Aerosoft implying that MSFS is the future

[Alpine Scenery 1,594]

Yah, there are still some advantages Xplane has over MSFS to me, but I do like both sims. I'll be honest I haven't used Xplane any since MSFS was released, but I am sure after a year or so I will go back to Xplane and do the back and forth thing again.

I hope Xplane sees their past mistakes and corrects them, they way underestimated the value of graphics in a sim. Xplane was purely focused on the sim side, but graphics are important for overall market power and sales, as we can now see from what Microsobo has done.

 

 

[andrecarli737 177]

My view is that x-plane cleary dominated the market when Microsoft was gone, not everyone stuck to P3D and they grabbed those potential costumers with version 11. But with Microsoft new data and technologies it's just going to be like it was in mid 2000's, the majority of the marketshare will be on MSFS. We will see the the golden age of MSFS in 2023 to 2024, just like we did with FSX.

Edited November 26, 2020 by andrecarli737

[cobalt 755]

Of course MSFS is the future, even if some don't accept this reality yet. X-plane can catch up only by adopting satellite-based real-world scenery and I don't see that happening.

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,744]

44 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

 Now back to MSFS , Microsoft has done super great marketing , believe it or not , many people know about MSFS , even my little brother who has 0 interest in aviation got to know it through twitch and news report. With this kind of marketing, of course the userbase will expand , even if the sim is just a game , some people may like it and some don't. However, with this userbase good chance more and more people will purchase add-ons for MSFS, which will result on thieving business for third party developers .

Two examples:

1. My 15 year old nephew who is a console based minecraft/fortnight/etc gamer spent a full day at my place last weekend trying out MSFS as he is thinking of saving for a gaming PC and buying MSFS

2. meanwhile another 15 year old I know from one of my night classes is actually doing real world flight training and on the recommendation of his instructor went out and got XPlane

[Alpine Scenery 1,594]

It's easy for many of us to see the mistakes both companies are making, because some of us have been doing this for 20+ years.

Asobo is too focused on world updates and needs to be focused purely on sim updates, leave the airports for the freeware and payware developers. We have so much content it is at a point now where it is becoming overloaded already.

They probably have a lot of idle modelers with nothing better to do, but then if that is the case, temporarily give those modelers jobs as project coordinators and let them contract work out to community experts. HERE is the biggest failure of Asobo, not opening certain things up enough, lack of documentation (the mostly undocumented SDK is inexcusable at this point, it's been 3 months, writing documentation does NOT take that long).

Japan was cool, but IMO the US update was mostly a disaster, breaking more things than it fixed. Now that is just the areas I fly, I am sure some areas were improved, but for me the US update was horrendous and should have never been released in this state.

 

Edited November 26, 2020 by SceneryFX

[marsman2020 1,310]

II also find the comment to "Ask if they were refused a higher level of MSFS development support" highly distasteful given that Aerosoft has a level of support that *no other developer* is getting. 

 

[Alpine Scenery 1,594]

1 minute ago, marsman2020 said:

II also find the comment to "Ask if they were refused a higher level of MSFS development support" highly distasteful given that Aerosoft has a level of support that *no other developer* is getting. 

 

I wouldn't read into what people say too much, they are programmers and developers, not politicians, they aren't always going to say the right thing, even politicians don't always say the right thing when trying.

Asobo did a good job in most ways, and this SIM is super entertaining, no doubt, but it's also highly annoying at times. Hard to put my finger on exactly why, it just is 🙂

 

 

[Gumerson 69]

Aerosoft are just forgetting to tell that almost all of the airports that they are releasing for MSFS are in fact just ports from the developments we FSX and P3D users has made posible because we paid for them before. 

Personally, since May 2020 and after hearing that Aerosoft was not going to release more updates for p3d v5 I'm totally out of their customers list by my own choice. 

Good news are that I can live without spending my money on aerosoft products with p3d v5. 

Good luck AS

Richard

[Ianrivaldosmith 4,874]

Man, I wish I had the crystal ball's some of the people have in here... I would use one to pick the lottery numbers 🙂 

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,744]

12 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

 

Asobo did a good job in most ways, and this SIM is super entertaining, no doubt, but it's also highly annoying at times. Hard to put my finger on exactly why, it just is 🙂

 

 

 

it is annoying because it is inconsistent 😄 you finally get a setup with some aftermarket addons and work arounds for the current bugs and issues and then suddenly Asobo do the equivalent of a two year old emptying a bucket of toys all over the floor in the room you just tidied.

 

is it worth the effort - just like having a real two year old, absolutely. However yes, also like having a real 2 year old, the sim gets frustrating and annoying at times.

Edited November 26, 2020 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[Alpine Scenery 1,594]

14 minutes ago, Gumerson said:

Aerosoft are just forgetting to tell that almost all of the airports that they are releasing for MSFS are in fact just ports from the developments we FSX and P3D users has made posible because we paid for them before. 

Personally, since May 2020 and after hearing that Aerosoft was not going to release more updates for p3d v5 I'm totally out of their customers list by my own choice. 

Good news are that I can live without spending my money on aerosoft products with p3d v5. 

Good luck AS

Richard

This is my frustration, I am trying to break into the scenery market, but there are only 2 of us (and both of us are very part-time as we both have other jobs). It is VERY difficult because all these developers are flooding the market with too many airports, and a lot of the airports are kind of cheesy with 5-6 buildings (fine, I have nothing against it), but by the time I try to release something there will be over 1000 airports. So I don't really see that good of a market for 3PD's unless you make it into the MSFS store, and even then even that will be flooded soon enough.

Mostly it's people converting airports, though honestly to be fair, Aerosoft's airports were REALLY good, so I cannot hold it against them, it's just business and they are just trying to make a buck. It's just a very very tough business that takes an incredible amount of labor to get anything going.

Edited November 26, 2020 by SceneryFX

[craigeaglefire 175]

to celebrate Black Friday, purchased my first LatinVFR products:-

firstly, KMIA for P3Dv5 & secondly, KMIA for MFS,

happy to support the developers & the various sims!

[Gumerson 69]

3 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

This is my frustration, I am trying to break into the scenery market, but there are only 2 of us (and both of us are very part-time as we both have other jobs). It is VERY difficult because all these developers are flooding the market with too many airports, and a lot of the airports are kind of cheesy with 5-6 buildings (fine, I have nothing against it), but by the time I try to release something there will be over 1000 airports. So I don't really see that good of a market for 3PD's unless you make it into the MSFS store, and even then even that will be flooded soon enough.

Mostly it's people converting airports, though honestly to be fair, Aerosoft's airports were REALLY good, so I cannot hold it against them, it's just business and they are just trying to make a buck. It's just a very very tough business that takes an incredible amount of labor.

Though it's hard for me to say because I haven't released anything yet, I'm taking my sweet time and am also trying to be nice and do freeware as well so I don't come off as a money hungry floundering bafoon.

I completely understand to you my friend. We could read days ago how Umberto from Fsdreamteam replied to us customers in FSDT forums when someone asked why they were releasing LSZ and not other updates for P3D. He replied in plain english that if the had the ability to make a quick and nice port to MSFS they had to do it before others release theirs LSZ. 

In my youtube channel I have one of the best devs as subscribers involved in P3D and MSFS development and they have the same feeling. My advice is that you try to find other supporters for your products in alternative channels, not the bigger and sponsored ones. In my niche there are a lot of people that are using a lot of new addons coming from independent devs, just try this way, I'm sure it will help. People are supporting them, and would pay form most of the free addons because they are great!

Don't give up! 

Cheers 

Richard

[Alpine Scenery 1,594]

1 minute ago, Gumerson said:

I completely understand to you my friend. We could read days ago how Umberto from Fsdreamteam replied to us customers in FSDT forums when someone asked why they were releasing LSZ and not other updates for P3D. He replied in plain english that if the had the ability to make a quick and nice port to MSFS they had to do it before others release theirs LSZ. 

In my youtube channel I have one of the best devs as subscribers involved in P3D and MSFS development and they have the same feeling. My advice is that you try to find other supporters for your products in alternative channels, not the bigger and sponsored ones. In my niche there are a lot of people that are using a lot of new addons coming from independent devs, just try this way, I'm sure it will help. People are supporting them, and would pay form most of the free addons because they are great!

Thanks for the info, interesting. Yup, and there is a lot of foreign people getting into it which is driving the labor costs of development down so they can just flood the market with $10 airports. I have nothing against any of the other devs, but this business feels a bit "too sharky" for me. I'm definitely releasing stuff as we've got combined over 1000 hours of labor into 3 products now, but whether or not I continue is another story entirely, we'll see...

 

[Maxis 1,640]

1 hour ago, SceneryFX said:

Xplane still has a chance to fight back, but the clock is ticking and every minute matters right now. P3D is almost dead IMO, only thing keeping it alive is all the great payware planes it had.

Xplane has decent technology behind it, and all it really needs it better trees, better looking water, better day-time lighting engine, slightly better rendering engine, and a tool to build MASS Ortho instead of the WED or Ortho4XP tool, as both were easy to do a single airport, but to use Ortho4XP with proprietary GIS data was a MASSIVE pain. Not speaking of NAIP, but there is still a small (yet significant amount) of state GIS data that remains untapped by all these developers. Unfortunately since the MSFS mesh is locked down and everything is pretty much downscaled and server-side, developers are not able to do 60cm quality mountains and scenery. That said, MSFS looks really good, just the mountains could be a lot better in some places.

The problem with Xplane was they undervalued the payware scenery designers, and did not focus on graphics fidelity enough. They should have budgeted more for graphics, at least a little more, it could have been a lot better as the programmers were actually VERY VERY skilled in many areas.

The scenery gateway was in theory a good idea, but everything looked too generic, what people really want is more customized looking renditions of airports (even if not perfectly exact), and this is where XPLANE failed us. Yes, there were developers building third-party airports, but it was expensive.

 

Or they can sell themselves to Google and try to come up with a rival product. If this was to come to pass and the the product is demonstratively superior i have no hesitation to jump ship. This instance of MSFS has completely broken any feeling of loyalty to the brand. Anything better and im all ears.