If Microsoft decided to stop developing for MSFS in two weeks' time, the least they can do for this not-a-pilot, not-a-dev not-a-hardcore user are:

1. Fix suicidal ground personnel
2. Fix and match live weather
3. Fix photogrammetry (eg. dark lines in water and bridges)
4. Finalize replay functionality
5. Working windshield wipers
6. Pilot controlled lighting

For me: just let the servers run. So the franchise does not end similar to their Flight title

Microsoft won't stop this franchise , at least not for several years. If they did they would they would have a bunch of law suits coming, from customers, addon developers and certainly Asobo.

But if they did stop the franchise I doubt they would leave their servers running since these are probably their highest expenditure. They might as well keep the franchise running so they still have the income from the marketplace.

Regarding the list of last minute fixes if development stopped; there will probably as many lists as there are flightsimmers.

52 minutes ago, orchestra_nl said:

But if they did stop the franchise I doubt they would leave their servers running since these are probably their highest expenditure.

It's not.  This has been discussed before. Microsoft owns Azure so running the servers for MSFS is dirt cheap. Read neilhewitt's comment on this:

Quote

Bandwidth is super cheap right now. There is a boatload of unused fibre out there. Even with 2 million users all hitting the CDN for MSFS at the same time with 100Mbps+ connections, I doubt it's more than a blip on the Azure traffic radar. Server hardware is a fairly small % of the cost of building and maintaining the cloud, too (networking gear is much more expensive); the scale that Azure and AWS (and even GCP) work at is so mind-bogglingly big that having even a few thousand VMs dedicated to running the MSFS back-end is not a top-10 workload for Azure. Nowhere near. If you or I were doing it it would cost a few million a year, but for Microsoft it's much much less than that. 

Also, Google hasn't blocked MSFS from using Google maps for almost 2 years now. If MSFS were a huge drain on Google's servers, Google would have blocked MSFS from using its map data a long time ago.

 

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by abrams_tank

1 hour ago, orchestra_nl said:

Regarding the list of last minute fixes if development stopped; there will probably as many lists as there are flightsimmers.

100% agree. The community around MSFS is so diverse. It's an opportunity and a challenge for the developper's roadmap.

But all-in-all, why adressing the personal priority by stoping the dev and the franchise. Just enjoy what we have !

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by vbazillio

2 hours ago, orchestra_nl said:

Microsoft won't stop this franchise , at least not for several years. If they did they would they would have a bunch of law suits coming, from customers, addon developers and certainly Asobo.

But if they did stop the franchise I doubt they would leave their servers running since these are probably their highest expenditure. They might as well keep the franchise running so they still have the income from the marketplace.

Regarding the list of last minute fixes if development stopped; there will probably as many lists as there are flightsimmers.

Between the fearmongers who hide their dislike of change with their 'remember 2009 when they let us down !' and the blissful crowd who thinks that Neumann is kind of a Mother Theresa, there is a principle of reality which says that the shelf life of a product is dictated by its relative profitability compared to other opportunities. We don't know anything about the MSFS costs and profits and MS financial needs for other projects. Anybody to remember Steve Jobs saying in 1984 "Apple 2 is here for ever" 😄 ! My own totally uninformed prediction is that MSFS is here to stay for at least the next two years. After that I don't know. The again I am 74 so my horizon limited to tomorrow's breakfast.

If they stop the franchise, they will evidently shut off the servers. Prepare yourself for great arguments like 'its good for the planet' !

Now, in the meantime, we would have had plenty of fun ! I do. My last flight yesterday was from Luang Prabang to Lima 20A with MV Porter equipped with the G530 in not so good weather. Twas a hoot ! 

Now to answer the OP hypothetical question : that they complete the ground cover which is lacking in large swaths these days, with decent imagery. I am aggravated to find myself sometimes flying over the offline textures because there were clouds the day the Bing provider took the pic and that Bing is too much  of a cheapstake to buy good ones.  

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by Dominique_K

47 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Now to answer the OP hypothetical question : that they complete the ground cover which is lacking in large swaths these days, with decent imagery. I am aggravated to find myself sometimes flying over the offline textures because there were clouds the day the Bing provider took the pic and that Bing is too much  of a cheapstake to buy good ones.  

Is there a map anywhere that identifies those areas of the world in MSFS that are not covered with photoscenery? I am curious to know the extent of this. If I ever decide to follow the Microsoft path again, I would need to know where they are. I do not fly over generic default scenery in 2023, and have not done so for a long time.

11 hours ago, bofhlusr said:

 

1. Working windshield wipers

Wilga has them. They work great to clear ice from the windscreen.

 

21 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Is there a map anywhere that identifies those areas of the world in MSFS that are not covered with photoscenery? I am curious to know the extent of this. If I ever decide to follow the Microsoft path again, I would need to know where they are. I do not fly over generic default scenery in 2023, and have not done so for a long time.

Nope, you discover them by zooming in the World map. There are small patches everywhere and very large patches in some places.  For the UK, I don't know.

The offline texture replaces the satellite imagery in some large swathes of land - Bug Reports / Scenery and Airports - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

52 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Is there a map anywhere that identifies those areas of the world in MSFS that are not covered with photoscenery? I am curious to know the extent of this. If I ever decide to follow the Microsoft path again, I would need to know where they are. I do not fly over generic default scenery in 2023, and have not done so for a long time.

There is no area in MSFS, that I know of, that is not covered by Bing satellite imagery. I think what Dominique_K is referring to is that some satellite imagery has clouds obscuring the ground, probably because when the satellite took photos that day, there were some clouds. And perhaps the Bing maps team didn't get a better satellite photo to replace it.

BTW Christopher, I see you posting in the MSFS forum a lot, asking a lot of questions, although I assume, you still don't own MSFS yet.  FYI, you can try MSFS for dirt cheap if you get one month of Gamepass. I'm not sure about the price of Gamepass where you live, but in the US, I think it's $1 USD for the first month of Gamepass. So in the US, you can try MSFS for one month, for $1 USD.  You can stop Gamepass from renewing for the second month. And MSFS can run pretty well, even if you have an older computer (ie. if you bought your computer in the last 6 years, MSFS can probably run on it, just tone down the settings for an older computer).

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by abrams_tank

35 minutes ago, filou said:

MSFS can close tomorrow, I don't mind. There's too much imbalance and too many "Toy" effects for me to regret.

With each flight there is something that ruins the immersion. 

The only things that don't spoil the immersion or who helps it to forget it are the exceptional performance and the ease of use and without forgetting candy packets.

I would have liked to throw my bottle in the sea too, but my wish list is too long too different from yours and too pretentious.

MSFS is the most beautiful simulator in the world but the feeling is not there by its overall imbalance.

I would have liked so much to be like the people who find MSFS exceptional...

 

 

I knew that had to be at least  one "MSFS sucks" post in this thread. 

 

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by Bobsk8

So did i.

Given the amount of investing MS has done from the beginning till now into MSFS, not just in the various different Asobo teams for covering different aspects of the sim, but also hiring devs like WT to fold into the core team, and the pouring of money into outsourcing aircraft and scenery to 3rd party devs in order to give it free to us (i.e. iniBuilds A310), etc etc... given all that, they're not on a path where they would cease to develop MSFS. If anything the financial success is snowballing and therefore more investment is pouring in, and 3rd party buy-in is also growing by leaps and bounds where some of them are now exclusive to MSFS. But all that said, business is business, and anything can happen. Even if the worst case happens, I still don't see complete shutting off of MSFS since keeping the Azure servers/services going is a drop in the bucket for MS since it owns that whole cloud infrastructure.

So the worst case I see is them going into is a "keep the lights on" mode where all new sim functionality/enhancements are ceased but critical bugs are fixed and all services are still available.The only way I see MSFS completely going away is if some larger financial or other troubles befall the company where it needs to let go of its Azure cloud infrastructure, or the whole company goes down for whatever reasons.
 

Edited May 14, 20233 yr by lwt1971

3 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

Given the amount of investing MS has done from the beginning till now into MSFS, not just in the various different Asobo teams for covering different aspects of the sim, but also hiring devs like WT to fold into the core team, and the pouring of money into outsourcing aircraft and scenery to 3rd party devs in order to give it free to us (i.e. iniBuilds A310), etc etc... given all that, they're not on a path where they would cease to develop MSFS. If anything the financial success is snowballing and therefore more investment is pouring in. But all that said, business is business, and anything can happen. Even if the worst case happens, I still don't see complete shutting off of MSFS since keeping the Azure servers/services going is a drop in the bucket for MS since it owns that whole cloud infrastructure.

So the worst case I see is them going into is "keep the lights on" mode where all new sim functionality/enhancements are ceased but critical bugs are fixed and all services are still available.The only way I see MSFS completely going away is if some larger financial or other troubles befall the company where it needs to let go of its Azure cloud infrastructure, or the whole company goes down for whatever reasons.
 

In the worst case, they probably would go to a subscription fee, knowing that simmers would have no problem with that. Right now some simmers are even  paying for subscriptions for AI traffic control, so paying for the core sim should be no problem. 

2 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

I knew that had to be at least  one "MSFS sucks" post in this thread. 

 

Given you’ve used quotes I expected to see that phrase used by the poster. He didn’t. Criticism and alternative opinions to others are permitted even if you don’t agree.