Google's Waze uses the community to make their maps more accurate. I could see something like that in the future. And who better than to want to correct issues than nerdy flight simmers.

Highflyer 2020 expressed exactly my thoughts. I have posted elsewhere the view that this is just the beginning of something very big that will eventually have an impact way beyond flight simulation. A recent video by a professional photographer/world traveler, posted a few days ago on this forum, showed some of the possibilities that he foresaw for his profession, and they are mind-bending. "Game", my foot! This has implications that go far beyond mere entertainment.

Edited August 8, 20205 yr by cobalt

13 hours ago, WestAir said:

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 sure does, but not for your convenience.  Your history is the product they sell.  And you have given your full agreement without reading the fine print.

3 hours ago, jetlag said:

It sure does, but not for your convenience.  Your history is the product they sell.  And you have given your full agreement without reading the fine print.

I consent. But I was also rooting for the Night King on Game of Thrones so maybe my sense of morality isn't the best.

In any case, data mining may have given us MSF so I'm selfishly happy.

 

On 8/7/2020 at 9:06 AM, 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.

This just didn't happen overnight, MS has been working on this for several years now. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox,  is the one that greenlighted this project as they plan for exclusive content on the upcoming new Xbox Series X and PC platforms ( Play Anywhere). 

 

Quote

FY20 4 QTR Xbox content and services grew 65 percent year-over-year ($1.2 billion)

Quote

It favorably positions Microsoft to execute its next-generation vision, spearheaded by its Xbox Series X console, and Project xCloud cloud streaming technology. The current climate fosters a growing demand for interactive entertainment, with software sales and services like its Xbox Game Pass subscription fundamental to the brand moving forward.

 

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-microsoft-q4-2020-earnings-gaming

 

Edited August 9, 20205 yr by joec63

On 8/7/2020 at 12:58 PM, 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

That is not all they do. The Azure Cloud infrastructure is just the medium that MSFS is allowed to use. The Azure Cloud runs everything else that has the name "Microsoft" on it too. 

MSFS using the Azure cloud is like a flea riding on a dog, together with hundreds of other fleas. Maybe a particularly fat one, but a flea nonetheless. They all have to pull their weight when it comes to feeding the dog. The dog being a platform with a baseline cost of billions of dollars every year. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/

Best regards

Edited August 9, 20205 yr by Lorby_SI

On 8/7/2020 at 10:06 AM, sanh said:

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.

The thought that Microsoft/Asobo could utilize this platform for a future open-world Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator is absolutely drool worthy.

On 8/7/2020 at 10:06 AM, 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.

I’ve had similar thoughts, I just can’t figure out the long term business case and I hope for our sake it pans out as Microsoft has planned.  In a lot of ways it seems too good to be true.  I just have to believe that they know what they are doing or they wouldn’t have invested in this.

We've just seen how Ms will make money out of this.  Build half baked cities, i.e London with so many landmarks missing,, along comes a third party developer charging a very reasonable price for landmarks and we all snap it up, a stealth method of charging extra for the sim.. No doubt other landscapes will appear at a reasonable price and we'll all invest again.  MS will undoubtedly get a cut.  That's how they do it. 

31 minutes ago, badger2000 said:

We've just seen how Ms will make money out of this.  Build half baked cities, i.e London with so many landmarks missing,, along comes a third party developer charging a very reasonable price for landmarks and we all snap it up, a stealth method of charging extra for the sim.. No doubt other landscapes will appear at a reasonable price and we'll all invest again.  MS will undoubtedly get a cut.  That's how they do it. 

That certainly is consistent with what they have been saying all along... They are "planning to deliver a platform that 3rd parties can build on".

I would expect airports, cityscapes, airplanes, avionics etc to appear for MSFS, much as they have in the past.. only this time MS takes a cut. Which if all goes well could be a win-win arrangement..  I'm sure we'll hear the 3rd parties' view on this shortly..

Edited August 9, 20205 yr by Bert Pieke

There must be all sorts of different ways for MS to leverage the data they get from simmers, either directly e.g. selling their nav data to travel / tourism companies or indirectly e.g. use simmers tsunami of bug reports to improve the world data to make it higher quality for business use. It’s quite possible revenue from sim sales won’t be making up the bulk of total revenue.

3 hours ago, badger2000 said:

We've just seen how Ms will make money out of this.  Build half baked cities, i.e London with so many landmarks missing,, along comes a third party developer charging a very reasonable price for landmarks and we all snap it up, a stealth method of charging extra for the sim.. No doubt other landscapes will appear at a reasonable price and we'll all invest again.  MS will undoubtedly get a cut.  That's how they do it. 

That's exactly my thoughts too. MS provides some outstanding cities, only to make those half baked ones even more impossible to bear. Third parties like Orbx then have a feast of selling dozens and dozens of landmark addon packs. It's a win-win for both MS and the developers. Even at $8/cities, we the customers however can easily shell out over hundreds in months.

Not really complaining though, overall it's a fair game and I couldn't thank MS/Asobo enough for making the dreaming come true. 

They've already got your data. I think this is more about commercial and other uses long term.

23 minutes ago, FlyIce said:

That's exactly my thoughts too. MS provides some outstanding cities, only to make those half baked ones even more impossible to bear. Third parties like Orbx then have a feast of selling dozens and dozens of landmark addon packs. It's a win-win for both MS and the developers. Even at $8/cities, we the customers however can easily shell out over hundreds in months.

Not really complaining though, overall it's a fair game and I couldn't thank MS/Asobo enough for making the dreaming come true. 

I think that's probably right. MS is thinking long term and you can't have a ten year project if you just give away everything for free at the start.

But I will quibble a bit with the idea that they are releasing "half-baked" cities. To the extent that the 400 photogrammetry cities aren't already impressive and far and away more detail than you can get default in other sim, the AI cities are still pretty pleasing to the eye in most cases. They've put some landmarks in London, for example, but there's just noway they can put every landmark in every major city throughout the world. I think the compromise they've reached with letting the AI do so much work is really fair.

Besides, we all get the SDK. There's nothing stopping freeware developers from placing landmarks and putting them up. There's going to be a booming freeware market for this sim IMO. Like XP11 level. With so much of the world now on the table to explore, there will be a lot more people willing to put time into improving things.

Edited August 10, 20205 yr by bonchie

With the quality, detail and 'true-to-lifeness' of the entire world in this simulator which other simulators can't even be compared to, unless you buy specific addons available for a select few regions, and the tech behind it along with the possibilities this brings going forward, I honestly find it bizarre how one could seriously complain about some missing landmarks here and there or say the cities are "half-baked".