MSFS 2020 is really getting there!

[RobJC 2,069]

8 hours ago, ca_metal said:

Well, last time I heard/read a 3rd party saying something about that matter, it was stated the other way around. 3rd party developers follow the costumers, they go where the market is. No professional developer would start a project without reseraching the viability of such project and the number of potencial users, and the maket size of an specific platform is really important.

What market would you get behind based on those sales:

This chart was shared By Mathjis Kok, on an webinar hosted by the Flight Simulation Association. This chart shows the sales of each base simulator on the last 12 months. As he said, those are stimates, but he has the knowledge to do it very accurately. On what simulator would you focus to develop?

Of course 3rd party developers follow the customers as well. But MS had many 3rd party developers on board before they had one customer. 

[akita 429]

9 hours ago, Scottoest said:

Computer code isn't secret magic, and MSFS is the product of lots of modern graphical techniques.

However, what MSFS has that an outfit like LR does not, is the funding and access to worldwide data centers, AI-powered post-processing of global data, an in-house repository of global data and photography, etc.  These things all affect the ultimate visual output of the sim.

Even if a company like Google for some reason decided to let LR license access to their Google Earth data (which they wouldn't), you're still left trying to find a way to deliver that data economically to your users (Microsoft have much more scale, own their own cloud infrastructure, and own their own global map data), and process it in a way that won't bring anything less than a supercomputer to it's knees.

And that's only the beginning.  You then move on to things like accumulated technical debt for XP over the decades it's been around, and how efficiently your engine can even integrate some of those modern graphical techniques and APIs.  I suspect the move to Vulkan was at least in part an effort to clean up some of that.

As for wishful thinking - an interesting choice of words for someone assuming that two programs that have been extremely behind the times graphically for years, will now "catch up soon".  A lot of hopes sure are being placed on XP12 - perhaps unfairly.

And none of this is even shade at XP or P3D, by the way.  It's the reality of building on an existing platform from a particular time, versus starting fresh and picking and choosing to retain some bits of FSX.  Microsoft used the same engine for Halo for 15 years, and then had to take a couple of years just to upgrade their development tools to be up to a remotely modern standard.

I'll not re open a debate again about auto-gen/data driven procedural textures vs the horror show called photogrammetry/orthos so if we are speaking 50 guys to implement the Azure AI+streaming data this is irrelevant to what others are trying to achieve, if you rather flying with that, ok, but i'm assuming that as not agreeing comes mostly down to this.

When it comes to lighting, clouds, water and all the other fancy rendering pipeline stuff, 50 people is a way overblown budget, and this what makes most of MSFS graphics, not photogrammetry and not a 10m per px ground texture, if you want a proof for how MSFS looks with out a fancy lighting pipeline, I can find it.

And as for my "wishful thinking", we'll see....:)

Edited June 3, 2021 by akita

[abrams_tank 7,426]

39 minutes ago, akita said:

I'll not re open a debate again about auto-gen/data driven procedural textures vs the horror show called photogrammetry/orthos so if we are speaking 50 guys to implement the Azure AI+streaming data this is irrelevant to what others are trying to achieve, if you rather flying with that, ok, but i'm assuming that as not agreeing comes mostly down to this.

When it comes to lighting, clouds, water and all the other fancy rendering pipeline stuff, 50 people is a way overblown budget, and this what makes most of MSFS graphics, not photogrammetry and not a 10m per px ground texture, if you want a proof for how MSFS looks with out a fancy lighting pipeline, I can find it.

And as for my "wishful thinking", we'll see....:)

Autogen will always be inferior to satellite/photogrammetry in flight simming, especially for VFR flights.  I want real geography and real landmarks that reflect the world I see in real life. I don't want "auto generated" fake landmarks and fake geography that doesn't parallel what is there in real life.  The holy grail of flight sims is to reproduce in the simulator what we can do in real life.  For that reason, autogen will always be inferior to properly generated satellite/photogrammetry.

Asobo have taken a huge leap forward by using satellite/photogrammetry.  As time progresses, Asobo and Blackshark AI can refine the satellite/photogrammetry to create a more detailed world, with better resolution. And Bing will get higher resolution satellite/photogrammetry data as well as time passes.  And the best part is, the the satellite/photogrammetry feature is completely free after you buy your copy of MSFS - Microsoft has not charged us a single cent for this service since the release of MSFS (in another thread I created about this, people were willing to pay $5 to $10 a month for such a service).

I suspect Austin doesn't want to go the satellite/photogrammetry because it's expensive. You need the servers to stream it and that costs $$$.  Then you need the bandwidth for it and that also costs $$$.  Then you need the employees to maintain those servers and that costs $$$. And finally, you need the developers to write the code for it and that costs $$$.

For me, X-Plane will always be inferior to MSFS if it uses Autogen.  It's not the same, especially for VFR flight.

Edited June 3, 2021 by abrams_tank

[Janov 2,383]

With all the talk and reassuring each other about how great MSFS is, the actual metrics show that the userbase is not rising at all. There is no official usage data except for the Steam charts...and it shows a steadily declining usage. The concurrent user number (while admittedly being about 3x the amount of X-Plane!) is stagnating, staying under 5000 people at peak for several days in a row before the Update - peaking with the Update but then dwindling down again.

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/1250410,269950#3m

If abrams_tank is correct about MSFS being like the new Apple smartphones back then - why don´t we see a rapid increase in adoption and usage over the last 10 months? Why do we see a near steady X-Plane usage over the same time period?

I think all the elaborate text he and others put out is just wishful thinking and cheerleading for a game they love, and this is fine.

But I think you need to be afraid that MSFS development will ultimately be discontinued when all the massively expensive assets (you listed above) brought to bear will fail to generate the revenue to justifiy it.

Laminar is a small company with small operating costs - and while they may put out the visually inferior product, their return on investment may be much better than MSFS´s.

[akita 429]

48 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Autogen will always be inferior to satellite/photogrammetry in flight simming, especially for VFR flights.  I want real geography and real landmarks that reflect the world I see in real life. I don't want "auto generated" fake landmarks and fake geography that doesn't parallel what is there in real life.  The holy grail of flight sims is to reproduce in the simulator what we can do in real life.  For that reason, autogen will always be inferior to properly generated satellite/photogrammetry.

Asobo have taken a huge leap forward by using satellite/photogrammetry.  As time progresses, Asobo and Blackshark AI can refine the satellite/photogrammetry to create a more detailed world, with better resolution. And Bing will get higher resolution satellite/photogrammetry data as well as time passes.  And the best part is, the the satellite/photogrammetry feature is completely free after you buy your copy of MSFS - Microsoft has not charged us a single cent for this service since the release of MSFS (in another thread I created about this, people were willing to pay $5 to $10 a month for such a service).

I suspect Austin doesn't want to go the satellite/photogrammetry because it's expensive. You need the servers to stream it and that costs $$$.  Then you need the bandwidth for it and that also costs $$$.  Then you need the employees to maintain those servers and that costs $$$. And finally, you need the developers to write the code for it and that costs $$$.

For me, X-Plane will always be inferior to MSFS if it uses Autogen.  It's not the same, especially for VFR flight.

That's ok too, I just prefer my scenery textures with PBR materials at about 10x if not higher scale, with night lighting and season effects. You know like actual NG detail. Even if the roof color is wrong as long as other stuff like roads, powerlines, mesh etc is accurate.

And with global consistent quality of course. 

BTW: while this is pure speculation by me, I highly suspect Xplane gateway scenery may open for some other than airports changes, if does, challenging MSFS scenery with community efforts. a perfect one would be where as a user you can fix and submit fixes where data lacks to the base simulator. At least the last WED version supports this for 3d party developers. This kind of system IMO, can potentially close the "data resources gap" you guys like to badger about.

Edited June 3, 2021 by akita

[jarmstro 2,404]

With regard to revenue LR missed a trick years ago by not implementing an in-game marketplace. Even if sales of the base MSFS sim do inevitably decline over time there will always be an every increasing and significant source of funds from the marketplace.

As LR have been dragged kicking and screaming into playing catch-up I wonder if indeed we will now see a marketplace in X-Plane?

[abrams_tank 7,426]

27 minutes ago, Janov said:

With all the talk and reassuring each other about how great MSFS is, the actual metrics show that the userbase is not rising at all. There is no official usage data except for the Steam charts...and it shows a steadily declining usage. The concurrent user number (while admittedly being about 3x the amount of X-Plane!) is stagnating, staying under 5000 people at peak for several days in a row before the Update - peaking with the Update but then dwindling down again.

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/1250410,269950#3m

If abrams_tank is correct about MSFS being like the new Apple smartphones back then - why don´t we see a rapid increase in adoption and usage over the last 10 months? Why do we see a near steady X-Plane usage over the same time period?

I think all the elaborate text he and others put out is just wishful thinking and cheerleading for a game they love, and this is fine.

But I think you need to be afraid that MSFS development will ultimately be discontinued when all the massively expensive assets (you listed above) brought to bear will fail to generate the revenue to justifiy it.

Laminar is a small company with small operating costs - and while they may put out the visually inferior product, their return on investment may be much better than MSFS´s.

It's typical of games for there to be an initial interest on release, and then a drop in the player base over time.  Flight simulation is always a niche category.  Having said that, MSFS brought back a lot of old users to flight simulation, and brought some new users to flight simulation as well.  One more thing you have to consider is the upcoming X-Box market.  The X-Box market will lead to another expansion of the flight simulation market on a home console.  That means extra $$$ for 3rd party devs that are selling in the MSFS marketplace.  You already have 3rd party devs prioritizing MSFS development from the PC market alone.  When the X-Box version of MSFS is released, it's another reason for 3rd party devs to prioritize MSFS.

And for the record, I even expect the number of devs active on MSFS to lower over time at Asobo.  Let's assume there are 200 devs working on MSFS right now at Asobo, full time or part time.  By the 9th and 10th year of MSFS, I expect that to dwindle to maybe 20 or 30 devs, full time and part time.

I am also curious to see where Microsoft/Asobo take what they have created, to go after new markets.  If MSFS keeps improving, I don't doubt that they can go after parts of the commercial market at some point.  In addition, Microsoft has made combat flight simulator in the past and the MSFS engine is excellent to use for a combat flight simulator.  There are other uses for the MSFS engine since it models the world in 3D using satellite/photogrammetry so who knows what Microsoft will make use of it to go after a specific market.

And I disagree with you about the return on investment.  Unless X-Plane 12 is leaps and bounds better than X-Plane 11, that is X-Plane 12 has "revolutionary improvement" over X-Plane 11, I don't thinks the sales of X-Plane 12 will be that great because of the release of MSFS already.   Based on past history, new X-Plane versions have been "incremental improvement" rather than "revolutionary improvement."  Some X-Plane users have already moved to MSFS and some of these old X-Plane users will not purchase X-Plane 12 over "incremental improvement."  X-Plane 12 needs revolutionary improvement because the clock it ticking (just as the clock was ticking for Blackberry when the IPhone was released).

I do think Austin is a smart businessman - he wouldn't have succeeded so far with X-Plane if he weren't.  Having said that, if Austin is a smart businessman, if he doesn't make significant profit with X-Plane 12 (which is to be seen), the logical choice for him would be to stop throwing money at X-Plane for the desktop PC market and focus his money elsewhere (ie. mobile development of X-Plane, other markets, etc).

Edited June 3, 2021 by abrams_tank

[pmb 5,137]

11 hours ago, ca_metal said:

That chart is specifically about base simulator sales, but Mathjis is clear about P3D and X-Plane add-on sales. Sales for P3D have their lowest and X-planes add-ons have still a healthy environment of sales. 

Would be good to know what's exactly in the chart (many thanks for bringing it up, @ca_metal). "Base simulator sales" can't refer to "naked" simulators alone, as  Aerosoft (or anyone outside LM) doesn't sell P3D itself. It might be the sum of simulator plus addons sales, though.

Kind rgeards, Michael

[abrams_tank 7,426]

14 minutes ago, akita said:

That's ok too, I just prefer my scenery textures with PBR materials at about 10x if not higher scale, with night lighting effects. You know like actual NG detail.

None of the ground scenery of X-Plane has ever impressed me.  If anything, it's always been disappointing. At the ground level, MSFS just looks way, way better than X-Plane.  And MSFS uses real satellite/photogrammetry data to parallel real world geography and landmarks.  It's not even a competition between X-Plane and MSFS in this area.

[akita 429]

Just now, abrams_tank said:

None of the ground scenery of X-Plane has ever impressed me.

Oh they are horror too.

[Janov 2,383]

10 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I do think Austin is a smart businessman - he wouldn't have succeeded so far with X-Plane if he weren't.  Having said that, if Austin is a smart businessman, if he doesn't make significant profit with X-Plane 12 (which is to be seen), the logical choice for him would be to stop throwing money at X-Plane for the desktop PC market and focus his money elsewhere (ie. mobile development of X-Plane, other markets, etc).

You obviously don´t know Austin! He is not a businessman in the traditional sense at all. He - as sometimes happens - made a good sum by doing something that a lot of people wanted at the right time (X-Plane Mobile), but not out of greed for money like Aerosoft, PMDG or Microsoft, but simply because he loves aviation, technology and tinkering and pushing the boundaries. "Who said you can´t put a flightsimulator on a smartphone?". He did some other "fun" projects that really did not succeed commercially - which he would not have done if only in it for the money.

He chose to throw a HUGE amount of money away when fighting the patent scam lawsuit...instead of just settling out of court for a substantially lower sum. He is very smart, but also totally devoted to his convictions (saving animals, for example) and I believe that he would not stop supporting X-Plane even if he had to fund it out of his personal pocket due to a negative bottom line.

Now Microsoft on the other hand...hmm, lets look at their history of devotion to the Flight Simulator franchise - or maybe not 🙂 Maybe there has been some miraculous change in management and they have suddently turned saints and do things "for the love of aviation"... or maybe there hasn´t. Time will tell.

I really don´t want MSFS to fail - we have seen some folks turn up at the .org that entered with "MSFS has kindled my interest in flight simulation but I really don´t like how it is just a simplified game and now I got X-Plane 11, how can I...?" - so it obviously works! MSFS reels in new folks with its stunning graphics, and the smarter percentage of those soon realizes that for the real aviation experience they need something more sophisticated 🙂

 

 

[abrams_tank 7,426]

3 minutes ago, Janov said:

You obviously don´t know Austin! He is not a businessman in the traditional sense at all. He - as sometimes happens - made a good sum by doing something that a lot of people wanted at the right time (X-Plane Mobile), but not out of greed for money like Aerosoft, PMDG or Microsoft, but simply because he loves aviation, technology and tinkering and pushing the boundaries. "Who said you can´t put a flightsimulator on a smartphone?". He did some other "fun" projects that really did not succeed commercially - which he would not have done if only in it for the money.

He chose to throw a HUGE amount of money away when fighting the patent scam lawsuit...instead of just settling out of court for a substantially lower sum. He is very smart, but also totally devoted to his convictions (saving animals, for example) and I believe that he would not stop supporting X-Plane even if he had to fund it out of his personal pocket due to a negative bottom line.

Now Microsoft on the other hand...hmm, lets look at their history of devotion to the Flight Simulator franchise - or maybe not 🙂 Maybe there has been some miraculous change in management and they have suddently turned saints and do things "for the love of aviation"... or maybe there hasn´t. Time will tell.

I really don´t want MSFS to fail - we have seen some folks turn up at the .org that entered with "MSFS has kindled my interest in flight simulation but I really don´t like how it is just a simplified game and now I got X-Plane 11, how can I...?" - so it obviously works! MSFS reels in new folks with its stunning graphics, and the smarter percentage of those soon realizes that for the real aviation experience they need something more sophisticated 🙂

 

 

Sorry, but I am skeptical that Austin is going to risk most of his personal fortune and risk bankrupting himself, just to satisfy X-Plane fans.  At the most, I can see Austin keeping a token number of devs working on X-Plane for the PC market, just to satisfy his fans, but nothing that will risk the majority of the wealth he has made.  I cannot see Austin bankrupting himself to compete with MSFS (because he would have to spend a lot of money to match MSFS in every area).  In the best case scenario for X-Plane fans, if Austin determines that he cannot make a profit with versions beyond X-Plane 12, he may keep a token number of devs left on X-Plane that don't cost him too much money.  But I highly doubt he is going to wage a full scale war against MSFS and risk the majority of his wealth.

[pmb 5,137]

29 minutes ago, Janov said:

You obviously don´t know Austin! He is not a businessman in the traditional sense at all. He - as sometimes happens - made a good sum by doing something that a lot of people wanted at the right time (X-Plane Mobile), but not out of greed for money like Aerosoft, PMDG or Microsoft, but simply because he loves aviation, technology and tinkering and pushing the boundaries. "Who said you can´t put a flightsimulator on a smartphone?". He did some other "fun" projects that really did not succeed commercially - which he would not have done if only in it for the money.

He chose to throw a HUGE amount of money away when fighting the patent scam lawsuit...instead of just settling out of court for a substantially lower sum. He is very smart, but also totally devoted to his convictions (saving animals, for example) and I believe that he would not stop supporting X-Plane even if he had to fund it out of his personal pocket due to a negative bottom line.

Now Microsoft on the other hand...hmm, lets look at their history of devotion to the Flight Simulator franchise - or maybe not 🙂 Maybe there has been some miraculous change in management and they have suddently turned saints and do things "for the love of aviation"... or maybe there hasn´t. Time will tell.

I really don´t want MSFS to fail - we have seen some folks turn up at the .org that entered with "MSFS has kindled my interest in flight simulation but I really don´t like how it is just a simplified game and now I got X-Plane 11, how can I...?" - so it obviously works! MSFS reels in new folks with its stunning graphics, and the smarter percentage of those soon realizes that for the real aviation experience they need something more sophisticated 🙂

Are you convinced you're in the proper topic and subforum here? 

Kind regards, Michael

[Janov 2,383]

1 hour ago, pmb said:

Are you convinced you're in the proper topic and subforum here? 

Kind regards, Michael

If abrams_tank and the subject he wrote about is - so am I. 😄

Kind regards, Jan

[Janov 2,383]

1 hour ago, abrams_tank said:

But I highly doubt he is going to wage a full scale war against MSFS and risk the majority of his wealth.

No one ever said he would "wage a full scale war" - and no, he would not "throw away his personal fortune" for it, either.

But he will accept making very low profit with it - something that the next CEO for MS will possibly not do for MSFS.