42 minutes ago, Sethos said:

Debo confesar que no tengo ni idea de a qué te refieres. La sugerencia de que la simulación de alta fidelidad está muriendo es, me atrevería a decir, objetivamente errónea. Tenemos una increíble cantidad de aviones lanzados o en desarrollo que son de mucha mayor calidad, tanto en términos de profundidad del sistema, precisión y profundidad, que en casi cualquier otro momento de la historia de la simulación de vuelo. Incluso nos están ofreciendo los proyectos de prestigio más descabellados, como el A380, por una asombrosa suma de dinero gratis. 

Por otro lado, X-Plane también lo está haciendo muy bien, con muchos aviones increíbles para elegir actualmente. 

Todos los desarrolladores han visto una afluencia masiva de apoyo y un gran aumento de las compras. Hay más interés, más dinero y más apoyo en la simulación de vuelo que nunca antes en ningún momento de la historia. La simulación de vuelo no depende de un pequeño grupo de personas de la vieja guardia para llevar a cabo algo. 

I'm not saying I'm dying now my English is pretty bad and maybe I don't express myself well. I want to say that most of us who buy these hi-fi complements are the same as always and that most of us also have already many years, good purchasing power and much more free time.

The people who come from behind in general neither have patience nor have the desire to spend hours watching tutorials or reading complex manuals, they are another type of players who want everything now and immediately.

That's why it's clear to me that Asobo and Microsoft are looking for formulas to retain this type of players with career mode missions etc.

I am clear that MFS thanks mainly to the game pass has been a great showcase for our hobby, what I am not clear is how many of these new users really stay and how many more like high quality simulation as most of us in Avsim.

55 minutes ago, Sethos said:

Flight simulation isn't depending on some old guard small group of people to carry anything. 

The best thing that happened is flight sim moving out of the tiny niche it had got lost in and into a bigger world with high quality products aimed at a new audience. 
 

Avsim peeps that insist that decade plus old sims are the bees knees are not what drive this hobby forward. This thinking is irrelevant - no one stops you from using p3d or whatever old version of fsx, but companies today are not catering to you and your desires are irrelevant when it comes to new product development. 
 

And that’s a good thing. 

Edited December 22, 20241 yr by JonathanC

2 minutes ago, Aglos77 said:

I'm not saying I'm dying now my English is pretty bad and maybe I don't express myself well. I want to say that most of us who buy these hi-fi complements are the same as always and that most of us also have already many years, good purchasing power and much more free time.

You’re not giving enough credit to the integrated Marketplace. It’s made buying add-ons way easier and sometimes even cheaper. Sure, there’s some junk in there, but the customer reviews make it a lot easier for both newbies and long-time simmers to find the good stuff for the sim.

1 hour ago, Aglos77 said:

Have you considered how old most of us who buy these hi-fi addons are?

I have some actual data to offer that should comfort you.

Looking at the 2023 Navigraph survey, the top 3 addons that respondents looked forward to are the PMDG 777, the Fenix A319/A320/A321, and the FBW A380. Very much hi-fi addon territory.

Moving on to the demographics, the age peak is in the 15-20 year bracket (12% of respondents), and 49% of respondents are younger than 40.

Hi-fi flight simming is very much not just an old person's game.

The casual market is great for flight simming.  I don't know why people have this anti-casual view.  Both groups can (and do) co-exist quite well.  I have barely touched the career mode button in the sim.  Free flight is there for me just like always.  

Also, I don't know why the existance of a new option sends people spiraling down.  All your existing options still exist.  I don't think MSFS 2024 has a hidden script to break all your other options.  

There's nothing wrong with sticking with an old version.  PC gaming is filled with people playing older games.  For strategy fans, Civilization 7 is coming out in Feb, but I know many people are still playing and enjoying Civ 4 (and 5, 6 for that matter).  

The big thing that gets ignored is how many more serious simmers are coming back.  I was gone around the time MS Flight came out.  I dabbled in Xplane a bit (and liked it), but it never scratched that itch so to speak.  There were entire years I never fired up any flight sim until 2020 came out.  

33 minutes ago, Aglos77 said:

I'm not saying I'm dying now my English is pretty bad and maybe I don't express myself well. I want to say that most of us who buy these hi-fi complements are the same as always and that most of us also have already many years, good purchasing power and much more free time.

The people who come from behind in general neither have patience nor have the desire to spend hours watching tutorials or reading complex manuals, they are another type of players who want everything now and immediately.

That's why it's clear to me that Asobo and Microsoft are looking for formulas to retain this type of players with career mode missions etc.

I am clear that MFS thanks mainly to the game pass has been a great showcase for our hobby, what I am not clear is how many of these new users really stay and how many more like high quality simulation as most of us in Avsim.

Well, we have both and a lot more now. I think you're using a translator. Nobody said you were dying or thought you were. 🙂

MSFS 2020 (2024 when it gets ironed) has both. You can have your "oh, look I can see my house" people who love to fly small planes and hit Control + E and bounce into the skies. That's fine. A lot of sims had that for years.... MSFS has that but also a decent collection of high fidelity planes and scenery. A lot people...almost the overwhelming majority of "simmers" moved over to 2020. Some still keep their other sims for other reason. XP and P3d have some good planes unavailable to MSFS (Majestic etc) so some people one to stick to what they love to fly.

Long story short: MSFS has mostly all of this. High fidelity or Carenado-style planes. 🙂

I loved the other sims and still do. But also wanted it to look fancy. Years of color correcting ortho imagery are finally in my past. No more Terabyte drives so the ground doesn't look like garbage. Kind of nice for VFR flights.

It's very difficult for anybody here to have much of a real idea about this sort of thing. Unless you are actively involved in the production and sales of (ideally) the sim itself, or a fairly large selling addon, you (we) can only be basing our comments on personal preference/bias. Or observations from what strikes me as the notoriously unreliable world of youtube etc - notorious because of the combination of ego and desire for sponsorship in those environments. Even the reference to such things as the Navigraph survey doesn't totally confirm anything as almost by definition the Navigraph survey will tend to attract only a relatively small subset of those using the various sims.

I have no particular opinions about Mr Randazzo. He seems to attract a fair amount of comment here one way or another, but it strikes me that his would be a possibly more accurate opinion than many of the posts here, simply because of what he does, i.e. PMDG.

The other aspect of all this speculation is that we are very much in "what if?" territory. My own personal take on all this is that yes, it feels like MSFS (2020 and then 2024) has been a total game changer. But then I'm a guy that has no interest in all the technical flying (piloting) stuff, merely enjoying moving a variety of aircraft around (not very far) above as realistic a land- and city-scape as possible. For me, before 2020 arrived I was using P3D and XP11. Both of which were ok but required an awful lot of work and maintenance to achieve what I wanted from my sim. i.e. the visuals. At that point I was pretty much heading towards abandoning P3D, in spite of the huge investment I had in addons for it, as I was finding that the performance with all the addons and settings I needed to get the visuals I wanted was becoming unacceptable. XP11 was much better, both in terms of performance and visuals, but for me only in those areas with Orbx's True Earth products. Unless I used massive Ortho4XP tiles with huge LODs, which in turn clogged up the system.

So how long would I have persevered? I have no way of knowing. XP12 is looking good to me, but nowhere near as good as MSFS. P3D is dead for me now. It's the only sim I've actually removed from my PCs as on the various times I fired it up just to see if it still felt as uninspiring to me as I remembered - it did!

But MSFS (2020) kicked off a whole different ball game for me personally. I don't play PC games of any other sort (maybe pinball a couple of times a year when I remember it), and in spite of what I just typed I don't see MSFS as a "game", in the sense of any sort of role playing or "achieving goals" thing, rather a means to explore the world.

I may well have continued on and focussed totally on XP. But then would XP have continued to progress to the same degree (so in the visuals field) without the spur of MSFS? Again, no-one knows. Flightsim, or more accurately for me, "worldsim", I guess, is pretty much my main "hobby" (hate that word for some reason) so I probably would have continued, but I very much doubt I would have spent the five figure sum I have in the last few years on it.

MSFS2024 is a bit of a dog's breakfast in many ways at the moment, but I am enjoying it immensely in those areas in which it does work well. which for me is low and slow and away from the big airports and cities. And I've still got my 2020 full system when I want to use it. Which I still do.

1 hour ago, Aglos77 said:

Have you considered how old most of us who buy these hi-fi addons are?

First of all, I want to point out that since MSFS came onto the scene, some of the "hi-fi add-on" developers like PMDG are making recording profits.  I have posted multiple threads about this in Avsim before here in the MSFS forum.  PMDG sold more copies of their DC-6 in the first few hours of its release for MSFS, than they sold the for all the DC-6 in their entire history of FSX, P3D, and XP.  Think of that, more sales of their DC-6 in a few hours for MSFS, than they ever sold for FSX + P3D + XP combined.  The sales of the PMDG 737-700 for MSFS was even more than the most optimistic scenario that Randazzo could project using his old P3D sales projection methodology.  And PMDG sold some 6000 copies of the 777 in 3 minutes.  All these record sales for PMDG came from the new influx of flight simmers when MSFS came back to the scene, that simply weren't there in the decade of P3D + XP after FSX.

And believe it or not, a portion of these sales are to younger flight simmers.  I don't know how often you go to Twitch but if you have a chance, check out channels like LondonController or Kenco.  These are streamers in their early twenties and they buy all the high fidelity airliners and know them inside and out.  LondonController and Kenco can probably start the PMDG 737 or Fenix A320 from cold and dark, enter all the necessary information into the FMC for their flight, and fly the PMDG or Fenix on VATSIM.  And believe it or not, a lot of their followers in chat are just as knowledgeable as them and around the same age as them.  For LondonController, he was a teenager when he became a VATSIM controller, that's how serious some of these younger flight simmers can be. And a lot of these younger flight simmers, despite spending the money on a PMDG or a Fenix add-on, they go on to become real life pilots later.  Now it's true that some of these younger flight simmers might not be able to afford a full fledged home cockpit, but they certain can afford a PMDG 737 or Fenix A320.

I think you should get out more, check out the MSFS 2024 channel on Twitch, and you will see some younger flight simmers and they are a significant makeup for the market of high fidelity add-ons.

2 hours ago, Aglos77 said:

High fidelity simulation is a dying breed whether we like it or not. Most of us who like this are already very old and this is going to die with us.

 

Younger people live in a world where everything is consumed very quickly, with a few exceptions they don't want to spend weeks reading manuals to fly complex airplanes.

 

That is why Asobo has designed 2024 as it has done to try to retain that type of casual players who make four flights to see their house and their sister-in-law's house because they have it on the gane pass and never return to the simulator again.

Completely laughable…

1 hour ago, sloppysmusic said:

Tooshay.

Good imitation of the original.

1 hour ago, GCBraun said:

You’re not giving enough credit to the integrated Marketplace. It’s made buying add-ons way easier and sometimes even cheaper. Sure, there’s some junk in there, but the customer reviews make it a lot easier for both newbies and long-time simmers to find the good stuff for the sim.

Now, if only they could improve the speed at which updates are cleared for release....

4 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

MSFS has indeed 'saved' the flight sim community from the stuffy old days of real world accurate physics and aviation science.

This sentence set the tone for the rest of the post, which is typically a negative one from this poster.  MSFS is outstanding and gives us the opportunity to replicate real world procedures over an astoundingly and beautiful representation of our world.  There are already aircraft with accurate systems available for 2024 in the first month, and no doubt many more will follow just as the case with 2020.

Early bugs in the 2024 does not negate this.

4 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

If you can't back up your opinion with facts

Could I point you back to your first few paragraphs!

4 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

Except the new crowd love to trample on any dissent

Trampling on a view is perfectly acceptable when it contains inaccuracies, or in your post a pretty thinly veiled rant -  which ignores what is actually in, or available for the sim.  

4 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

We no longer have to suffer planes that have annoying systems that absolutely refuse to behave unless you use a checklist in the right order and can be thankful we now have beautiful liveries and UHD rivets. 

One only has to look at the Fenix A320 or the JustFlight RJ series to show this statement is untrue, and 2024 has only been out a month.  Many, many more accurately modelled aircraft with accurate systems will be released quickly. 

I use XP12 too, but not as much since 2024 was released.  What gets me is some people have to be so negative about the sims they don't fly.  As you say no sim is perfect as they all have something to offer.

1 hour ago, Aglos77 said:

I'm not saying I'm dying now my English is pretty bad and maybe I don't express myself well. I want to say that most of us who buy these hi-fi complements are the same as always and that most of us also have already many years, good purchasing power and much more free time.

The people who come from behind in general neither have patience nor have the desire to spend hours watching tutorials or reading complex manuals, they are another type of players who want everything now and immediately.

That's why it's clear to me that Asobo and Microsoft are looking for formulas to retain this type of players with career mode missions etc.

I am clear that MFS thanks mainly to the game pass has been a great showcase for our hobby, what I am not clear is how many of these new users really stay and how many more like high quality simulation as most of us in Avsim.

There is plenty of people out there who aren't yet flight simmers who have the passion, interest and patience, thousands and thousands of them in fact. We have people across the entire spectrum looking to enjoy our hobby in whatever way they deem fit. However, to keep a hobby alive you also need to constantly keep it fresh and bring in new blood and the flight simming genre certainly wasn't doing that. 

So yes, a product that caters for a much larger audience was needed and they have absolutely proven it works. As both mentioned and as announced by several developers, the sales numbers for a lot of addons are through the roof compared to the FSX / P3D days, even on expensive high-fidelity addons. PMDG also announced absolutely stellar sales numbers compared to their P3D counterpart. 

The people are there, the passion is there and as years go by, you also convert those 'casual simmers' that some people around here love to put down, convert them into passionate flight simmers like ourselves. 

The numbers speak for themselves and they speak loudly. The approach works. 

3 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

Default streamed assets cannot (yet) be edited, but anything 3rd party certainly can be.

they certainly can be edited since the streamed assets are placed on the client side drive prior to launching the flight.  however, if the streamed assets are asobo-encrypted, then only certain files can be edited, which severely limits the scope of mods that can be done (.cfg files are all locked).  vfs projection tool in dev mode shows what's been streamed and stored.  this is why modders are again asking asobo not to encrypt default planes for fs24 (same merry go round for fs20). here's an example:https://flightsim.to/file/85336/mfs2024-asobo-b737-max-lighting-mod

as for the original topic, Robert is correct--fs20 saved flight sim from certain decline and demise of 3rd party hifi payware devs.  p3d point releases were horrible (dark cockpits? waffle clouds? awful textures? horrible performance?), stale 3rd party echosystem coupled with an aging user base that ensured economic irrelevance.  fs24 didn't seem to incorporate any learning from fs20 (same old bugs all over again) so it will take time to sort out, but hopeful for the day when it can replace fs20.

flying dcs is fun but would've missed flying the glorious tubeliners and interesting ga planes had civ flight sim withered away.  fs20 saved flight sim.

Edited December 22, 20241 yr by kdfw__