I find it curious that all these data centres will be crunching ortho/AI/rendering/etc day in day out to feed us lovely pictures and highly valuable data and yet we pay only a one off fee. There must be more to this commercially for Microsoft. I can't see it being the addons. Surely not profitable enough for MS. So, perhaps its about the data? Facebook is free. Google & Google Maps is free but they make money all the same. I wonder what they can infer from our usage patterns? Maybe its about simply signing up lots of people with microsoft accounts and tracking cookies. Google probably tracks everything I do but I didn't have a Microsoft account before.

This doesn't put me off. Its the world we live in and the deal we accept but I'm curious all the same. Kudos to Microsoft for finding another interesting, worth-it-deal way of exchanging data for valued services.

 

Expect adds during your flights soon 🙂

Edited August 7, 20205 yr by dilore

14 minutes ago, Spit40 said:

 Google absolutely tracks everything you do

 

 

 

'Cessna 1234, you are cleared via the Coca Cola approach, to the Utterly Butterly ILS for Runway 27, sponsored by Kellogg's Cornflakes. Contact Approach, in association with Goodyear Tires, and report established on 119 decimal 7, the only station you need, in association with Panasonic. This message brought to you courtesy of the great taste of Budweiser, available in the airport lounge.'

51 minutes ago, Spit40 said:

I find it curious that all these data centres will be crunching ortho/AI/rendering/etc day in day out to feed us lovely pictures and highly valuable data and yet we pay only a one off fee.

 

Ok, but many of users (especially the beginners) will use MSFS as part of monthly Gamepass subscriptions. And for more, MS receive not so small fee from every sold add-on via built-in market in MSFS. So you don't have to afraid, that MS will lost their money 😉 . And load for Azure servers due to MSFS will be very small, compare to all other on-line services, which MS provide to their users.

In-sim adds I reckon.. Chock's reply was, I think, tongue in cheek, and it was amusing, but yes there might be some billboards with real world advertising on them, or even the occasional Cessna towing banners over football grounds.

2 hours ago, Spit40 said:

Google & Google Maps is free but they make money all the same. I wonder what they can infer from our usage patterns?

It may be interesting for the tourism and travel industry and associated market research. When you give people the chance to visit any place on earth, where do they choose to go?

Also, what places do customers from, say, China, find most interesting?

I think they could license their "world" for other purposes, both gaming and commercial.

Didn't an earlier MSFS title also spawn a combat flight sim title? If they decide to build a combat flight simulator a lot of the work is done.

I think people also under estimate the size of the gaming market. Its way bigger than many other entertainment markets like movies and a successful title can make a lot of money. 

I have to admit that I simply can not get my head around how this is going to work in the long run. The more little bits and pieces that come out just make me a little nuts sometimes. I have been doing this stuff going back to the beginning and if I had a dollar for evey time I have read that there is just not a big market for flight sims. We cant have this or that or the other because it is just a tiny market. Then their is the DEV's can't feed their babies because this is such a small hobby crowd.

Fast forward to 2020 and now we have slow business and out of work people all over the world, not to mention the sad deaths, and all of a sudden there magically appears this huge market of flight simmers with tons of money to through at the "Game". This will all be supported by ka-zillions of bytes of data about weather, traffic,  trees, hotdog stands and animated goats and the list seems to grow more by the day. The kicker to all this is that all this data has to be maintained by the hour for not only now but in the future. Who the hell is going to pay for this and how!! Based on what we know now it just does not make good sense.

Blackshark AI plus Azure Cloud have other use cases in commercial industry and military. They will use this as a technology demonstrator for their other clients and use feedback from simmers on fixing issues to better the product. 

They'll also learn from the data collected on which areas are being used the most and more importantly processing resources needed at scale.

3 minutes ago, shivers9 said:

I have to admit that I simply can not get my head around how this is going to work in the long run. The more little bits and pieces that come out just make me a little nuts sometimes. I have been doing this stuff going back to the beginning and if I had a dollar for evey time I have read that there is just not a big market for flight sims. We cant have this or that or the other because it is just a tiny market. Then their is the DEV's can't feed their babies because this is such a small hobby crowd.

Fast forward to 2020 and now we have slow business and out of work people all over the world, not to mention the sad deaths, and all of a sudden there magically appears this huge market of flight simmers with tons of money to through at the "Game". This will all be supported by ka-zillions of bytes of data about weather, traffic,  trees, hotdog stands and animated goats and the list seems to grow more by the day. The kicker to all this is that all this data has to be maintained by the hour for not only now but in the future. Who the hell is going to pay for this and how!! Based on what we know now it just does not make good sense.

Some products are loss leaders and this might be the case here. It's also an advertisement for the Microsoft and Azure brand. There's money in the banana stand.

2 hours ago, joec63 said:

Google absolutely tracks everything you do.

Slightly off topic but the other day I learned I can see all my movements on my google account home page. Where I've been, with timestamps and distances and durations. Not sure if it syncs with my phones location data or just GPS but it was really good.

I went back and relived some vacations I took. I actually really enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

5 minutes ago, WestAir said:

Slightly off topic but the other day I learned I can see all my movements on my google account home page. Where I've been, with timestamps and distances and durations. Not sure if it syncs with my phones location data or just GPS but it was really good.

I went back and relived some vacations I took. I actually really enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

Yes, it even combines this data with photos you take on the same phone to build AI-generated vacation photo albums.

4 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Yes, it even combines this data with photos you take on the same phone to build AI-generated vacation photo albums.

It caps out at 15GB of data so if you take a lot of video and stuff you can limit how far back you can see...

Just noticed it also saves all my web searches, youtube videos I've watched, etc. Crazy.

It's less about data I think and more about creating a simulated world. Flight simulator is a good way to get a project that like up and running and make money along the way with the end goal being to produce a product that can be used for a variety of applications that can make use of a fully simulated world.