August 27th, 2020 - Development Update

[Scottoest 1,561]

11 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

What does any of this argument have to do with Flight Simulation?

MatthewS is a Jedi Master when it comes to the art of the tedious, cyclical side-argument.  Clearly you are not acquainted with the Force in the same way.

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Just now, Scottoest said:

MatthewS is a Jedi Master when it comes to the art of the tedious, cyclical side-argument.  Clearly you are not acquainted with the Force in the same way.

I've been caught in circular arguments before in forums (not this forum yet though, thankfully), but in theoretical technical discussions or where one argument can never be proven right or wrong, there is no point because even if in some remote chance there is a way to prove, by the time it's proven, the other person will be so mad that they will refuse to acknowledge the obvious facts which would prove the argument in the first place.

I personally have no idea how many people are working on the code itself, it could be anywhere from 1-100+, no-one can guess that. I would just say about 50 if I had to guess, but it could be much lower. Some of the remaining bugs I see in the code looks like they have a few too many 'party' coders that are drinking too much, or management is really really forcing them to switch gears, wish they would fix the bugs though.

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1 minute ago, Nuno Pinto said:

I'm surprised they have 200+ people working on this, i didn't know and that surely gives some confidence for its future. Nice.

There are quotes from people including Phil Spencer himself (the head of the Xbox division at Microsoft), saying that if they were going to dive back into the Flight Simulator business, they needed to do their homework on what matters to simmers, and they needed to be in it for "the long haul" (his exact words).  It would make no sense to just dabble and make a "game" then cut and run, because that would never fly with the actual flight sim community who would be necessary to keep this project going for years after the casually curious get bored and move on to something else.

With that in mind, I'm not at all surprised that 200+ people are still actively working on it right now.  Rare (an internal Microsoft studio) still have a third of their studio devoted to working on Sea of Thieves, and that game came out in March 2018.

Microsoft are all about games and software as "ongoing services" these days, and Flight SImulator was always a prime candidate for that, with how the add-on market works.  It's why they said they see MSFS as a "10 year project" in the first place.  Keep putting out expansions to the core foundation that they can sell (like helicopters) to keep people on the platform, and thus also keep collecting whatever percentage they get from third-party sales on the in-game marketplace.

That doesn't work if they abandon it for the next thing, and simmers just filter back to X-Plane or whatever.

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Hopefully the above is true, and not to sound fatalistic, but one thing I know for sure, only one thing corporations care about, and that's money. Now if it were a private corporation being run by a flight sim enthusiast they may be willing to tough it out. 

So in the end, no-one can actually accurately and honestly say "this is a 10-year plan", plans change instantly inside corps based on sales numbers, it's the cold hard truth. Hopefully the sales will remain high enough to be worth it for them.

What it really means is, Microsoft analyzed all the revenue models years ago to see how much money they could make from a Flight Sim, and they predict that as long as they can capture some of the addon market as well as increase Xbox subscriptions, then it may be worth it to them. Let's hope the bean counters are right.

Edited September 2, 2020 by SceneryFX

[Scottoest 1,561]

1 minute ago, SceneryFX said:

Hopefully the above is true, and not to sound fatalistic, but one thing I know for sure, only one thing corporations care about, and that's money. Now if it were a private corporation being run by a flight sim enthusiast they may be willing to tough it out. 

So in the end, no-one can actually accurately and honestly say "this is a 10-year plan", plans change instantly inside corps based on sales numbers, it's the cold hard truth. Hopefully the sales will remain high enough to be worth it for them.

Sure, but the attitude I'm describing there is very much a capitalistic one - not altruism.

They aren't going to support MSFS for 10 years out of the bottom of their hearts.  They are going to do it because being the preeminent flight sim platform means they can keep selling expansions to the core product every now and again, and keep collecting that percentage cut from marketplace sales.  If the actual sim community just filters back to P3D and XP, those revenue streams dry up.

For an imperfect analog, it's the entire reason Sony and Microsoft make consoles to begin with.  They don't make money on the hardware (in fact they often lose money) - it's the 30% licencing cut they get from every single game sold on their platform, that the real revenue comes from.  And in Microsoft's case, Game Pass too.

[MatthewS 761]

25 minutes ago, DPSimulation said:

Indeed, i'm wrong, there are actually 14 positions advertised. Spin it however you want, they are there.

Oh lol.. 14 since 1st April... And yet in a earlier reply it was 13 in last 14 days... You guys can't even agree. 🤦‍♂️

 

26 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

Outside of that, the numbers Neumann mentions seem to mostly be mentioning the size of the entire teams at some of their contractor partners, as well as the team at Bing, who obviously have duties beyond supporting Flight Simulator.  So no, I don't think there's THOUSANDS of people ACTIVELY still working on MSFS as their day-to-day job. The economics of that would be absurd, and Neumann himself doesn't really claim that anyway. 

So we agree then.  Apparently others can't see the light. 💡

 

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1 minute ago, Scottoest said:

Sure, but the attitude I'm describing there is very much a capitalistic one - not altruism.

They aren't going to support MSFS for 10 years out of the bottom of their hearts.  They are going to do it because being the preeminent flight sim platform means they can keep selling expansions to the core product every now and again, and keep collecting that percentage cut from marketplace sales.  If the actual sim community just filters back to P3D and XP, those revenue streams dry up.

I am betting it will succeed. I'm doing a lot more than just betting, I'm spending a lot of time building addons for it (trying to learn). First freeware airport coming out soon as a test. I plan to do some payware eventually, but regardless of which route I go I'll hopefully always be able to make a majority contribution to the freeware airports. Unfortunately, unlike Orbx I don't have a ton of Hangars already built, so I'm still rending an object library.

First set of airport fixes are in Idaho and Utah, where too many of the regional and GA airports have either no buildings at all or are missing key things. 

[DPSimulation 235]

2 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Oh lol.. 14 since 1st April... And yet in a earlier reply it was 13 in last 14 days... You guys can't even agree. 🤦‍♂️

I never said 14 days, I said 13 in 14 weeks but it's actually less than that.

But I can see that making things up is what you think you're good at so i'll leave it there, others have summed you up in the last few pages rather well.

[MatthewS 761]

40 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Some of the remaining bugs I see in the code looks like they have a few too many 'party' coders that are drinking too much, or management is really really forcing them to switch gears, wish they would fix the bugs though.

MS needed to get it on the market ASAP, because they can't keep throwing money at it forever...   It's been 3 years in dev and if you believe some let's say up till now 200+ full time developers (at $50K / year), that's at least $10M a year (so $30M in total)... Rather a large budget I'd say.

There's no way, IMHO that MS are continuing to fund this at $10M a year for 200+ developers.

It's been released... Going forward I would say it's now 20 full time devs max at Asobo, and maybe some of the DLC work is being outsourced.

All IMO ofc.

Edited September 2, 2020 by MatthewS

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I have 2 complains thus far.

1) Asobo leaving us somewhat in the dark means I may end up wasting time fixing some airports that they are going to globally fix anyhow. Oh well, my airports will look better than their default airports anyways, so I guess there is that.

2) I don't understand why Asobo rendered so many weird looking hangars. Like 90% of real-life airport hangars look similar to about only 30 designs, yet Asobo skipped the common designs in the library. They rendered about 200 of what you could call "general purpose" hangars for GA, and 170 of them are so non-standard that I will never find a use for them. I was planning on rendering my own anyhow, just have to learn the new version of Blender, shouldn't be too bad. It might be nice though to have some actual decent looking hangars in the default library, there are a few "ok" ones, but Xplane had better.

No grass to deal with, no worrying about autogen, no custom trees (maybe eventually) means people can focus purely on the problems and mass produce airports.

Edited September 2, 2020 by SceneryFX

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35 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

MS needed to get it on the market ASAP, because they can't keep throwing money at it forever...   It's been 3 years in dev and if you believe some let's say up till now 200+ full time developers (at $50K / year), that's at least $10M a year (so $30M in total)... Rather a large budget I'd say.

There's no way, IMHO that MS are continuing to fund this at $10M a year for 200+ developers.

It's been released... Going forward I would say it's now 20 full time devs max at Asobo, and maybe some of the DLC work is being outsourced.

All IMO ofc.

MSFS was more than three years in development.  It sounds more like 4-5.

As for budget, if Flight Sim is a "triple-A" budgeted production (very possible - particularly with a marketing budget that apparently included shipping reviewers and "influencers" a full yoke and pedal setup), the total budget is probably north of $100 million dollars.

I don't expect there to be 200+ people at Asobo actively working on MSFS for the entire 10 years they hope it lasts as a platform.  I don't even expect it for 3-5 years necessarily.  I absolutely expect there are still 200+ people working on it now, and there will likely continue to be for a couple of years.

Once the console port is done, and the major content expansions are done (ie. helicopters, something Neumann describes as a massive undertaking, considering they are going to be adding thousands of heliports to the sim along with them), and the sim's core features and tools are in a good place, I expect they will dial back the active workforce a lot, and just focus on the odd patches, and monthly world updates, etc.  You don't need 200 people for that, but that's at least a couple of years away

[Kopteeni 819]

Asobo has been working on their next Plague's Tale sequel for a while now. I don't know how many of them are working on MSFS anymore but it's safe to say it's quite a lot less than before the release.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.eurogamer.net/amp/2019-12-04-a-plague-tale-2-reportedly-in-development

[RudyB24 296]

I just Googled how many employees Asobo has: 140 (says Google)

[Alaska738 8,407]

1 hour ago, RudyB24 said:

I just Googled how many employees Asobo has: 140 (says Google)

So they can work faster on future updates.

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You probably need 10 people just to set up a meeting with Microsoft