1 hour ago, MarcG said:

I've paid practically peanuts for some of the car racing Sims (and ETS2/ATS2) and raced them for years, overall thousands of hours of enjoyment and they still give me free stuff!

I doubt the financials are very similar. Or at least I've never heard of years spent developing single vehicles in any game, or regular download's from zillions of users on a daily basis (streaming scenery and etc.) amounting to probably terabytes of free bandwidth.

Somebody out there is paying for all that city photogrammetry data and etc. not to mention all the cross partnerships with Inibuilds, Working title, Blackshark and a host of others where I'm sure money is steadily changing hands.

Plus the expanding Asobo team.

All within a genre whose sales at their very best likely still pale in comparison to your average AAA game.....

There's probably quite a good reason so many in the community were predicting a subscription model, and frankly, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one ever appeared.

Because even with the much maligned but probably financially crucial Xbox audience, I'm not too sure it would be that wise of us to get too comfortably blasé about Asobo and Microsoft's unprecedented largesse so far.

There may come a time when we end up looking back wistfully; reminded the hard way of the old saying regarding never knowing what you have until its gone.

Edited February 4, 20242 yr by HiFlyer
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36 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I doubt the financials are very similar. Or at least I've never heard of years spent developing single vehicles in any game, or regular download's from zillions of users on a daily basis (streaming scenery and etc.) amounting to probably terabytes of free bandwidth.

Somebody out there is paying for all that city photogrammetry data and etc. not to mention all the cross partnerships with Inibuilds, Working title, Blackshark and a host of others where I'm sure money is steadily changing hands.

Plus the expanding Asobo team.

All within a genre whose sales at their very best likely still pale in comparison to your average AAA game.....

There's probably quite a good reason so many in the community were predicting a subscription model, and frankly, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one ever appeared.

Because even which the much maligned but probably financially crucial Xbox audience, I'm not too sure it would be that wise of us to get too comfortably blasé about Asobo and Microsoft's unprecedented largesse so far.

There may come a time when we end up looking back wistfully; reminded the hard way of the old saying regarding never knowing what you have until its gone.

Of course there's massive difference, a sim like this with 10m+ users & countless staff compared to say Automobilista 2 with not even 400k and a handful of staff is uncomparable. But at the end of the day both are still giving away free content & updates which is the premise of this particular conversation, the point being as I raised that this is nothing new.

I certainly don't know what the financial numbers look like for MSFS. Perhaps they are doing well, who knows? But is does seem to be an enterprise that requires a lot of resources to maintain in labor, streaming bandwidth etc. . You have to realize that the bean counters at Microsoft are watching closely. All it takes is a terrible looking profit chart in some conference room on a Friday afternoon for them to pull the plug on the whole thing or make some changes to secure a revenue stream to make it financially viable. I do not doubt that is much of the reason why there is a FS2024 coming up.

BTW, they could probably come up with clever ways to sneak advertising into the sim. They could do that and make a subscription fee optional to make the ads go away. A much used formula that has not made its way into the world of flight simulation as of yet.

43 minutes ago, rjquick said:

They could do that and make a subscription fee optional to make the ads go away

First it was a subscription model, now it's in-game advertising...

I don't think some people realise just how much money is generated from MS receiving a 30% cut of *all* the add-ons sold on the MSFS Marketplace when all Xbox users are locked-in and there is an alleged total user base of upto 12 million.

Also, factor in the original MSFS2020 selling price of $70. Just as a simplistic example, if even only 500,000 people bought it at MSRP, that's $35 million in revenue without breaking sweat.

26 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

First it was a subscription model, now it's in-game advertising...

I don't think some people realise just how much money is generated from MS receiving a 30% cut of *all* the add-ons sold on the MSFS Marketplace when all Xbox users are locked-in and there is an alleged total user base of upto 12 million.

Also, factor in the original MSFS2020 selling price of $70. Just as a simplistic example, if even only 500,000 people bought it at MSRP, that's $35 million in revenue without breaking sweat.

I stated that I don't know how much money they make. If you have inside information then I can only defer to your knowledge of it. Glad to hear that they are doing well.

24 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

MSRP, that's $35 million in revenue without breaking sweat.

I have no idea on this earth what this title is bringing in after expenses, and I take nothing for granted.

9 minutes ago, rjquick said:

If you have inside information

6 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I have no idea on this earth what this title is bringing in after expenses

Apart from Microsoft's cost accountants, no-one does. We can only surmise based on certain nuggets of information in the public sphere and some deducing.

That said, I've got a feeling that MS know what they're doing when it comes to gaming and to the business overall:

Quote

Xbox content and services revenue increased 61%
Operating income was $27.0 billion and increased 33%

(compared to the equivalent period the previous year)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2024-Q2/press-release-webcast

Back on topic (sorry, everyone!), it appears that Cuba wasn't listed, but there were plenty of Cuban POIs included in WU16:

 

Source: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/polls-world-update-xvi-caribbean/628064/302

 

What the cloud does for FS, it could do for most of the popular games. But MS doesn't own the rights to them all and other companies don't have a good way to use that sort of thing. I've seen internet news saying that demand for game consoles is decreasing sharply and they predict that will continue in the future. Everything in flux, but MSFS seems to have a relatively bright future in comparison to almost everything else.

Note to self: Try to avoid hold baggage when flying to the Caribbean!