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MSFS is a game-as-service platform – but that service is mods

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/microsoft-flight-simulator/mods

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Many of the most prolific modders sell their creations, and Neumann says that’s affected plans for what will be included in the base game – “those people need to make some money,” so he doesn’t want to “put those fans out of a job.”

While I completely understand that they don't want 3rd party developers to go bust, I don't really agree on the "affected plans for what will be included in the base game" part. I mean, aren't we all happy that MSFS will include so much in the base game? This looks like it's going in the other direction again (I know, this feeling is only based on that one sentence). I'm really curious as to which features were affected.


Former MSFS Alpha Tester, current member of the MSFS Stream Team.

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The writer doesn’t seem to have a simulation vocabulary. He speaks gaming.  What he calls “mods,” we call “add-ons.”  Sounds to me as though MS and Asobo are talking about support for third-party developers, and saying that they’ve decided to limit the amount of detail in, say, airports - and leave it to the add-on makers to finish the job. There might be some allowance for freeware, too.  But basically it’s business as usual for an FS title  My take, anyway  

 

Edited by Alan_A

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Well, until now I’ve seen Asobo members really focused on bringing us the best. And that’s what I saw on the interview video.

If now they head to another direction, then things can change a lot from customers perspective. 

What I think is that MS don’t want to hurt anyone, devs and customers.  But at certain point there will be difficult decisions to be made. And if they want a “10 years update product” as was said, them some third parties will be out sooner or latter. 

And honestly, I don’t think any customer want that some plausible default feature ends being a payware feature.

Edit: As far as I read here and in reddit. I think the way the autor made the article put words on MSFS devs that haven’t been said by them. 

Edited by aleex

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I understood a little differently what he said. To me he's just stating they changed their focus on the tools/features for the content creators, not that they are giving up features/improvements on the base sim so 3rd party developers have space to sell their add-ons. 

I could have understood it wrong, of course.

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9 minutes ago, aleex said:

And honestly, I don’t think any customer want that some plausible default feature ends being a payware feature.

Agreed.  But again, what I read (and translated from gamespeak) is that it'll be pretty much what we've always had - default airports, for example, will be developed to a high enough standard that most people will be happy with them out of the box (and the overall standard seems to be much higher than what we're used to, judging by the material we've seen so far).  But if you want your home airport to have every blade of grass in place, and every dent in every taxiway sign, then you'd turn to the guy who's going to spend a year researching and building it.  No different from what we've got now.

1 minute ago, ca_metal said:

To me he's just stating they changed their focus on the tools/features for the content creators, not that they are giving up features/improvements on the base sim

Exactly.

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4 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

Agreed.  But again, what I read (and translated from gamespeak) is that it'll be pretty much what we've always had - default airports, for example, will be developed to a high enough standard that most people will be happy with them out of the box (and the overall standard seems to be much higher than what we're used to, judging by the material we've seen so far).  But if you want your home airport to have every blade of grass in place, and every dent in every taxiway sign, then you'd turn to the guy who's going to spend a year researching and building it.  No different from what we've got now.

Exactly.

I think you are right. Just the way this article was written not match with the way devs talks about the sim. 

Nowadays it’s difficult to find reliable sources.  

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3 minutes ago, aleex said:

Nowadays it’s difficult to find reliable sources.

True.  Seems in this case like a reporter who doesn't know his beat.  It happens.

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I think that when the devs talk about putting everything in the base game without people needing to buy addons they are talking about mandatory base features and a good global set of planes and scenery so people can make full use of the sim all over the world without having to buy a thing. In X-Plane 11 for example I never dared to travel outside of the scenery areas I bought or downloaded because I would lose immersion straight away when seeing the default scenery, now we can without having to think ahead. I never even thought about visiting places like the US or the Caribbean because I had no scenery for those locations, now we can visit them without thinking. Without addons X-Plane 11 looked pretty dull, so we had to buy things like X-Vision to make it look good, this sim will look good straight out of the box. 

Think about it, we are used to spend a lot of money on basic things like sky colors, clouds, generic taxiway and runway textures and more things like that. That shouldn't be necessary. Also addons like moving jetways, fuel trucks, baggage carts and rain on windshield effects should be in the base game. Because of all these different addons and the need to implement them in scenery and aircraft we see a lot of fragmentation. 

But they will never create every plane and airport on earth in great detail, so that's where the 3rd party developers come in. The devs just need to make sure that everything those 3rd parties need to build on will be implemented in the base game. So no more moving jetway plugins, this needs to be there already. Things that are not there yet should be on a roadmap, so 3rd party developers won't start working on things like this and find them implemented in the base game a few months later. 

 

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