12 hours ago, EGLD said:

I suspect by years 2/3+ we'll be finding out Microsoft's funding model to continue allowing us to stream satellite imagery

The free Windows map application allows to stream satellite imagery. Likewise their free website. Why should they stop streaming for MSFS?

 

10 hours ago, EGLD said:

I admire your utopian vision of Microsoft but trust me, the infrastructure costs associated with running MSFS, and the revenue it's generating, will be known down to the last cent within Microsoft and someone will be signing that off every year

The map app is generating zero revenue and someone signed it off since bing exists.

 

 

 

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by mrueedi
reply to later post added

I think it's almost a certainty that FSL will come to MSFS eventually, and they will have learnt from misstakes. So in time, there will be a plethora of quality Airbus add-ons: FSL, FBW, Aerosoft, Fenix, plus, plus.  Freeware in development. Toliss may convert theirs over as well.

Greazer.

Do we really need another A320 though? Would much rather have seen an A330 or even a 340; who knows maybe they will follow.

36 minutes ago, mrueedi said:

The free Windows map application allows to stream satellite imagery. Likewise their free website. Why should they stop streaming for MSFS?

The map app is generating zero revenue and someone signed it off since bing exists.

 

the "free" windows map application will be funded through the cost of the windows license

why should they stop streaming for msfs? i didn't say they would - someone else did - I just said that they would need to cover the cost of the infrastructure consumption caused by MSFS 👍

how do you know the map app is generating zero revenue btw?

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by EGLD

11 minutes ago, EGLD said:

the "free" windows map application will be funded through the cost of the windows license

Is it not nice, that bing maps are funded by windows license alone? In other words, what MSFS uses is paid beforehand.

And don't overestimate the cost to serve the additional data for MSFS. Cloud infrastructure scales horizontally in extremely efficient ways. In other words, "the same more often" comes nearly for free.

The main cost of something like a global aerial imagery database are the images, not the hosting cost.

And, ... the load scales proprotionally with MSFS success. Therefore the hosting cost is more or less a fix percentage of MSFS revenue. And a small one (educated guess: a small single digit figure) at that.

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by mrueedi

3 minutes ago, mrueedi said:

Is it not nice, that bing maps are funded by windows license alone? In other words, what MSFS uses is paid beforehand.

so a million flightsim users added no considerable overhead to the costs of serving satellite imagery?

1 minute ago, EGLD said:

so a million flightsim users added no considerable overhead to the costs of serving satellite imagery?

Servers run unattended and cheaply, get no wages and have no holidays and are not organized in unions 🙂

Cloud services are like industry mass production. The scale effects are tremendous.

As I said, getting the images is the primary cost.

2 hours ago, Chock said:

 English language is the b*st*rd of all languages, with influences from Greek, Arabic, Latin, French etc, so the winner in terms of which spelling became the common one, was Phoenix. 

Appreciate your etymological deep dive. But you missed a language that has influenced English quite a bit. We do not appreciate to be etc, so it's time to pay a visit to Lindisfarne again! You have quite a few words on loan (lån) from us that we come to recollect! We jump into the longships now and might arrive on Torsdag or Fredag! 🙂

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by mazex

1 minute ago, mazex said:

Appreciate your etymological deep dive. But you missed a language that has influenced English quite a bit. Time to pay a visit to Lindisfarne again! You have quite a few words on loan (lån) from us! We jump into the longships now and might arrive on Torsdag or Fredag! 🙂

That's why I said 'etc', it'd be a long list if we named all the places which had influenced the English language, all kinds of stuff from all over the place. 🙂

Just now, Chock said:

That's why I said 'etc', it'd be a long list if we named all the places which had influenced the English language, all kinds of stuff from all over the place. 🙂

You quoted me just before I changed the wording. Look above 🙂

1 hour ago, Elvensmith said:

Do we really need another A320 though? Would much rather have seen an A330 or even a 340; who knows maybe they will follow.

We need a high quality / study level A320. I do at least. It's my favorite jet to fly at the moment. Used to like the 737 but it's just getting outdated and the MAX incidents did the rest.

FBW is great and will always have a justification for being freeware - but it's not the same level as PMDG or FSLabs.

If I compare the textures of the Fenix screenshots to the FBW textures it seems the Fenix texture are all LOT more detailed.

Do you agree or am I mistaken??

1 hour ago, Elvensmith said:

Would much rather have seen an A330

that one is in the works at Aerosoft

1 hour ago, EGLD said:

so a million flightsim users added no considerable overhead to the costs of serving satellite imagery?

Out of 200 millions of Windows 10 users and about 1 billion of all Windows versions combined ? Pittance, basically a rounding error... 

1 hour ago, mrueedi said:

And don't overestimate the cost to serve the additional data for MSFS. Cloud infrastructure scales horizontally in extremely efficient ways. In other words, "the same more often" comes nearly for free.

The main cost of something like a global aerial imagery database are the images, not the hosting cost.

And, ... the load scales proprotionally with MSFS success. Therefore the hosting cost is more or less a fix percentage of MSFS revenue. And a small one (educated guess: a small single digit figure) at that.

Oh, that's interesting.  I didn't know that.  So the cost of adding more MSFS users (ie. a lot more MSFS users will come from the X-Box release) scales very well horizontally.  That's interesting.

This means the surge of X-Box users that will play MSFS won't add much more to the Azure cloud costs, including the cost of extra server processing power, bandwidth, and manpower to maintain those servers and bandwidth.