Do you feel that Asobo was a good choice in making MSFS 2020

[Capt Timeter 29]

1 hour ago, overspeed3 said:

a new flight sim almost from scratch

This is simply not true. They heavily relied on the FSX source code. In fact, MSFS is built on it.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

If the game was develop by only aviation expert, it would have suffer the same fate as P3D or Xplane 11 : Inaccessible for the masses and it would have remained a niche product for the few thousands that are way too hardcore.  MSFS is the perfect bland of just plugin a controller and fly to flying the DC-6. There is something for everyone.  They created a new way to do virtual tourism in a global pandemic, they have appeal to a brand new generations of young people who probably didn't care too much about aviaton and now they want to learned more. they are hooked. To any one saying Asobo was the wrong choice doesn't get it. 

Edited October 21, 2021 by fogboundturtle

[united001 126]

Whom choose whom is the question. As others have stated, the details are thus far cloaked in mystery and lore. As to whether MSFS should not have been released when it was, we turn to Peter Jackson: "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to."

United001

[bobcat999 8,483]

1 hour ago, Farlis said:

On that one I agree. He seemed tired and stressed out.

When he said he didn't know what "collimated" means, I was chalking that up on the language barrier, but then I looked up the german term for this and it is basically the same.

So he and his team worked on an aircraft with a HUD and he does not know what collimated means? 
Somebody was caught on a very wrong foot.

Yes, to be fair, he did look like he was stressed and might have something else going on in his life; we can never know these things.

[bofhlusr 453]

8 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Did bing map or google map stopped working or got abandoned during last recession ? 🙂

No. They didn't. But why then did the MSFS servers go offline the other day while Bing and Google map were working just fine and were still online? 🙂

[overspeed3 410]

   Whether they used FSX source code, not too many flyers out there would agree that it looks and feels like FSX:  They omitted many features of FSX, but they changed or added other features that FSX lacked.  Their greatest accomplishment, of course, is the Bing real Earth environment,  

   But we all can agree on thing:  Asobo's constant tweaking, and never-ending updates for over a year is driving everyone nuts!  

[abrams_tank 7,419]

3 hours ago, bobcat999 said:

Or just a different opinion maybe.  Maybe I am in the minority, but I actually like Microsoft and what they do (I don't understand all the hostility towards them), and I think Jorg Neumann is a genuine guy who really wants to move the title on.  I really like him.

As for Asobo, I'm not too impressed in a lot of areas.  We already know about the quality control and the number of regressions and other issues during updates, but the attitude of Sebastian Wlock on the Twitch feed last night was not good at all.  He looked thoroughly disinterested again.  Not only just reluctant to answer questions, but seemed rather dismissive, and after months of talking about a 'vegetation distance slider' and it being on their own snapshot, the answer was 'you already have it in the menu, low, medium, high, or ultra, but I can turn it into a slider for you if you want'.  What the hell!  The look on Jorg's face told it all really.  And once again he seemed to totally wave off the landscape morphing issue to 'needing better data'.

Martial Bossard is no better at times with his vague answers.  He doesn't seem to know what is going on in his own sim half of the time and laughs about it himself.  His stock answer is 'we are working on it'.  Well, we kind of know that Martial - it's on the feedback snapshot.

I am wondering is it is a bit of tension caused by Microsoft / Jorg telling them what they want and to what timescale, and then Asobo facing time pressure to deliver it.  They do almost seem bitter about being dragged in front of the paying customer to explain their progress, or lack of it.  And I know it has been said that maybe they are demoralised by the 'whinging' and criticism.  Well you know what, it's tough at the top.  This is a paid product.  If they don't like it, give up the fine salary, and move over.

I know you have criticisms of Sebastian and Martial, but I'm gonna say, on the whole, we are lucky that Asobo/Microsoft have a Q&A with us every month to answer our questions.

Look at P3D and Lockheed Martin (LM).  LM basically doesn't really answer questions from its home market consumers - likely because LM doesn't care about its home market consumers.  At the last Flight Sim Expo, LM had a presentation but once again, people were reporting they gave nothing about P3D's future for home market consumers.  In other words, home market consumers are an after thought for LM and they get whatever table scraps that LM gives to them.  I assume this is partly because P3D was never intended for home market consumers, and for LM, home market consumers makeup a very small fraction of P3D's revenues, with commercial and military customers being way more important for LM.

Next is XP.  For years, Austin tuned out calls for a major improvement in XP's graphics.  Now XP did move to Vulcan which helped.  But still, Austin largely ignored the call to push XP's graphics forward and there was little progress in this area for the last 10 years.  Fast forward to today, MSFS walks into the home flight simulation market and is able to take a huge chunk of the market share partly because MSFS has modernized graphics for a flight sim, and Austin finally reacts, with XP 12 being very focused on improved graphics.  

So on the whole, Asobo/Microsoft not only have the Twitch Q&A with us every month, but they are actually listening to us and reacting to us (ie. they immediately put the slider to control pop-ins when panning around in WU6 after SU5, after the entire MSFS community requested it after SU5).

On a scale of 1 to 10 for interacting with its customers, LM gets like a 1 because they simply don't care about home market customers, XP maybe gets a 6 or 7, and Microsoft/Asobo get an 8 or 9.  So by far, Microsoft/Asobo is interacting with its community much better than LM or XP, IMO.  Could Microsoft/Asobo be better?  Yes.  But compared to the competition, Microsoft/Asobo are way ahead of the competition, IMO (ie. it's not even a comparison between Microsoft/Asobo and LM).

Edited October 21, 2021 by abrams_tank

[bobcat999 8,483]

16 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I know you have criticisms of Sebastian and Martial, but I'm gonna say, on the whole, we are lucky that Asobo/Microsoft have a Q&A with us every month to answer our questions.

Look at P3D and Lockheed Martin (LM).  LM basically doesn't really answer questions from its home market consumers - likely because LM doesn't care about its home market consumers.  At the last Flight Sim Expo, LM had a presentation but once again, people were reporting they gave nothing about P3D's future for home market consumers.  In other words, home market consumers are an after thought for LM and they get whatever table scraps that LM gives to them.  I assume this is partly because P3D was never intended for home market consumers, and for LM, home market consumers makeup a very small fraction of P3D's revenues, with commercial and military customers being way more important for LM.

Next is XP.  For years, Austin tuned out calls for a major improvement in XP's graphics.  Now XP did move to Vulcan which helped.  But still, Austin largely ignored the call to push XP's graphics forward and there was little progress in this area for the last 10 years.  Fast forward to today, MSFS walks into the home flight simulation market and is able to take a huge chunk of the market share partly because MSFS has modernized graphics for a flight sim, and Austin finally reacts, with XP 12 being very focused on improved graphics.  

So on the whole, Asobo/Microsoft not only have the Twitch Q&A with us every month, but they are actually listening to us and reacting to us (ie. they immediately put the slider to control pop-ins when panning around in WU6 after SU5, after the entire MSFS community requested it after SU5).

On a scale of 1 to 10 for interacting with its customers, LM gets like a 1 because they simply don't care about home market customers, XP maybe gets a 6 or 7, and Microsoft/Asobo get an 8 or 9.  So by far, Microsoft/Asobo is interacting with its community much better than LM or XP, IMO.  Could Microsoft/Asobo be better?  Yes.  But compared to the competition, Microsoft/Asobo are way ahead of the competition, IMO (ie. it's not even a comparison between Microsoft/Asobo and LM).

I can't disagree with that. 
I suppose that even when we get decent communication and response, some of us (like me) still strive to ask for an even better or clearer response - that's the danger of a feedback loop! 
Like you say, I wouldn't begin to compare them to Lockheed Martin etc. on communication - they are a world away.

[ANCRM114 35]

I think they where a good choice to create the 1:1 earth game engine. I also think world fidelity was a priority over flight dynamics fidelity at first.It seems like they are bringing in more aviation people recently as the teams grow.

I don' think there was any other studio who could have done it better.

[bofhlusr 453]

48 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

...

On a scale of 1 to 10 for interacting with its customers, LM gets like a 1 because they simply don't care about home market customers...

Even if they wanted to, they shouldn't AND can't care about home market customers. They're not supposed to have home market customers to begin with. So there are, no home market customers to care about.

[abrams_tank 7,419]

7 minutes ago, bofhlusr said:

Even if they wanted to, they shouldn't AND can't care about home market customers. They're not supposed to have home market customers to begin with. So there are, no home market customers to care about.

My understanding is that because of their license and whatever agreement they had with Microsoft when they received the code for FSX, was that LM was not allowed to enter the home market consumer space.

However, if home market consumers actually made up a big chunk of P3D's revenues (ie. perhaps more than 50% of P3D's revenues), there are round about ways that LM could use to communicate and pacify its home market consumers.  One way is for LM to listen to its home market consumers and what features they want, and then LM can come out and say they are coming out with such and such features for one of its commercial customers, but really those features are aimed at home market consumers.  As long as LM doesn't interact/respond directly to the home market consumers of P3D, I think there are round about ways that LM can use to pacify its home market consumers, because it's very hard to prove that LM is catering to home market consumers - LM can simply say they are catering to its commercial customers and they want to make P3D better for its commercial customers.

However, home market consumers probably make up a very small slice of P3D's revenues.  So from a business standpoint, LM just doesn't care about them and largely ignores them because they don't bring in the $$$.

Edited October 21, 2021 by abrams_tank

[Farlis 2,287]

1 hour ago, abrams_tank said:

On a scale of 1 to 10 for interacting with its customers, LM gets like a 1 because they simply don't care about home market customers, XP maybe gets a 6 or 7, and Microsoft/Asobo get an 8 or 9.  So by far, Microsoft/Asobo is interacting with its community much better than LM or XP, IMO.  Could Microsoft/Asobo be better?  Yes.  But compared to the competition, Microsoft/Asobo are way ahead of the competition, IMO (ie. it's not even a comparison between Microsoft/Asobo and LM).

And from what developers tell us, they are also leagues ahead in terms of communication and willingness to adress problems a developer might encounter.

[bofhlusr 453]

3 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

.... there are round about ways that LM could use to communicate and pacify its home market consumers...

I agree. There are ways.

But someone in higher levels of management probably correctly reasoned that coordinating a group of employees and the disciplined effort required probably does not justify the risks involved.

[Mike S KPDX 597]

3 hours ago, Farlis said:

On that one I agree. He seemed tired and stressed out.

When he said he didn't know what "collimated" means, I was chalking that up on the language barrier, but then I looked up the german term for this and it is basically the same.

So he and his team worked on an aircraft with a HUD and he does not know what collimated means? 
Somebody was caught on a very wrong foot.

Collimation has no impact, application or use on a monitor system.  It requires distance in excess of about 5' minimum between the collimated image and a scenery image.  Your eyes are focused on the fixed distance to the monitor at all times (yes, even in VR).

[Nicholas Jackson 39]

19 hours ago, captain420 said:

Just curious what the community thinks here regarding Asobo being the game developer chosen by MS to work on the next gen MSFS? Do you guys think that there are other developers or studios that could've done a better job?

I think the team at Asobo are crushing it! I love their dedication, communication, commitment and transparency with the community. I think MS did there homework well in choosing them as the developers for MSFS.

Yes without a doubt Asobo are the right guys for the job