make for a sim the better. 

Yes I’ve poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into countless years of research, trips, photographers, sounds recording sessions and all the fun that goes into making aircraft modules but I love doing that. 

I’ll break even at some point selling modules but it’s certainly won’t make millions which some in the community seem to think. I really do it for the love, as do all of my team on various sim’s.

Can I give something back to the community to ignite the same passion that my team and I have, yes of course I can. 

On countless streams with DTG I’ve talked about the SDK and how easy it is to integrate an aircraft into FSW and I’m glad to see some of the community interested in that and will help them develop their vision and dreams into a reality. 

Yes I’m very sad that FSW is no longer in development and I still think it’s one of the best sims out there for its graphical ability (read PBR in core sim here) and I fly all of the other major sims out there and develop for three others outside FSW.

Will FSW die and no longer be used, only if we let it. 

Let’s cut the sniping out and move forward, after all this is our hobby and passion. 

Chris"

Quote

From BlueSky Flight Simulations:
"Hey Guys,
Some of the folks at FSW Break have been asking about making aircraft for Flight Sim World.

This Saturday May 5th at 20:00 BST (GMT +1) I'll be doing a live Q&A stream showing how to set-up your work environment using the FSW SDK and the main principles for the model and textures for an FSW aircraft.
I'll be doing some animations and explaining as I go so please have your questions ready.

Feel free to post any questions in this post before the stream and I can make sure I cover them.

The stream will be here: https://www.twitch.tv/blueskyfs

Look forward to seeing you on Saturday,
Chris."

It is really inspiring to see that someone cares!!!! 

[Murmur 3,941]

1 hour ago, torium said:

FSW is not completely dead - yet. 🐣

That would be great news, but for FSW to "survive" two things would be needed:

1) New users able to buy it (even after the 24th May);

2) Continued development.

This could in theory be possible, but DTG would need to sell FSW to another company.

 

[chelmo 42]

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

That would be great news, but for FSW to "survive" two things would be needed:

1) New users able to buy it (even after the 24th May);

2) Continued development.

This could in theory be possible, but DTG would need to sell FSW to another company.

In theory anything is possible. However, as things stand after 24 May Dovetail will not be able to sell the product as their licence will have expired and after that date what you will essentially have is a core technology owned by Microsoft and a sort of "extra" technology owned by Dovetail. Each of which then is pretty useless without the other.

So someone, again in theory, could step in....but good luck to them.

[Christopher Low 5,353]

Removal from sale does not mean that the existing FSW users can't keep the dream alive. I used Flight Unlimited 3 (plus the Flight Unlimited 2 San Francisco scenery) exclusively between 1999 and 2008, and I used the built in FLight Unlimited EDitor to "upgrade" the airport and airfield layouts, and add lots of scenery packages (with the help of one or two model builders). Others created a handful of good quality flyable planes, and massively upgraded the AI environment. It was a fantastic little community, and I am honoured to have been a part of that. Maybe FSW can be the same?

[Murmur 3,941]

23 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Removal from sale does not mean that the existing FSW users can't keep the dream alive. I used Flight Unlimited 3 (plus the Flight Unlimited 2 San Francisco scenery) exclusively between 1999 and 2008, and I used the built in FLight Unlimited EDitor to "upgrade" the airport and airfield layouts, and add lots of scenery packages (with the help of one or two model builders). Others created a handful of good quality flyable planes, and massively upgraded the AI environment. It was a fantastic little community, and I am honoured to have been a part of that. Maybe FSW can be the same?

Of course nobody is going to forcefully uninstall FSW from users PC's. I purposedly used the word "survive" between quotation to mean a very specific thing, that is a simulator whose user base is expanding. But that is possible only at two conditions, i.e. new users can get it, and it is in active development (whether the core or using addons).

I doubt the current estimated userbase of 50-60.000 people is enough to sustain interest in the long term. Even if affectionate 3rd parties would begin pumping out addons for FSW, the userbase couldn't expand after it will be taken off from sale.

For this reason it could "survive" only if, one way or another, it will remain for sale to the public.

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

3 hours ago, Murmur said:

Of course nobody is going to forcefully uninstall FSW from users PC's. I purposedly used the word "survive" between quotation to mean a very specific thing, that is a simulator whose user base is expanding. But that is possible only at two conditions, i.e. new users can get it, and it is in active development (whether the core or using addons).

I doubt the current estimated userbase of 50-60.000 people is enough to sustain interest in the long term. Even if affectionate 3rd parties would begin pumping out addons for FSW, the userbase couldn't expand after it will be taken off from sale.

Agreed, and to make things worse, this sim won't have much of a public presence after May 24. It was only sold through Steam, and presumably the Steam store page for FSW will go away at that point.

A question was asked on Steam about what would happen to the FSW Discussion area there, and this was the reply from DTG:

Will the Steam forum still be available?
Yes, if you own the sim. The community hub will be viewable if the sim is in your library.

So the Discussion area won't even be visible to anyone curious who doesn't already own it. I assume the Avsim forum will remain open for user-to-user support. But unless DTG sells the entire package to someone else, this sim will have a very low profile going forward.

By comparison, you can still download the free introduction version of MS Flight from the Microsoft site. I remember other sims like Flight Unlimited were still available long after they stopped development. User interest and buy-in tailed off slowly, and wasn't suddenly interrupted like this. Due to the license issues, this sim is crashing much harder than those other ones.

I'm not a developer, but it seems to me that anyone interested in creating add-ons, even on a free basis, would shift their efforts to one of the "surviving" flight sims.