ACES Studio Member Responds to FSW Closure

[Boomer 1,619]

What we saw here is the Darwinian effect of market forces.

[Nuno Pinto 1,395]

I just love when the truth finds its weird way out into the open.

[paulopp 56]

The debate is interesting, but without any hard facts why DTG really choose to cut development the debate will just be between "knew it all from the start" and "negative campaigning brought it down".

[fs4fun 366]

It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare FSW with the established sims and say FSW failed because it was inferior. That's like shooting a foal because it's "inferior" to an adult racehorse. DTG had plans to replace many of the old subsystems from FSX with new technology, TrueSky was just the start. This seemed pretty interesting to me and I was looking forward to seeing what happened. In the meantime DTG could not have expected any great market penetration with the limited feature set they delivered to date, so it doesn't make sense to say FSW failed to do something it could not reasonably have been expected to do. Even though FSW exited EA, they were still clearly in the early product development stages.

As Christian says above, we don't know the facts. It could well be that DTG realized that since they had to back off on the 30% DLC cut, they had no other way to get the revenues needed to support ongoing development, or it may be as said in the OP that problems in other non-FSW areas of DTG product development meant that FSW development could not continue. Being blown off by major 3PD's probably didn't help, and I will say a lot of those problems were DTG's own doing.

Anyway my impression is more that FSW was smothered in the crib, much like MS Flight was.

[TheFamilyMan 280]

No business/product is immune to bad management.  FSW fate was ultimately a result of this, and this alone.  Blaming the consumer is plain silliness at best...hey, it's a free market...bring us what we want...don't blame us if you don't.

[G-RFRY 1,710]

2 hours ago, TheFamilyMan said:

No business/product is immune to bad management.  FSW fate was ultimately a result of this, and this alone.  Blaming the consumer is plain silliness at best...hey, it's a free market...bring us what we want...don't blame us if you don't.

Judging by what the simmers want`s no one has done that yet even the ones on the market now.

[himmelhorse 1,276]

Vortex681, and all,

I was specifically referring to his last video just after FSW closure, which drew a fair amount of critisism. I am/was aware that he was very vocal in his critisism after the release of FSW and wasjust one among many detractors. 

However, in the closure video he did, in fact, praise the creative staff and most of his vitriol was aimed very directly at the management and marketing practices. Again, that is my view and if others disagree, then so be it. It was not my intention to denigrate any opinions and I really was just stating my own.

Torium answered the second part of your query. That statement also obligated the word "inferred" in my initial response.

Regardless though, of who said what and why, I am not trying, and was not trying, to apportion blame. My hope remains, that someone or some company, can turn this fiasco into a sim platform that was initially touted by FSW. It still has "potential"  but, for the life of me, I still cannot understand why DTG released what it did and not actually do what LM did with just a 64 bit version of FSX. I cannot see why they needed to strip FSX in order to redo the whole platform. At least with the full 64bit FSX they had a fully functional sim platform which, I believe, could have been gutted and modified in sections, ie WX, ATC, Traffic etc. It may well be impossible (I really do not know) but even an explanation would have worked wonders in my opinion.  I also thought, and criticised DTG for what I perceived as their initial poor communications skills.

Again, regardless of the actual or inferred or just guessed reasons for the failure, the fact remains that it has gone belly up and not a lot will ever change that. In moving forward, if that is possible the problem or or outstanding solution, lies in positivity and not negativity. I believe very strongly that the platform is revivable although it will take deep pockets, and if the right approach can be found now, there is a chance that it will be competitive with the other biggies.  

I think we have reached the stage where we can do without the "I told you so" statements and all other negativitity and to really start to think creatively to achieve a state where a "rescue mission" is possible. There are volumes of wants and desires for the new  FSW platform in the early stages of its development in the Avsim forums. If someone can re-read those and, most importantly actually do something, other than listen, we coulod have a new and fully functional new platform.

I live in hope.

Regards to all

Tony 

 

 

 

[chelmo 42]

14 hours ago, TheFamilyMan said:

No business/product is immune to bad management.  FSW fate was ultimately a result of this, and this alone.  Blaming the consumer is plain silliness at best...hey, it's a free market...bring us what we want...don't blame us if you don't.

I wouldn't say it was the sole reason but it certainly was the biggest one.

They had gone for years with their Train Simulator; then at virtually the same time (July 2014) they announced the deal with Microsoft which would lead to both FSX Steam and FSW, they announced the start of development on their fishing game and work also started on Train Sim World. Three big development projects which would clearly take time, effort and above all lots of money before they could hope to make any return. Knowing what they were due to pay Microsoft I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at their business meetings planning for this.

In the end I'm afraid they should just have stuck to trains.

[vortex681 806]

On 5/10/2018 at 12:41 PM, torium said:

I think he refers to this statement (facts), quote: "...... alongside the player numbers we need."

https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/flight-sim-world-closure-announcement.4514/

or:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/389280/announcements/detail/3400657079148405506

In those links he says "we regrettably don’t see a clear direction that will allow us to keep to the development time we’d want, alongside the player numbers we need". That's hardly blaming the customers - it's simply stating a fact.

On 5/10/2018 at 1:02 PM, nealmac said:

Blaming the consumers is laughable at best.

But where is the actual evidence that DTG blames the consumers or the community for the failure of FSW? I'm in no way trying to defend DTG but, whilst no one outside of the company actually knows what happened, many here seem happy to make assumptions or misquote to support their arguments. If you have the facts to support your claims, please give them!

DTG may not have a spotless track record with other products but that doesn't justify attacking them, without evidence, for what happened to FSW.

Edited May 11, 2018 by vortex681

[TheFamilyMan 280]

I was responding to the blame assigned by the quoted rant in the OP.  I should have been more clear about that. 

Though IMO that statement holds for any product that fails in the marketplace: it's never the customers' fault.  BTW, I really was hoping that DTG would kick serious bootie with FSW.  My want was: give us a full featured FS with P3D (or better) quality.  I thought that FSW was on its way, but apparently not nearly quick enough for its viability. Also, I'm not P3D user (yet).

Edited May 11, 2018 by TheFamilyMan

[Novawing24 3]

Just going to leave this here.....

 

Safe Skies

 

[Longranger 148]

Well, I can understand that Chris Trott is frustrated, and he has some right points, but some other things are completly off.

X-Plane had 50 people working for it? When, how. This would be right if you would count all the collaborators, but most of them don´t get paid at least not directly. Even parts of there current developer crew doesn´t work fulltime for them.

And DTG fumbled in a lot of places on their own. That FSW was in trouble was more or less clear long before it appeared on the market. When they started their project I was already wondering: How do they want to pay this? I think when they developed Flight School they had probably more people under pay than what LM and Laminar had on  converted full time hours together! Our market isn´t huge. Laminar doesn´t even have their own offices, all members work together via the internet.  So they got around a lot of their costs. So the project was already in Debt before they released Flight School. But it was a risk that they had to take since they were years behind in development time.

And their main idea was obviously: We earn money by putting a flight simulator on steam. So P3D wasnb´t the big problem in their eye, but X-Plane was. Not in the beginning but when they released X-Plane 10 they started to attract more and more 3rd Party Developers.. 

When they released Flight School it became probably obvios that they were in trouble. I don´t think that it were really the comments and reactions it was simply the numbers! I don´t think that Flight School or later FSW had a single month, to even earn the money that the developers got in this month.

When Laminar even shocked their own 3rd Party developers by releasing X-Plane 11 in 2016, DTG went into a shock. They cancelled a previously scheduled Press Conference. I am quite certain that behind closed walls they openly discussed: Should we cancel? It was too obvious that Laminar had quite improved their rendering during the X-Plane 10 run.

Obviously they decided against it. But they decided to change the strategy. Afterwards we often enough heard words like "It isn´t a sprint.". They knew they would have to lower their costs. They had hoped that PBR and 64 Bits would be enough. This was no longer the case. They wouldn´t be able to compete directly, they would have to compete with their price. 

And it was essential that they would have to break even with thgeir new simulator most of the time. This meant: A lot of their developers had to leave and find new jobs, after the release. This was known and scheduled. So many of their staff were beginning to look for other jobs, especially senior developers with a higher salary.

DTG obviously pushed a lot of money in this project even at that time. Then they released FSW at a bargain price and even switched buyers of Flight School over. At that time they obviously had the dream of many 3rd party developers switching.

But when they met with developers, they had to realize that they were in trouble: Most better developers were simply unable to convert their planes without an SDK and better capabilities to convert their own custom code. I know that many developers were shocked that they obviously didn´t know how their systems really worked.

But some of them even tried, like JustFlight converted their Arrow but the silence after the release was loud enough. Contrary to their X-Plane release. The numbers were obviously so good, that they immediately scheduled their next conversions.

It wasn´t difficult to get the sales numbers for programs that were released on Steam. And they told the story loud and clear. In the beginning they got a lot of interest. While they probably didn´t earn enough to break even at that time, it was a chance. But the numbers dropped. Even in sales they no longer moved a lot of licences. I don´t think that this was unknown to their staff. Than they dropped out of early access and raised their prices. But the earnings didn´t really recover, they were far from a break even point and their reputation started to decline. Sure, their staff didn´t know when DTG would pull the plug, but it was obvious that they would have to.  They were simply draining money.

They had lowered their costs by releasing their better developers, but this also meant that it would take more and more time to really improve the systems. The specialists were simply no longer a part of the team and the remaining guys would have to cope with it. This was probably very obvious in their team. Many team members were probably seeking for new jobs many month ago, without anyone asking them to leave the team. But this also lowered their development options further. They were already promoting scenery designers to developers but such options can only go so far.

In my eyes they tried everything to make FSW a success. While a lot of people said that DTG killed the project, in my eyes they did anything possible to not kill the project. I think it was already pretty hopeless at the start of this year.

[vortex681 806]

On 12 May 2018 at 12:11 PM, Longranger said:

And it was essential that they would have to break even with thgeir new simulator most of the time. This meant: A lot of their developers had to leave and find new jobs, after the release. This was known and scheduled. So many of their staff were beginning to look for other jobs, especially senior developers with a higher salary.

How do you know this?

[Longranger 148]

2 hours ago, vortex681 said:

How do you know this?

Did you sometimes follow their streams? Sometimes they said that people were leaving, sometimes they vanished and when scenery designers say that they are now developers you only have to connect the dots.

But most of all: How do Banks operate? When will they get nervous? How do companies try to recover projects, that don´t meet their numbers?

After the first Beta of X-Plane 11 was available, the DTG team suddenly went of the air and when they reappeared months later their community manager left the company., Those were signs that were hard to miss. Suddenly their speaches were totally changed.

But how can you get the banks to cooperate? The whole project was so expensive that they couldn't pay it by themselves, while they are developing Train Sim World, work on new Sceneries for their Train Simulator oh and work on a fishing game, that had bad numbers.

In such situations banks get nervous. They demand answers. If you don´t give them answers they will cut you off. I think that was one of several reasons why they continued. They had invested a lot of time and money into their Flight Simulator, while Train Sim World missed their deadlines. Two huge projects and one of them is in trouble... A very bad situation. 

If they would have had at least some images or new features to show, they wouldn´t have stopped all communications.

But how can you get the banks to put more money into the project? What will they demand? They will demand results. They have to be certain that the project is able to work. On the other hand you have quite expensive developers. Do you know how long it takes for them to find a better place, where they feel more secure? You don*t want them to quite unexpectedly. This will spread rumours and more and more developers will flee!

In such a situation it is much better to play with open numbers. They have to know what will happen and why it will happen. Many senior developers feel responsible for their younger colleagues. You don't want them to leave unexpectedly. It is much better if they have a clear goal: develop the project as far as possible in the time that I am here and teach your younger colleagues how to solve such problems so that they can fight on their own.

Another big factor in such a situation: You can offer team members a future in this company even if the project fails: As part of the train simulator group. As an example the weather effects of Flight Sim World were developed by a member of the TSW group.

To get rid of FSW now wasn't such a big problem. While TSW isn't a huge success, it has multiple DLCs in place that were sold at normal prices with a normal revenue.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Longranger

[vortex681 806]

25 minutes ago, Longranger said:

Sometimes they said that people were leaving, sometimes they vanished and when scenery designers say that they are now developers you only have to connect the dots.

So, basically you're just speculating? No one outside of DTG actually knows what happened and IMHO it's wrong to try to give the impression that any of us have a genuine handle on what really caused FSW to be cancelled (unless you actually work for DTG, of course).