What happens when MSFS goes EOL?

[chickster25 153]

I know EOL is a good few years away but what happens when Microsoft shutdown the servers?

Will we be able to continue to play the game ?

 I want to buy lots of addons but am worried that one day I may not be able to play this game anymore?

im hoping we can still play it even if the photogrammetry is not available but as MSFS is an app, will it even load?

[Keirtt 574]

1 minute ago, chickster25 said:

I know EOL is a good few years away but what happens when Microsoft shutdown the servers?

Will we be able to continue to play the game ?

 I want to buy lots of addons but am worried that one day I may not be able to play this game anymore?

im hoping we can still play it even if the photogrammetry is not available but as MSFS is an app, will it even load?

They've stated they are committed to the sim for the next ten years. I would assume the servers will remain online even after that. At the end of the day though, if they were to shut down the servers, I would assume the sim is mostly useless at that point. Either way, I don't think you have much to worry about.

[chickster25 153]

I don’t get a huge amount of time to play but the good thing with previous versions is that I know I will always own it and be able to play when I want.

10 years may sound a long time but FS9 is already 17 years old and I still use that

[superspud 450]

The 'future of gaming' means you'll be forever at the whim of whoever's feeding it to you. I've tried it fully offline a few times and it was rather grim and of course if they turn off the terrain I presume they'll turn off the game activation as well. 

We're buying the right to access the program for however long they decide rather than the actual program itself. I'm sure all of these companies would love to extinguish actual ownership completely and they're doing a pretty good job already. 

Considering the volume of updates and the speed at which the mapping is evolving it would be a bit weird for them to kill it off and then relaunch another one the next day which looked pretty much the same. But there's more money in that. 

Maybe it'll move to subscription at some point. 

Edited August 28, 2021 by superspud

[Bobsk8 12,735]

4 minutes ago, superspud said:

 

Maybe it'll move to subscription at some point. 

Since many MS services are subscription now, that wouldn't surprise me at all. 

Edited August 28, 2021 by Bobsk8

[Flic1 977]

23 minutes ago, chickster25 said:

I know EOL is a good few years away but what happens when Microsoft shutdown the servers?

LM will release P3D V6...

[PilotPete99 915]

The thought of this potential issue makes me think twice about buying addons. They can say they are committed to X number of years, but at the end of the day, money talks. We can’t be surprised if they pull the plug early, and that possibility is very concerning.

Cheers, Pete

[superspud 450]

2 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Since many MS servicers are subscription now, that wouldn't surprise me at all. 

There would be a vast amount of screaming if it did happen and I'm not sure how they'd frame it for people who already 'own' it.

I presume many users don't realise how dependent it is on the internet feed. Perhaps subscriptions would be proposed in lieu of it being shut down. It also depends on whether there's a shiny new alternative from them and whether they judge this whole thing as a success by then. 

Maybe autogen will be so clever by then it'll only need a tiny amount of  initial reference info to populate the world and there'll be a competitor that won't need to pull the plug. 

[Bobsk8 12,735]

2 minutes ago, PilotPete99 said:

The thought of this potential issue makes me think twice about buying addons. They can say they are committed to X number of years, but at the end of the day, money talks. We can’t be surprised if they pull the plug early, and that possibility is very concerning.

Cheers, Pete

A few good aircraft  add ons are all I need . Default scenery is fine, looks better than any sim I have ever flown just the way it is. Not going to spend thousands on scenery like some other sims require to get them to look OK. 

[Bobsk8 12,735]

16 minutes ago, superspud said:

There would be a vast amount of screaming if it did happen and I'm not sure how they'd frame it for people who already 'own' it.

I presume many users don't realise how dependent it is on the internet feed. Perhaps subscriptions would be proposed in lieu of it being shut down. It also depends on whether there's a shiny new alternative from them and whether they judge this whole thing as a success by then. 

Maybe autogen will be so clever by then it'll only need a tiny amount of  initial reference info to populate the world and there'll be a competitor that won't need to pull the plug. 

There was alot of screaming when MS Flight was closed down overnight. Then everyone just moved on. 

Edited August 28, 2021 by Bobsk8

[flyinpilot212121 724]

3 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

There was alot of screaming when Flight one was closed down overnight. Then everyone just moved on. 

Flight one closed down?? I didn’t know that, purchased a lot of stuff from that site back in the day!

Edited August 28, 2021 by flyinpilot212121

[chickster25 153]

I did go a bit overboard with payware for FS9 but I knew that once purchased I would be able to use it for as long as I wanted.
 

MSFS has basically moved me on from FS9 so perhaps there’s not much difference after all, as we will all be tempted by the latest, greatest game, but once bitten, twice shy and so I think I will be a lot more selective with my payware choices for MSFS.

[Bigbluss 304]

As a software engineer who works with a lot of modern web and ML services, I can speak from a position of (admittedly limited) experience when I say that in ten years the web will be a very, very different place. Think about the use of ML algorithms generating hyper detailed terrain from satellite data in near real time. Home computers (as opposed to sharded clusters) will most likely not deliver nearly enough power to perform these operations. In a decade I wouldn't be surprised to see VR reproducing almost real world imagery. From an ML and web services perspective, the world couldn't be more different to 2011. The things we're beginning to see will require increasingly distributed machines to serve them. I know there are downsides to that, but look at MS2020 out of the box Vs the equivalent sim in 2011 and then factor in the exponential improvement in tech.

 

I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but unfortunately I do think your concerns are largely unavoidable (and that may well be a good thing).

Edited August 28, 2021 by Bigbluss

[Bobsk8 12,735]

14 minutes ago, flyinpilot212121 said:

Flight one closed down?? I didn’t know that, purchased a lot of stuff from that site back in the day!

I meant MS Flight not Flight One. MS Flight was shut down 5 months after it was started ( 2-2012 to 7-2012) , and many people including myself got stuck paying for add ons even up to the day the plug was pulled on it. 

Edited August 28, 2021 by Bobsk8

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

This topic seems to come up every month or so, and just keeps getting rehashed over and over.

First off, I would argue that the premise itself its a bit of much ado about nothing.  There arent really any indicators that servers are going to shut down any time soon - sales are strong enough that MSFS is one of the sole pc/xbox entertainment products to be featured at the company shareholder annual meeting.  I take it from those reporting the story that its a rare occurence.  Bodes well for this thing sticking around for a while.

On top of that, while online server based connectivity for fight simming is new, its getting to be passe in the general gaming industry.  Multiplayer games have been running servers for well over 17 years in some cases (longer in others).  Some do charge subscriptions, but others have pretty solid business models that rely solely on selling addon material and expansions (sound familiar?)

Finally, it is incorrect to say that the sim is worthless without the server.  In truth it leaves you in a place that is NO worse off that something like X-Plane where its up to the simmer to create/aquire there own scenery.  You can browse flightsim.to right now to download regions of mesh data.  Another enterprising individual already found a way to map large quantities of ortho imagery from Google to map a region in the same way that its done using Ortho4XP in the other sim.  Is it all ready for prime time?  No, but rest assured that if the plug were pulled tomorrow, the community here would have it back up and running in short order.  Ive done enough scenery building in the SDK to know that its more than capable enough to handle it should the need arise.

Either way, I'd argue that this isnt an issue you should waste too much time worrying about...

Edited August 28, 2021 by VFXSimmer